Dinner with Michael Boddicker

[synthetic]

I just had a cool dinner that included Michael Boddicker, synth player to the stars in the '80s in LA. Someone from EWF walked by, he mentioned that he met him on the "Let's Groove Tonight" session, and it turns out he played that vocoder part, as well as the ones on MJ's Pretty Young Thing and Donna Summer's album and... He was talking about what a big deal the Oberheim Four-voice was when it came out, and how he worked with that company when it was Tom, Jim Cooper (JL Cooper) and Fred Jones (Who later distributed Cubase as Steinberg/Jones and now runs Audiomidi.com). He used the Oberheim filter on a dead-simple one-finger clavinet part at a session, and the producer called him the "funkiest white guy he had ever met."

 

I asked him later if he still had a synth museum at home, since he owned one of everything back then. He was approached by someone who wanted to start a rental company, and made him a business partner and ran the business in exchange for his gear. This became SST in Los Angeles. I said that I had heard of them, and always wanted an excuse to rent a CS-80. "When is the last time you saw one of those monsters," he asked. "Actually, I've never seen one in person," I replied. Which made him say, "Wow, you're young. I still remember flying to Japan to work on the presets with the engineers."

 

He mentioned at one point the difference in the studio business these days. Back then, when you hired a triple-scale musician, he was expected to help you with the arrangement. Greg Phillengaines would help you write a killer intro, and someone else would come up with a hook in the guitar part. It was a team effort to write a hit song. These days, he asked a guy to engineer a record with his Pro Tools rig, and the guy wanted 50% of the writers credit.

 

Oh, and not all of the synths are at the rental company. He still has "his Moog and Chick Corea's Moog."

[sirgant]

I think it's Russ Jones, not Fred.