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ERIC PERSING: SOUND DESIGNER AND SPECTRASONICS FOUNDER
"I've always considered myself a musician first, with sound design being only a means to create and express a musical vision," reflects Eric Persing. "The two concepts have only been separated in recent years. I think the best sound design is always going to come from someone with a musical perspective, and sound designers are not always musicians these days." Perhaps it's this musical perspective, combined with a dedication to producing sounds of the highest calibre for use by musicians, that has made Eric arguably the top designer of sound libraries in the world. As Chief Sound Designer for Roland Corporation, a position he maintains despite the rigours of running his own company, Eric created many of the patches for the groundbreaking D50 and JV1080 synthesizers. And at his own company Spectrasonics, the Rolls Royce of sample-library producers, Eric's sound-design acumen has overseen the creation of such classics as Symphony Of Voices, Liquid Grooves, and Distorted Reality, the best-selling professional sound library of all time. Enjoying a bumper year, Eric has just wrapped up Roland's latest synthesizer entries, the XV3080 and 5080. He is also putting the final touches to Spectrasonics' soon-to-be-released epic Vocal Planet, part two of a worldwide bid to create the most extensive collection of vocal sounds ever assembled. The son of a San Francisco choral director, Eric started playing piano in the sixth grade after a "disastrous relationship with the trumpet" and chapped lips! He found himself drawn to the rich tonal possibilities of the piano. Then, in 1975, he played his first Minimoog and immediately felt that he had found his calling. "It was all over at that point," says Eric. "I began devouring everything I could on the subject of electronic music. In contrast with today's concept of synths as studio tools, the idea of playing the synthesizer as a musical instrument was my goal. To do this, you needed to learn keyboard technique, music theory and how to make and create your own sounds — remember, presets didn't exist yet. I just figured that making sounds was part of learning the instrument." After moving to Los Angeles and starting to work as a session player in the studios, he soon came to realise that "almost no one, not even the famous keyboard players, knew how to use their instruments. Since I had a knack for creating sounds, it opened a lot of doors for me." The number of doors it opened was, indeed, immense. The roster of artists Eric has worked with reads like a Who's Who: Luther Vandross, Quincy Jones, Danny Elfman, Marcus Miller, Herbie Hancock, James Newton-Howard, Eddie Jobson, Michel Colombier, Diana Ross, Arif Mardin, Chaka Khan, Larry Carlton, Hans Zimmer, Leonard Cohen, Michael Jackson, Randy Newman and Celine Dion. He has also produced records for a number of jazz and gospel artists including Mezzoforte, Roby Duke, the Katinas and Richard Souther. Asked to pick his proudest achievement in the studio, Eric selects Brazileiro by Sergio Mendes. "That was the most inspiring project I've been a part of. Incredible music and great people are my favourite combination. To work in that environment for more than a year was a priviledge," says Eric about the album, which received the Grammy award for World Music in 1993.
But Eric's greatest opportunity came not from an individual artist, but the Roland Corporation. Shortly after the introduction of MIDI in 1984, Eric was working in a Southern California music store that had every conceivable keyboard and synthesizer but, due to an unfortunate location, no customers. As a result, the sales staff at the store had plenty of time to experiment and learn all the gear. As Eric recalls: "When the Roland MSQ700 (the first MIDI sequencer) was introduced, no-one at Roland could figure out how to use it. Because of all the time we had at the store, we figured out a lot of weird tricks. Like if you played the parts from a Jupiter 6 and powered up the MSQ700 last in the MIDI chain, you could get a multitimbral, multitrack sequence playing. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal now, but at the time it was pretty mind-blowing. So we put these awesome demos together with every instrument in the entire store MIDI'd together. Anyway, Roland started sending their employees down to our store to get trained on their own gear by us. Tom Beckman (then President of Roland US) came down to see what was going on, and I gave him the big demo and he dug it. He asked me to demo at the '84 NAMM show and then I was in." Eric's first project as Chief Sound Designer for Roland was to design the patches for the MKS80 Super Jupiter and JX8P, and he has played a major part in the distinctive Roland sound up to the present day. He personally created a majority of the patches for such landmark units as the D50, S-series samplers and the JD800 ("It's all my fault" says Eric in mock apology for the D50's ubiquitous Fantasia, Digital Native Dance and Soundtrack patches). As Eric's session and production work expanded, he became a consultant to Roland R&D Japan, a relationship which has continued to the present day. The Roland sound-design team has increased in numbers as the number of factory presets has grown, but Eric has remained as the final authority for selection, review and tweaking on their pro instruments. "Since Roland synths like the XV5080 now come with over 1000 factory patches, I'm part of a larger international team of sound designers which is headed up by 'Ace' Yukawa of Roland R&D Japan," says Eric. "After all the patches have been created by the International team, it's my job to rate them and put the finishing touches on the factory set. I just finished up tweaking the patches for the new XV3080 and 5080, and I've been involved with the Variphrase project for a long time. It's nice to see these things finally coming out. Both projects have been about seven years in the making." Eric also oversaw the development of all of Roland's worldwide sampling sessions and created the Roland factory CD-ROM libraries. Despite the quality of these libraries (as evidenced by their continued residence in many a film composer's collection) the projects generated a certain degree of frustration. "We were doing difficult work at the now-defunct Roland R&D in Los Angeles," describes Eric, "spending years creating these massive CD-ROM libraries for Roland's 700-series samplers. But as a hardware company, Roland didn't really view sample libraries as their core business. As a result, the Roland CD-ROMs didn't reach very many people. It just wasn't important for a large company like Roland to advertise them. Of course, many people became familiar with our work through the hardware products like the Sound Canvas, the 1080s and Expansion Boards, but few heard the original 'hi-res' versions we created on the Archive and Project series CD-ROMs." As the early '90s progressed, Eric saw a growing market for sounds to fill ever more cost-effective samplers, and watched as the soundware industry sprang into life as an exciting new field. At the same time his session work as a synthesist was beginning to change. More and more artists and composers were buying instruments like the 1080, as opposed to hiring a synthesist to bring his or her own rig to the studio and create fresh sounds for their project. "In a way, I was putting myself out of work," says Eric. "So I figured, if people are going to buy sounds instead of hiring me to do custom stuff, I might as well be the one selling them the sounds!" Eric, with his wife Lorey as co-partner, founded Spectrasonics in 1994 and set up UK distribution with Time & Space. With five phone lines in their kitchen, the pair started small and took charge of everything themselves: product development, manufacturing, marketing, sales, shipping, dealer support, and customer support. "We had no idea how difficult it would be when we started the business," Eric reflects. "My wife and I worked 7am to 3am, seven days a week. It was totally overwhelming." Fortunately, the fledgling startup business had a great initial line-up. "Our first library was Bass Legends," says Eric, "which was only possible because of my friendships with Marcus Miller, John Patitucci and Abraham Laboriel. They had a lot of faith in us, and it has gone on to be one of the best-selling discs of all time. At the same time, my good friend Bob Daspit (whom I mentored in the sampling arts at Roland R&D) had gone to work for Hans Zimmer as his personal sound designer. Bob is also a wonderful guitarist and had created a custom guitar sample library from Hans' extensive collection of guitars. We also found an amazing group of people in Singapore who were working on this incredible exotic library. We helped them finish it and that became the hit Heart of Asia. So we were blessed with three outstanding products at the inception of Spectrasonics."
A focus on theme, according to Eric, is one of the key factors that distinguishes his company's products from the herd of sample libraries out there. "I learned quickly that it's the concept and title of the library that capture people's imagination. Since Distorted Reality didn't have any famous players associated with it, I was initially unsure if it was a good idea or not. I thought we'd only sell a few copies. But because the concept of 'distorting reality' appealed to so many different kinds of musicians, it has become our best-seller by far." Another Spectrasonics library, Liquid Grooves, proved more problematic. "We thought the concept of 'Liquid Grooves' would be great, but we really had no idea how to make rhythms sound 'liquid'. Three weeks before the introduction at the NAMM show, all we had was a title and cover art. So we rushed into the studio and started experimenting, commanding the drummers "OK, now think liquid!" "It was a big challenge," says Eric, "but the creative part of it was very rewarding. It wasn't until all the experiments with Wavedrums and live elements were sampled and remixed that it really came together. It was a very time-consuming process, but it's another one of our products that gets a great deal of use out there." Besides a focus on theme, Eric attributes his success to a commitment to high-quality, useful sounds. "It's not actually that hard to make a weird sound any more," says Eric, "but truly inspiring, unique and useful sounds are an entirely different matter. It takes a lot of patience." Some Assembly Required Patience is also required in recording, editing and processing the truly staggering number of samples required for a professional sampling product. Spectrasonics compounds this by retaining only a fraction of the samples initially gathered. For example, on Distorted Reality 2 Eric developed about six gigabytes of material over a three-year period that never made the final cut. The forthcoming Vocal Planet was an even greater effort. Four years in the making, Vocal Planet is really the second half of the epic vocal collection that began with the well-known four-CD-ROM Symphony Of Voices collection, which features cathedral-recorded choirs, boys' choirs, and samples of classical vocalists. The project was spun off into two parts when Eric realised the immensity of the undertaking. The two works, combined, provide the most comprehensive collection of vocal samples ever assembled, demanding over 75,000 samples of 500 singers from which to draw the final material. Vocal Planet renders the vocal utterances of ethnic singers, from Gaelic and Celtic folk singers to moaning Mississippi delta bluesmen, jazz and gospel choirs, to the otherworldly drones of the Tuvan throat singers (who can each sing multiple notes). One of many challenges of the project was that Tuvan throat singing is a dying art, with only 30 or so authentic singers left in the world. According to Eric, "The Tuvan throat singers were one of the things on my wish-list if I could have any sound for Vocal Planet. But we had no idea how to contact them in outer Mongolia! Then one day someone called and told us the throat singers happened to be in town doing a tour with the Smithsonian Institute. They agreed to do the sampling late that night and were on their way back to Tuva the next morning!" The Shrinking Studio Plan Surveying both the past and future, Eric has much to be proud of. Most Spectrasonics releases remain chart-toppers — some of them seven years after they were first shipped. How many recording artists can say the same thing? What's next? Aside from the imminent release of Vocal Planet and the Roland XV synths, expect the release of new Classic Drumming series titles from Spectrasonics. These CD-ROMs will be activated for Groove Control™, a proprietary method of developing sample libraries created by Spectrasonics and ILIO that allows users independent control of tempo, pitch, feel, and even changing the pattern of a stereo drum loop, without relying on any external software or programming aside from your sequencer. His studio might get a makeover as well. In a break with the gear-head tradition of acquiring ever more pieces of equipment, Eric is seriously considering slimming down his studio. "I'm relying more and more on software and computers," said Eric, "I'll probably get rid of some hardware processors and synths, but never my treasures like my 200-pound, 1976 Yamaha CS80 and my Moog." Reflecting on the radical breakthroughs taking
place in software sound synthesis and effects processing, Eric seems a man at
ease with the new technology. "It's a whole new world," he says. "This year we
ran our entire Frankfurt show from a Powerbook. We were at NAMM just a couple
months earlier and that wasn't possible."
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