Dave Oliwa & Rob Eads, Owners of MultiMusic, Dallas, Texas -- "From Radio to Recording Studio"
It's a production person's dream: One day you go to work, give your resignation, and begin a successful business of your own, doing what you do best for yourself, not someone else. Many dream about it, a few wake up and pull it off. Last year, Dave woke up. Leaving the halls of radio stations behind, Dave Oliwa teamed up with Rob Eads and created Multimusic! (! is part of name) Radio And Production takes a look at this new company. We look at how it started, what it did, and how it's doing now; and we dedicate this month's interview to those of you tired of dreaming.
R.A.P. Give us your background, Dave.
Dave: I started out as a small white baby in radio, ripping wires in the newsroom for ABC Network when I was 14. I lied about my age to get a job there. Then I started working at little radio stations across the country, putting in years and years of sitting in the little production room, talking to myself and a microphone. I worked in Newark, NJ; Monmouth, IL; Galesburg, IL; and Peoria, where I was the #1 afternoon drive disc jockey for 3 years. I then moved to Dallas where I've been for the last 8 years.
R.A.P. What took you Dallas?
Dave: Well, my strength all along has been production, and I was really interested in sound effects. The reason I moved to Dallas was to create digitally encoded sound effects for video games. I thought I was going to get out of radio. Apollo Video Games moved me to Dallas.
At that time the idea of digital was far off in the distance. There was no one in the United States doing digital recording. The only people doing that were in England, so I guess I was one of the first people that thought digital could work this way. I wanted to put sound effects on video games and store them digitally in the game cartridge. At that time the game artridge just had instructions for the computer, and the computer generated the sounds. So I moved to Dallas and the company that hired me went out of business a month and a half later. It was back to radio.
I went directly to KRLD, which is an all news station, and strangely enough, I started doing news. I did that for about 3 years. Then channel 4, the CBS affiliate, hired me away to be their Assignment Editor. I stayed there for a year and then went back to KRLD. I was there for a year more and said to myself, "This is ridiculous; I'm in Dallas, the jingle capitol of the world!" When I was Production Director, I thought the "in" thing to do was to produce jingles. So I decided it was about time I made some jingles.
R.A.P. Rob, what were you doing during this time?
Rob: Well, I played in a lot of bands. I graduated with a music composition degree from East Texas State University and I landed a job with a programming and production company in Dallas called PAPA; Programming And Production Associates. I worked there for years doing jingles, commercial production, and things of that nature. I met Dave about 4 years ago when he was doing some voice work with us, and we started a friendship. We talked about getting together and starting our own company.
R.A.P. Are you a musician as well, Dave?
Dave: I've played piano since I was three and a half.
R.A.P. Where did the idea to create Multimusic come from?
Rob: David told me about an idea, when we first met, to produce a collection of Christmas production music beds for radio stations because there were none available, or very few available. We thought there was definitely a hole in the market.
Dave: Every single year, around Christmas time, I realized there was never enough Christmas music. Every single year I had to flip through albums, make beds, and do all the stuff everyone else was doing. I had talked to friends at TM and Jams and said, "Hey, you guys should come up with some kind of Christmas music library". They all said, "No, no. It's too much trouble and nobody would buy anything like that". So it was a matter of putting it together ourselves.
We thought it would be a good idea to find an electronic music studio, manufacture the beds, then put out an album our-selves. It was too much of an investment to get the musicians together, score it out, and get the studio time, but with today's technology of electronic music studios, there was no reason why it couldn't be accomplished with electronic keyboards.
R.A.P. So how did the idea become a reality?
Dave: We found a guy that had an electronic music studio and told him we wanted to do this. He was real interested. So, when we started up, we did it part time. Rob was still working and I was still working. Then I quit KRLD. Rob's company went through a change and he left there, and we all started working on it full time.
R.A.P. How long did it take you to finish the album?
Dave: We started working on "Holiday Hot Cuts" last August. We made a demo before we finished all the cuts, and then printed an ad on a card and sent the card and an Evatone sound sheet of the demo to every radio station in the country. We continued to work on the cuts after the demo had been mailed. We finished pressing the discs at the end of September.
R.A.P. One would expect an album of Christmas production music to contain renditions of standard Christmas tunes. What made you decide to do original music?
Dave: Every other Christmas music bed that we had seen was some old standard simply set to a disco beat. We though it didn't necessarily have to be a Christmas song as long as it sounded "Christmasy".
So we sat down and figured out what makes Christmas music sound like Christmas music, and we wrote some of our own.
R.A.P. Aside from the mailout, you did this project without any capital investment, right?
Dave: That's the thing. There's virtually no capital needed. Once you have the music system, it's just a matter of being able to spend the time.
R.A.P. Granted, you can produce the music without any capital up front, but the mailout does cost. What was the expense there?
Dave: It was pretty cheap. If you're going to bulk mail something, you're going to pay 16.7 cents per piece. There are 9900 stations in the country, excluding educationals, so when sending a mailout to every station, you're going to spend a couple of thousand on printing, a couple of thousand on the Evatone soundsheet, and a couple of thou¬sand on postage. You can hire someone to stuff all the envelopes for you for a few hundred dollars. So for under ten thousand dollars you can make a contact with every radio station in the country.
R.A.P. Would you say there are a lot of music systems out there that are not being used to their fullest potential; systems someone could hook up with just like you did?
Dave: Sure. That's going to be the next major chunk of music. All these music systems are available, and when people figure out how to use them properly, we're going to see a lot more music from people that, up to now, never had a chance to put out a record. Before, you had to have a band; and the band had to rent studio time and get nice instruments and nice processing equipment to make it sound good enough. Now, in the digital domain, anyone can go out and spend a thousand dollars and get a little synthesizer. You can get a synthesizer with a sequencer for sixteen or seventeen hundred. So many people are going to have the opportunity to make music. These people that have the equipment now, at home, are potential marketers of music; they are potential recording stars. I think a lot of the people you hear in music today, especially in urban contemporary, only had a synthesizer. They were very, very clever. They spent a lot of time on it, they made some stuff, and it sounded good. They got into a record company because they had the ability to make the music to present to the record company. Up to the digital age, that was something that was very expensive, and now, it's very inexpensive.
R.A.P. What about the individual who's not as musically educated as you? Does he need to be a musician to use these systems to make a simple music bed?
Dave: No, but it makes it easier to do. We know a music bed has to be either :29 or :59. Music sort of plays into your hands: A standard musical 8 bar phrase is going to take 10 or 12 seconds. You're going to have a second melody, or a counter melody, and then a repeat of the first melody and wham, you're up to 29 seconds! It can be very easy. Even a novice can manufacture a decent sounding track, but it may take him a little longer. The great thing about electronic music systems is that someone who can't play very well, can sound as though they can. With a sequencer you can program it in; you play it very slowly then you just speed up the tempo.
R.A.P. Describe the studio you're working out of.
Dave: One of our guys has a very nice studio in his house. We have an IBM computer running 4 synthesizers and a digital drum machine. The recording is being done digitally onto the hard disk of the computer. Actually, what's being recorded are the instructions to the synthesizers to perform the music, so each time you play it back, it's not technically a recording but a repeat performance of the music. We have a couple of samplers and some great software for the computer. We use the Voyetra software for the IBM. We also have a Ramsa 12 channel mixing board and a Roland reverb unit.
R.A.P. If you were to put a dollar figure on the studio, what would it be?
Dave: It's really very nice. I'd say about 30,000 dollars.
R.A.P. What other things are you doing in the studio to make money?
Dave: We're producing the standard bank jingles. We do the basic tracks in the electronic studio, then we move the tape to a local studio, and add some real instruments and some vocals. We're small, so we don't own our own full blown studio yet.
R.A.P. You have a great voice. Are you pursuing any voice work as well?
Dave: I've always done voice work. Lately I have not been pursuing any, but I probably will in the future. I've done national spots for lots of companies from Chuck-E-Cheeze Pizza to Rockwell International. Right now, my voice is the computer voice on the Commodore talking computer.
R.A.P. What advice would you give to someone wanting to do their own studio?
Dave: If you're going to pop the bucks for any kind of electronic music stuff, don't buy things that are huge. Buy little things and string them together. Modular thought, when it comes to electronic music studios, is the best, because the technology is changing so fast that if you put all your money into a Fairlight or a Synclavier or something like that, thinking you're buying something phenomenal, in 2 years, you're going to find that you spent way too much money, and you will wish that you would have bought a separate computer and a separate synthesizer. If you pop the money for something big now, you're gonna be sad later. Take the guy that spent $4,000 on an Oberheim 4 years ago: 3 years ago they came out with digital, and the Oberheim dropped in price to about $500. Recognize that what you're dealing with is a technology that's rapidly changing. Protect yourself by not buying things that are going to be too costly and tie you down capital-wise. In the very near future, things are going to change big time.
We wish Dave and Rob the best of luck with Multimusic! The key to the success of any production library is good quality work, and Dave and Rob have that in "Holiday Hot Cuts". Obviously, a career in radio production doesn't have to end in radio production. It's also good to know that a former Production Director is out there producing music for today's Production Directors. He knows what we need.