I credit both my parents with my love of music. Both played piano quite well and enjoyed all sorts of different music. My father was, for a time, choir director at our church. I grew up surrounded by music - but never had any real talent for making it.  I simply enjoyed listening to it.

But my father was also a techno-geek, and took great pleasure when I showed an interest in technology. He had a lot of fun with electronics, and it kind-of rubbed off on me. He didn't push me into it, but was always ready to explain something I didn't understand. He was extremely patient with me, with the result that I always enjoyed the stuff we did together (at least in the workshop... I never did develop his enthusiasm for golf). By the time most kids are learning their multiplication tables, I knew Ohm's Law and the resistor color-code.

So I grew up with this great love of music, but no real talent, and this great love of technology, where I showed a lot of promise. Jim Peterson, the vocational electricity instructor at Crown High School in Carpentersville, Illinois, was another big influence.  He allowed me to take his Junior-year fundamentals classes during my Sophomore year and the Senior-year advanced classes during my Junior year, then return as a lab assistant in lieu of study halls during my Senior year. Also during both my Junior and Senior years, we used my stereo (I had the loudest stereo in Carpentersville) for sound reinforcement for the school musicals (Brigadoon one year, Kismet the next). I discovered that my favorite place to be was where the two great loves of my life, music and technology, came together.

I had problems with college. As a Freshman at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, I wasn't allowed to "CLEP out" of the basic electricity course. It was the same course, with the same textbook, I'd aced in my sophomore year at Crown. This contributed to my attitude problem. Lab periods were spent in the classroom (things have probably changed by now - this was 1967): the instructor would bring in a cart with the equipment and demonstrate the experiment, from which we were to write a lab report. My attitude was "you did the experiment, you write the report. I'll write a report when I get to do the experiment." Lab reports were 50% of the grade, so I flunked... but it was a moral victory...

I managed to get into Elgin Community College for the 1968-1969 school year. There, I was told that I could have skipped basic electricity had I come there straight from Crown, but since I had failed the course (same book, by the way) at Milwaukee, I had to take it over. Elgin had a real lab, though, and Mr. Green was an understanding instructor. I had a bench at the back of the room where I could do anything I wanted, as long as I wrote up a good lab report on it. I built a stereo amplifier and an FM tuner.

In early July of 1969, I got a letter:

"The President of the United States to

John K. Emerson

Greeting

You are hereby ordered to report, on the 30th day of July, 1969, for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States of America...."

It wasn't a big surprise - I knew my "moral victory" at Milwaukee had cost me my student deferrment.

Drafted!  Well, I didn't want to go into the Army, go to Viet Nam and get shot at, so I fooled them... On the 28th day of July, 1969, I was in my Navy recruiter's office saying "I, John Emerson, do solemnly swear..." they can't draft you if you're already in.

The Navy made an Interior Communications Technician out of me. IC's take care of public address, telephone communications, intercoms, and anything else electrical that nobody else wants. "Please don't throw me into that briar patch!"

They sent me to the USS Oklahoma City - the 7th Fleet Flagship. I was going to Viet Nam (part of the 7th Fleet's territory), but I was going in style. The "Okie Boat" was 610 feet long, 65 feet wide, 7 stories tall, weighed 44,000 tons and carried a crew (including the Admiral and his staff) of over 1200 people. The Admiral we carried was the guy who decides where each ship in the fleet is going to be at any given time. You can bet the ship he's on is usually going to be someplace nice. It was good duty.

Part of the Admiral's staff was the 7th Fleet Band. Not just a marching band, they could configure as a dance band, a jazz band, a concert band or even a jazz-rock combo. It wasn't too long before I was back in my favorite place, where the music and the technology come together, as principle sound technician for the 7th Fleet Band. It was supposed to be a rotating gig, but they asked for me.

Military issue sound gear, back then, was big, heavy, rugged and barely useable. But our "home port" was Yokosuka, Japan. Yokosuka (pronounced Yo KO ska - the u is silent and the accent is on the second syllable) is about a half-hour train ride (they have excellent public transportation) from Akihabara. Akihabara is a district of Tokyo I like to think of as "transistor heaven." The train station is surrounded by about eight square blocks of nothing but electronics stores. You could get any kind of electronic part you wanted.

I designed and built my own mixer, had my folks mail my microphone collection to me, augmented it with a few well-made Japanese mics and soon had both a PA system and a 4-track recording setup (with a Teac A-3340S 15 ips open-reel recorder) I could be proud of.

The high point of my military career came when Frank Sinatra, shortly after he came out of retirement with the hit single "Let Me Try Again," did a USO tour. He didn't bring along Nelson Riddle and his Orchestra, but mailed sheet music ahead and used whatever musicians were available. At Yokosuka, that was the 7th Fleet Band. He sang into my Shure 55S, one of the mics I'd had my parents send over, and my hands were on the controls. I've still got the mic.

No horror stories about the short-tempered mega-star... as a matter of fact, during our one and only rehearsal, he did everything he could to try to loosen us up (I was scared s---less, and so were most of the musicians... I mean, this was SINATRA!). What finally worked was when he sang "Fry Me to the Moon" - after all, we were in Japan.

By then his voice was pretty-much shot, his range was barely an octave, he was perpetually hoarse, rarely on key and it didn't matter. He had so much stage presence that nobody cared what he sounded like or that it wasn't Nelson Riddle backing him - he was SINATRA! He got a standing ovation just for walking out on stage.

That was the only show I wasn't allowed to tape. I do have tapes of Bernie Allen and Steve Rossi (comedy, patterned after Martin and Lewis - Steve Rossi had a hit in the early sixties with the song "More"), and of Johnny Desmond (billed as the Singing Sergeant when he was part of Glenn Miller's Army Air Corps band, still doing Glenn Miller tunes in 1973), but Reprise (Sinatra's label) wouldn't allow it.

Duty on the Okie Boat was so good that I reenlisted and spent nearly six years on that ship. When I finally rotated back to the States, it was to teach at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, about 30 miles from home. It wasn't long before I was moonlighting as a recording engineer at a small country and western studio and planning, when my hitch was up, to be a full-time recording engineer and, maybe someday, producer.

Well, when my hitch was up (October, 1978), the little studio I'd been working for was on the verge of bankruptcy. I mailed several copies of my resume (a cassette of stuff I'd recorded, mixed and sometimes produced) to larger studios around the country. I got an excellent offer from a fairly well-known studio in Nashville, not just a good wage, but a chance to move into production fairly quickly. Nashville! Music City, U.S.A.!

I sold off all my personal recording gear (except the "Sinatra" mic.) to finance the trip down. I was going to have a sixteen-track studio to play in - let somebody else play with the four-track toys. Then the "bomb" went off, courtesy of Morley Safer.

It was Sunday and I was getting ready to leave. I was supposed to interview there on Tuesday.  I had the TV on, half-watching 60 Minutes as I packed. The "bomb" was an exposé of "Rip-off Recording Studios." The concept is simple (and still practiced today): You take some schmuck with a little talent and a lot of money, flatter the heck out of him, convince him he's the next Elvis, and bleed him dry with studio time, engineers fees, record pressings, anything you can think of to pad the bill. Guess who was at the top of their list...

I called down, next morning, and told them I'm not a whore. They said that's okay, they'd had a bunch of cancellations and didn't need me anymore.  So much for my career in music.

The studio I'd been part-timing at folded, I had no recording gear of my own (except the Sinatra mic.) and the Nashville incident had left a bad taste in my mouth.  I didn't want to be in the music business anymore. I applied for, and got, a job as an electronics technician, with a company that let me advance as I proved myself, and gave me ample opportunities to do so.

I spent 24 years at Videojet (November 1978 to Novenber 2002), moved through manufacturing, repair, test and field service on my way to new product development and was promoted, in several steps, to the position of Senior Engineer... in spite of my lack of a degree. Or perhaps because of it... nobody ever taught me what couldn't be done, so I just did it. I had a hand in the design of several profitable products. I took risks and tackled problems that most of my peers were trying to avoid, often on my own initiative.

Most important, I learned a lot of things most engineers don't deal with (but should).  Things like how to design for test and how to match a design to the lowest-cost assembly process for the projected production volume.  I learned to listen to my customers - not just the end-users (my "external customers"), though they were always the most important customers, but marketing, manufacturing, test, field service, sales and purchasing - my "internal customers."  An elegant design is no good if it doesn't meet the end user's need - that's a given.  But it's also wasted if it costs too much to build and test, is difficult to service, hard to sell or uses esoteric and hard-to-get parts. 

My eventual termination was the result of my refusal to keep my head down. I had taken on a big risk, trying to extend the life of an old "cash-cow" product. One of the microprocessors had become obsolete - I had accepted the assignment of redesigning that particular board with a newer processor. I was on my way to accomplishing my "rescue mission" when, in the span of one week, our biggest competitor in that particular market announced a new product that overcame our main competitive advantage, and the manufacturer of another vital chip announced that chip's obsolescence. The "rescue mission" was terminated... and so was I (along with 44 others, all on the same day).

Meanwhile, I had started "moonlighting" again.

In 1978, I had bailed out of the music business, but I hadn't lost my love for music. I had a lot of fun, especially, going to local-band shows. While I listen to a lot of different kinds of music, loud-and-fast suits my musical tastes quite nicely. I also get a kick out of seeing kids having a good time.

In the late eighties, I got involved with a heavy-metal band called RIPT, mostly as a fan, sometimes as a roadie, sometimes as a financial backer. I decided to get into recording again, just as a hobby, and bought a Tascam PortaStudio and a few more microphones.

RIPT broke up before I had the chance to record them (though I did get to do the sound for a reunion show in the middle nineties), but I latched onto a folk-rock duo who called themselves "Electric Koolaid" and started to refresh my recording-engineer skills.

Meanwhile, a local promoter, Brian Peterson, had started doing local-band shows on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes they were at the Elgin Turners' Club, sometimes at a club called the #1 Soul, and a couple times at Scrap Skate Park, in Hoffman Estates (where I first saw Rancid, before they signed a major label contract, opening for a punk band called The Queers). In 1993, Brian's shows landed in a more-or-less permanent home at a place we lovingly called "The Third Floor," on a regular schedule: every other Saturday. It was literally the third floor of a building... without an elevator. But it was within walking distance of my home.

Well, Brian's regular sound guy didn't like the stairs. The kit he brought kept shrinking. He seemed to care less and less and the quality of sound he provided, never better than average, slipped well below par. I started running off at the mouth about it: "I haven't done live sound for fifteen years and I could do a better job."

I was 44 years old at the time. The reaction I got was "Sure, old man, like you really know a lot about punk." But the seed was planted.

A couple weeks later, on a Friday evening, my phone rang. It was Brian Peterson. He'd gotten my number from one of the Electric Koolaid guys. His regular sound guy had cancelled on him at the last minute and he couldn't find anybody else. Could I do the sound for tomorrow's show?

"No problem!" - and no hesitation.

The next morning found me out shopping for sound gear: a used 16 X 2 X 1 Peavey board, a couple compressors, graphic EQ, 16 X 4 snake, amps, speakers, a couple more mics, stands, cables... I blew the top off my Mastercard and made a big dent in my Visa (15 years with the same employer and an engineer's salary make for an excellent credit rating). I spent about $5000 that morning for the gear I needed to do a show that evening... that I knew in advance was going to pay me $150 and might be the only show I'd ever get. That's when I realized just how much I had missed it.

Brian opened the show by getting on the mic. and apologizing to the audience because the regular sound guy wasn't there. He asked them to take it easy on me. What a confidence builder.

But the opening band was Slapstick, a ska/punk band with a 4-piece horn section. After several years with a military band, I know how to mic. and mix horns... and working with some fairly big-name musicians had given me a good feel for what was needed in a good monitor mix... which is what any musician needs to do his best work.  My mixing style doesn't change from genre-to-genre and it hasn't changed much since 1973.  I try to make it loud without influencing how the band sounds.  It's not "the John Emerson show."

After Slapstick, the 3-piece and 4-piece punk bands that followed were easy. Brian closed the show by getting on the mic. and thanking me for the excellent sound, and from then on, until the place closed its doors for good, I was THE sound guy at the third floor.

Pretty soon I started getting calls from bands setting up their own shows, then from other promoters, and have been doing at least 1 and usually 2 or 3 shows a week ever since. I expanded the system and added lights (that first show was played under the installed fluorescents).

Brian moved to Chicago and started doing shows at the Fireside Bowl. At first, I did the sound for most of them, but when he started doing shows on weeknights, it started interfering with my day job. He found Elliot Dix, at first just to do the weekday shows, then to take over the Fireside gigs entirely. I approve. I've usually got other shows to do on weekends. If I don't have a show of my own on a Friday or Saturday, I'll sometimes go to the Fireside just for the show. I know it'll sound good. While Elliot has expanded, too, and now hires other sound people to do most of the Fireside gigs, he's managed to find some pretty good people to fill in for him and keeps an excellent system there permanently.

Anyhow, as I kept expanding my system (it's now enough to do a 1400-seat auditorium comfortably... and still growing) I ran into a lighting problem. I had a James Lighting model 916 controller and had expanded to 32 channels of dimmer and relay packs, plenty of PAR cans, pinspots and some simple effects (a couple moonflower effects, some strobes). I wanted to add some intelligent movers. The James stuff was MUX-64. Nobody seemed to make MUX-64 movers. I had to go DMX-512. I settled on a pair of American DJ MightyScans and a DMX Operator to control them.

Try to choreograph a good light show when you've never heard the band before. Now try it when your movers are on a different controller from everything else. Now mix the sound at the same time.  To simplify the task, I decided I wanted to get all the dimmers onto the DMX Operator - a lot more channels, scenes and chases than the 916 - and looked for a translator... to no avail (I didn't realize that MUX-64 and micro-plex were practically the same thing). I decided I'd design my own... eventually.

Well, the loss of my Videojet job gave me the time, and a severance package based on 24 years of service gave me the money, to do something about it. Since the severance would, eventually, run out and since I figured I probably wasn't the only one with this problem, I decided to try to make a product out of it, and the DMX-lator I was born.

I had already built the first five pieces and established my pricing structure, based on my costs, when I found out that MUX-64 and micro-plex are essentially the same thing - I could have just bought an IF-501 from NSI. But the list price on the IF-501 is nearly double the list price I established for the DMX-lator I - I think I've got a winner.

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