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If You Don't Know Jorma...
Read this great story on The Fur Peace Ranch in Delta Magazine this month
The Ronnie Milsap Interview
40 Number Ones and Still Doing It His Way
By Dan DaleyRonnie Milsap has had a career any recording artist would long for. From 1973 through the present, the 62-year-old Robbinsville, NC, native has posted 40 number-one records on country and pop charts and sold 23 million records.
In the process, he's accumulated six GRAMMYs, six Billboard awards, eight CMA awards and three ACM awards. It's a storybook career in many ways: recognized as a virtuoso musician while studying classical piano and violin at the age of seven, Milsap transferred his genius to rock & roll in high school with his first band, the Apparitions. A career as a touring musician—he played with J.J. Cale, among others—and as a session player in Memphis and Nashville—that's him on piano on Elvis Presley's "Kentucky Rain"—in the early 1970s led to a few singles on indie labels.
After that, his signing with RCA Records in Nashville saw a remarkable and seemingly endless string of hits that defied genres, including country chart-toppers "Pure Love," "Please Don't Tell Me How the Story Ends," and "(I'd Be) A Legend in My Time," as well as R&B-tinged pop crossover hits, beginning with 1977's "It Was Almost like a Song" through "Smoky Mountain Rain," "No Gettin' Over Me" and "Any Day Now." For 15 consecutive years of his 20-year association with RCA, Ronnie Milsap had at least one record in the top ten of one or more charts. Furthermore, Milsap co-produced most of his own records—an uncommon occurrence in the strictly defined Nashville music machine of the era before Garth—and many of those records were recorded at his own studio facility, Groundstar Laboratories.
But what makes this fairy tale-like story all the more magical is that Milsap has been blind since birth, from congenital glaucoma.
A Studio Is Born
Groundstar Laboratories was a fixture on Music Row for decades. Milsap bought the studio from Roy Orbison in 1978, and customized it for his particular needs, such as a unique open-ended iso booth for the grand piano, which allowed Milsap to minimize leakage from the instrument while he remained in the main studio room, leading the band and often cutting keeper lead vocals.
"All the other artists I talked to said I was crazy for buying a recording studio," Milsap recalls. "I heard nothing but, 'Why waste your money when you can just rent a studio and walk away when you're done?'"
But Milsap wanted more intense involvement in the record-making process, long before project and home studios came into vogue. Even the name he gave the studio is telling: "It was a laboratory. It was a place I could experiment and play and try things out." Fortunately, he had the backing of both RCA label head Jerry Bradley, son of the legendary Owen Bradley (producer of the equally legendary Patsy Cline and many other classic country artists who had owned several recording studios), and then-label marketing v.p. Joe Galante, an iconoclastic New Yorker slugging his way through a Music Row innately suspicious of Yankees in the country music business, who in 1983 would take the helm at RCA and become Milsap's biggest champion.
Ronnie Milsap grew up around vintage audio gear, though at the time the adjective "vintage" wasn't necessary. Groundstar featured a Neve 8000 series console and rack upon rack of Pultec and Fairchild signal processing, as well as a growing collection of Milsap's favorite vocal microphone, the U-67, of which has specimens of both Neumann and the older Telefunken manufacture.
But as you might expect of someone who embraced technology as a way to maintain control over his music career, Milsap has not gotten sedentary in the miasma of the good old days of analog, when men were men and compressors were LA-2As. In fact, if you bought some classic gear on Ebay in recent years, you might have bought a piece or two from him; after he sold Groundstar in 1996, he put together a sketchpad studio in his home in the rolling hills on Nashville's south side. The Doghouse, as he calls it, quickly became filled with the accouterments of contemporary digital recording, including a Windows-based waveform editing system, which was imminently scheduled to be replaced by a Pro Tools system, with a large assortment of plug-ins to replace the outboard gear. As we talked about his digital transition, and as I fumbled through notes, looking for the most graceful way to put a question that had to be asked, Milsap intuitively stated it himself: "Can a blind person operate Pro Tools?" A beat later, he answers his own question: "You bet!"
Working with Computers
Milsap had been working with a Sony Sound Forge system for over a year, in conjunction with voice synthesis programs -- JAWS and WindowEyes for PC and OutSpoken for Mac -- which reads dialog from the screen and speaks it, along with spewing out a scrolling Braille-encoded ticker tape. (These also allow him to regularly use other computer programs, including Windows, Excel,Word and Outlook Express, as well as EX Creator to burn CD-Rs.) Using a mouse is out, obviously, but Milsap has become adept at hot buttons and short-cut keystrokes to change parameters and edit waveforms. "He uses the keys like a tape transport," explains Mark Lambert, a Pro Tools user and Nashville studio owner who has worked with Milsap on edits. "He listens, finds a spot, marks it with a keystroke, moves on and marks the next edit. He gets into the rhythm of the process. You don't have to be around him long to be impressed by his technical ability."
Overcoming a Challenge
Milsap's adroitness at navigating virtual editing was made clear last year when RCA asked him to edit a Christmas song for a compilation release. Well-known Nashville mastering engineer Glenn Meadows, who has mastered over a dozen of Milsap's albums over the years, told him flatly that a blind person could not do waveform editing. "Well, I took the edit down to his studio and played it for him and asked him, 'O.K., pick out the edits,'" Milsap remembers gleefully.
"And you know, I couldn't," says Meadows. "But looking back, it didn't really surprise me. Ronnie can do anything he sets his mind to."
On the subject of plug-ins, Milsap says most perform closely enough to the original to satisfy him, including one that closely mimics his favorite processing toy of all time, the revered Echoplex. "It even has a little bit of noise to make it sound more authentic," he exclaims. "I mean, it's not absolutely perfect. None of them are, compared with the original pieces of equipment. But combine how good they are with the convenience that comes with it being digital, and that's plenty good enough."
But while Milsap has more in common with a 17-year-old enraptured by home recording technology than with other country music elder statesmen, he also sets personal limits. "When I get really serious, when it's time to make records, I go into a big studio," he says. "It's great to have all this stuff at home. But when you want to make it for real, there's still nothing like making music with a bunch of other great musicians in the same room. That's one thing that'll never change."
Visual Impairment and the Recording Industry
Though blind artists have been an integral part of pop music history, such as Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder (both of whom are Pro Tools users, according to Digidesign) and Jeff Healy, the pro audio industry's transition to digital, computer-based technology has apparently left many sight-impaired hopefuls on the sidelines, as well as many educators.
Dr. Wes Bulla, coordinator of recording studio curriculum at Belmont University in Nashville, recently encountered that program's first blind student in his 12 years of teaching. As a two-year board member of the music education organization MEIEA, Bulla quickly realized that there were virtually no resources for teaching screen-based audio to the blind. He rushed a special request for a voice synthesis program and a modified dot-matrix printer, which punches Braille onto special paper, through channels at the school. "That works for the lecture part of the curricula," he says. "I don't know what we're going to do yet when it comes time to be hands-on one virtual consoles. But it has made me realize that there's no telling how many visually impaired people there are out there who would be in this business if they knew there was some capability for learning it.”
Dan Daley is a Nashville-based author and music journalist. He frequently contributes to Mix magazine and other music publications.