Tom hidley biography
- Tom Hidley (born 27 May 1931) is an.
- Tom Hidley has designed and built more than 400 of the world's top recording studios.
- Tom Hidley is an American recording studio designer and audio engineer whose companies have been responsible for the design of hundreds of professional studios worldwide since 1965.
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Tom Hidley
American recording studio designer and audio engineer
Tom Hidley (born 27 May 1931) is an American recording studio designer and audio engineer whose companies have been responsible for the design of hundreds of professional studios worldwide since 1965.[1][2] He coined the term "bass trap" and is credited with a number of recording studio design innovations, including soffit-mounted monitor speakers and sliding glass doors between live and isolations rooms.[2][3]
Career
Background and early career
As a teenager, Hidley spent long hours playing the saxophone, clarinet, and flute until ordered by his physician to cease after suffering a physical breakdown. Turning to other music-related activities, Hidley began working at loudspeaker and tape-machine companies while recording at clubs after-hours. By 1956, he was working for JBL Loudspeaker Co. and performing audio engineering at custom installations, including installations in the homes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Lucille Ball, and Danny Kaye.[ Recording studio in Montreux, Switzerland Mountain Studios was a commercial recording studio founded by American singer and composer Anita Kerr and her husband Alex Grob in 1975 within the Montreux Casino in Montreux, Switzerland.[1] The studio was under the ownership of Queen and then long-time Queen producerDavid Richards from 1979 until 2013, after which it became the charity museum/exhibition Queen: The Studio Experience, benefitting the Mercury Phoenix Trust. Singer and composer Anita Kerr and her husband, Swiss businessman Alex Grob, hired Westlake Audio and studio designer Tom Hidley to build the studio in the Montreux Casino,[2] where it recorded all live performances of the Montreux Jazz Festival. Additionally, the tax advantages of the studio's location in Switzerland proved popular, with British artists such as David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Yes, Rick Wakeman, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and Queen recording at Mountain Studios over the first few years. In 1979,[3] Queen acquired the American, Tom Hidley, is probably the most famous name in the world of professional studio design. Over the past twenty-five years his empirical approach to solving acoustic problems has led him to develop various room designs and monitoring systems that have been both innovative and wide-ranging in their influence. Paul Gilby tracked him down at this year's APRS show in London to find out more about the man and his work...•
Mountain Studios
Background
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How and where did your career in studio design first start Tom?
"On the acoustic side of things it started in the sixties for me. I had my own studio in Los Angeles and it had all the usual built-in acoustic problems of the sixties. So I began experimenting and drawing on some of the knowledge I had learned when I had worked with JBL at their loudspeaker factory. We worked on aspects like drum leakage spilling over into the string section and reflections off walls which were giving us difficulty.
That period in the early sixties was the transition from Big Band music to the Rock 'n' Roll era. Music was changing very fast, sound pressure levels were i
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