Using his professional line of vacuum tube recording gear, David Manley recorded direct-to-two-track analog, using the Manley Stereo Gold Reference microphone in his 30 foot by 40 foot studio, with a cathedral-peak ceiling height of 16 feet. The entire acoustic treatment was finished in Oregon Oak and Douglas Fir timbers, with continuous Helmholtz-tuned resonance absorbing slots. The floor was rubber over high density particleboard over concrete, with a resultant reverberation time of approximately 1½ seconds, providing a totally neutral and resonance-free acoustic. The Manley studio was unique because the complete recording and playback chain from microphone to playback monitors were made up of Manley tube electronics. Further, the studio was designed for purist recording techniques only, with all the music played live and captured straight onto two tracks.
Every single piece of equipment in the recording chain was entirely tube and entirely analog, of David Manley's design and built in their factory in Chino, California. This included the microphones themselves, the Manley Stereo Gold Reference condenser microphone. The Manley microphone was of the so-called larger capsule variety, has a diameter of 1¼ inches, with 3-micron gold-deposition Mylar diaphragms. The stereo version has one fixed capsule and one rotatable capsule, which offers a continuously variable pick-up-pattern. He most often used the figure 8 in the classic Blumlein coincident crossed-pair mode. The entire vacuum tube amplification is built into the microphone body, and no transformer coupling or external amplification is used at all.
The microphone is connected via VTL Quad double-screened cable right into a unity-gain mixer for level setting and metering. The mixer was based around the Manley Reference preamplifier, and can mix up to 10 microphones into 2 busses. Mixing of microphones is achieved by each input having its own dedicated grid, and not by the usual pot and build out resistor method as found in every console in use in the recording industry.
No equalization of any kind was employed. All fixed wiring in the patch-bay and control room was VTL White wire 3x pure copper and silver cores in Teflon. David Manley fully updated the mechanics in the ½ inch two-track Studer C37 analog tape deck, which contains only their Manley pure tube circuitry.
The recordings were then mastered in his full-featured mastering room. The LPs were mastered from the original analog tapes, and the CDs were transferred and mastered from the two-track analog master to the digital master using the Manley 20-bit analogue-to-digital converter with 128x oversampling. These original LPs and CDs under the ViTaL label are now out of print. However select titles, have been brought back into print by the Italian record label Fonè.
“What? Mr. Bunch neatly frames the question: how do you define Sekou Bunch as a musician? obviously, he is an electric bass-player of extraordinary talent. To my ears it goes further than that: he is simply the best Ive ever heard. note particularly on “catano, “As A Mat- ter of Fact, “night on The Town and “Pastels that Sekou plays the Tenor-Bass melody with the pyrotechnical skill that will be admired by the most accomplished guitarists! Further yet the man writes some lovely tunes; and further still he is a cool, calm and collected musi- cal director who never loses his head, even under the most musically trying circumstances. It is getting late at night (read early morning), some of the best are battling... but Sekou never misses a beat (or a solo-trick), never loses his smile of sheer musical enjoyment: he uplift and inspired everybody to give of their best and they respond... You hold the results of their collective talents in your hands now. Sekou molded his repertoire around some of the most interesting (and di- verse) players around california and demonstrated a whole palette of sound-colors in his arrangements. So those are my impressions and experiences with Sekou Bunch. Trumpeter Tom Browne chose Sekou for his gold album “Funkin for Jamaica (and as co-writer on the hit single “Thighs high). Anita Baker selected Sekou for her PLATInuM album “Givin you the best that I got. he has toured the world with Melba Moore, Tom Browne, Phyllis hyman, Dave Grusin, Jocylyn Brown, Freddie hubbard, Dayton, Randy crawford, Bernard Wright, George Duke, Anita Baker and Sheena easton... All in all were in pretty good company in choosing Sekou Bunch for our VITAL label.
David Manley California, 1991
Karen Briggs - Violin 2,5,7
Jim Oppenheim - sax. 2,5,7,11
Keith Fiddmont - sax. 6,8
Nick Smith - piano 2,5,6,7,8,10,11
Tom MacMorran - piano 1,3,4
Doc Powell - Guitar 1,3,4,9
Kevin Turner - Guitar 8,10,11
Nolan Smith - Trumpet 6,8
Rayford Griffin - Drums 1,3,4,5,7,8,9
Vince Wilburn - Drums 10,11
Terri-lynne Carrington - Drums 6
Bill Summers - Percussion 1,2,3,4,7,8,9,11
Nenge Hernandez - Percussion 11
Richard Requeri - Percussion 11
Keith Jones - Fretless Bass1,2,3,4
Sekou Bunch - Tenor Bass 1,2,3,4
Sekou Bunch - Bass 5,6,7,8,9,10,11
1 Catano - S. Bunch, M. Bambino - 4.45
2 Pastels - S. Bunch - 6.28
3 Night On The Town - S. Bunch - 5.34
5 What? Mr. Bunch - S. Bunch - 5.19
9 Let’s Jam - S. Bunch - 1.39
11 Day In The Sahara - S. Bunch - 9.23
