Editor's note: The following interview was done by Keith Hatschek in his book “How To Get A Job In the Music and Recording Industry,” available on-line from Berklee Press by going to http://www.berkleepress.com/. We’ll be presenting more interviews on this vital topic.

Murray Allen’s career spans more than fifty years in the music and entertainment industry. He has been a musician, producer, session player, studio owner, and studio designer, and now serves as Vice President of Post Production for one of the world’s most successful electronic gaming companies, Electronic Arts, based in Redwood City, CA. During the golden era of big bands, he played sax and clarinet with the Glenn Miller, Sauter Finegan, Bobby Sherwood, and Skitch Henderson bands. Murray backed up artists including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, and Perry Como.

His session work includes dates with Stevie Wonder, The Platters, and Andy Williams.

When the guitar began to rule pop music, Murray started to engineer recording sessions, rapidly becoming one of the most in-demand engineers in Chicago, recording the likes of Ramsey Lewis, Duke Ellington, Steve Allen, Stan Kenton, and Sammy Davis, Jr. In the early ‘70s, he became president of Universal Recording, where he would stay for the next seventeen years.

During that time, the studio won numerous Emmy and Grammy nominations, and compiled a substantial number of Clio awards (the Oscar equivalent of the advertising industry). Murray’s insatiable quest for knowledge and love of technology led Universal to many “firsts” in the recording industry: pioneering the use of digital audio workstations in commercial production; offering video sweetening (in 1971) before SMPTE time code was developed; and mentoring other studio owners and manangers in recording studio management.

During Murray’s watch at Universal, more than 250 feature film and television soundtracks were recorded by the studio staff including: Steel Magnolias, Home Alone, Flatliners, The Witches of Eastwick, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Sea of Love, Midnight Run, and many more. In its heyday, Universal employed more than 400 employees.

In his current position, he heads up audio and video post production, quality assurance, testing, and customer service for Electronic Arts. He has been sound designer of the Grammy awards telecast for twenty years, and an active member of the Recording Academy and SPARS.

Murray is a man with a boundless supply of energy, an uncanny ability to identify and develop new talent, and a passion for excellence in everything he undertakes. One quote from Murray sums up his apparent ability to do just about anything to which he sets his mind: “I’m not concerned with problems, I’m only concerned with solutions.”

Keith: What drew you to the music and recording business?

Murray: Well, it’s a funny story. I started playing an instrument when I was about six years old. I started on piano, and then I migrated over to clarinet when I was eight years old. But my first love was physics. I really loved being an engineer and doing all kinds of stuff that related to physics.

When I was in high school, however, everybody had to take swimming, and I’ve always been afraid oft he water. So the only way you could get out of swimming was to be in the military band. Now because I already played clarinet pretty well, I joined the military band.

So I became a musician because I had a fear of water. Later on when I got out of high school, I went to Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) because I wanted to be a physicist. That was my goal. But I already was a working musician. I’d been working as a musician since I was about thirteen years old.

I had my own Society Band at the Morraine Hotel on Chicago’s North Shore when I was sixteen years old. When I was enrolled at IIT in the 1940s, an engineer with a masters degree working on the Manhattan Project was earning about $7,500 a year. As a musician I was already making $8,000 a year.

So I thought, why do I want to spend all this time getting an advanced degree in physics, even though I love it, to earn less money? Coming up through the Depression, money has been a very important motivation for me.

So I then became a professional musician. I went to New York. I wanted to study from Joe Allard, who was considered the best clarinet/ saxophone teacher in the country at that time. And when I was there I got to play a little bit on the Calvacade of Bands, WOR radio, and I worked fulltime at Roseland Ballroom as a lead saxophone player. And then I was going to be drafted for the Korean War.

So I came back and I went to college to stay out of the draft. And I finally got tired of that. So I enlisted in the army. I figured I should get it out of the way. But because I enlisted in the army, I was able to choose my duty station and I joined the Fifth Army Band. Next, I got myself a radio show that we did five days a week. We did it with my own five piece band.

And my piano player for three years was the incomparable Bill Evans. I was stationed near Chicago, and during that time, I started moonlighting playing record dates. It was highly illegal and definitely against the regulations. But I did it and I never got caught.

So by the time I got out of the army, I went on the road with a band to work at the Hilton chain for about a year, after which I took my own band into the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago.

I was there for two years, and I was working record dates and everything else. Then finally I had so many record dates, that’s all I did. I became a fulltime studio musician. I did that from about 1956–57, all the way through to the mid 1960s. I recorded hundreds of albums and singles.

Anyway, around 1965 I could see that rock ‘n’ roll was starting to come in. Where I used to work about twenty seven sessions per week, it was getting down to maybe twenty. I’ve always kept charts and graphs on whatever I was doing. Got down to about twenty sessions a week, and then about fifteen. We used to have about five saxophone players in every session, Henry Mancini type arrangements. We were getting down to three or four saxes.

Well, I was the number two call, so I always worked. But I thought I needed to make a decision. I’ve either got to learn to engineer again, or I have to learn to play the guitar. One of the two. Backtracking a bit to my time in New York in the early 1950s, I worked the Roseland Ballroom. We had air shots every night where we broadcast over CBS and ABC, and then NBC.

The next day I’d go over to the sta tion and listen to a playback of what we did. They used to record it. I sounded terrible. So I went over to Manny’s Music store one day and I bought an Ampex tape recorder and speakers, amplifiers, and microphones. It took me three years to pay for it, but I learned how to use it and how to make a decent recording.

Having a science background, it was no big deal. I learned how to mix, record, and take the machine apart and put it back together again. I knew how to repair it and keep it running just right.

So consequently then, going back to the mid 1960s, I decided to get back into recording. I knew what makes an Ampex recorder work. I knew about mixing. So I started mixing a few dates and all of a sudden, clients wanted me to start mixing for them.

Well, because I was making so much money in residuals playing on commercials, I said, “The only way I’ll work for you as a mixer is if you also hire me as a musician.” So they started doing that. What happened then is that I became extremely busy.

The other mixer in Chicago at that time was a man named Bruce Swedien. Now Bruce was going to work for another company in Chicago, but he had a one year no compete clause. So for one year, I became the number one mixer.

I was mixing sessions at RCA, CBS, and at Universal in the morning, and recording music. But in the afternoon, they were taking the 8 track tapes back over to Universal or some other place to finish. They put the announcers on and did the final mix.

I didn’t get a piece of that action. I was only getting the music part. So two other engineers and myself opened up a studio called “Audio Finishers,” a real hole-in-the-wall. But, then we added some experimental acoustic treatment to it, and we called it the Audio Finishers so that we could do that finishing work in the afternoon.

But then RCA in Chicago closed down for a year because they wanted to move, and Curtis Mayfield and all these Chicago acts needed a place to record. Well, it turns out that at this time we got the first 16 track recorder in Chicago.

Acoustically the place was great for stacking [overdubbing], since it had great separation. So all of a sudden we started getting all the Curtis Mayfield work, Donnie Hathaway, Roberta Flack, and we started “stealing” business from CBS and from Universal, because the sound of our little room was so good.

Plus, we had the only 16 track in town. And because we were good mixers, we got great sounds. Universal came to us and said that we were killing them. They asked if we could enter into some type of agreement. We knew that our studio was limited in what it could do, because it was so small. Universal had such large, great sounding rooms.

So we made a deal with Universal. One thing led to another and eventually we took over management in 1970, then bought the studio in 1975. I still was working sessions by the way, and engineering. I was going back and forth between the two studios. The rest is history.

We quickly became a gigantic operation—a major studio. We were nominated three times for TEC awards. We did over 250 feature films. We did every note of music in the original Blues Brothers film, which I’m very proud of. We had a cassette manufacturing plant working under contract for CBS and Motown. At that time, we had more than 400 employees.

But a funny thing happened. After twelve years running Universal, around 1985, I started getting very tired of running a recording studio. I hate to admit this, but we started getting to where everything was stacked one track at a time.

We didn’t use big orchestras anymore. Producers who were getting into the business now were not musicians. Computer programming was the coming wave for pop music production.

And although we were the first studio to do so many things, I was getting very bored. We had to spend so much money just to keep up with the competition, it was terrible. So I decided to get out of the studio business. I sold the company in 1989 and I stayed on for about another year. And then I was a consultant for about a year. I worked with Editel [one of the leading post production houses] in Chicago.

I also worked with Tom Kobayashi who left Lucas Arts at that time and founded ednet. I helped him work with Crescent Moon Studios down in Florida, and put in a T1 line between them and Capitol Studios in Los Angeles—so that Gloria Estefan could do her Christmas album from her home in Florida and the band could play live in California.

Phil Ramone was the producer. Phil and I have worked together for so many years. That technology is what kicked off the Sinatra Duets album, which was the first chart topper that proved that artists could collaborate over T1 or ISDN lines from anywhere in the world. The artist, producer, and musicians no longer had to be in the same studio.

K: How did you make the move to Electronic Arts?

M: One day the phone rang and it was a headhunter asking me, “Murray, would you like to go out and live in California?” He said there’s a job opening at Electronic Arts, and I came out here and I interviewed. Silicon Valley in 1993 closely resembled the record business back in the early 1950s. So I said, “Yes, this is going to be fun.” And that’s how I got to where I am today.

K: Do you remember your first paying gig?

M: When I was thirteen, we used to go out and play at the local park districts. Whatever they collected at the door we split among the band. So we would get $2–$3 each, or something like that.

Actually, when I was about twelve years old, I was on a radio show in Chicago called “The Joe Kelly Quiz Kids Band.” We did a couple of shows. We didn’t get paid for it because in those days, the musician’s union was extremely strong.

K: Sure. You couldn’t be paid without membership in the union.

M: That’s right. And we couldn’t join the union until we were sixteen. So they gave us a waiver. They had to have a bunch of musicians stand by and get paid while we did the actual playing. But the first actual payment I got was these little park-concert-type things.