joaoveludo@gmail.com

ADK Microphones began in 1997 as
the dream of Larry Villella – recording
engineer, piano expert, and vintage mic
collector – to build quality microphones
for his friends. ADK’s extensive line of
microphones now ranges from very affordable
to top-of-the-line hand-built creations.
I met up with Larry at SuperDigital in
Portland, one of his earliest distributors.
What’s your history with microphones?
In ‘71 I went to recording school in Boston. Eli Lilly’s
grandson, George Lilly, was building Renaissance
Recording Studios in Boston. He went around and
found some academics to create a recording school,
and to teach him how to use all this equipment that
he’d bought. He had a big MCI board and eight brand
new Neumann U 87s mics. They taught us the basics
of recording. We’d take this 8-track Scully [tape deck]
and drag it to old churches to record pipe organs,
harpsichords, and pianos. The instructor came in to
class one day and said, “We’re going to spend the
whole week at The Jazz Workshop recording this new
guy.” We spent five nights with Chick Corea. Jazz
piano recording sort of set my life in motion.
Chick Corea on acoustic piano?
It was the Circle group, which was his avant-garde
group with Anthony Braxton, Dave Holland, and
Barry Altschul.
Some amazing players.
Yeah. In the last three years Dave Holland, Anthony
Braxton, and Chick Corea have all recorded on ADK mics.
Yeah, it comes back around!
Forty years later. My life is complete. Chick did a
recording that’s coming out soon with Jazz at Lincoln
Center, and they used a pair of our 3 Zigma lipstick
mics; the SD-C cardioids.
That must be an honor.
If I ever run into Chick Corea again, I’m going to tell
him that he set my life in motion. It’s an honor to
hear some of these tracks, and to know that was what
set out to be my life’s work.
What happened after that?
I moved from Boston to Phoenix, and I worked at the
Electronic Music Labs at Arizona State University. I
had an ARP 2600, a Hagstrom guitar, and a Tandberg
half-track with sel sync. I used to sit there and
strum guitar chords on one channel, dump that track
Behind The Gear
This Issue’s Creator of Capsules
Larry Villella
14/Tape Op#103/Mr. Villella/(continued on page 16)
by Larry Crane
over with some synthesizer lead on the second
channel, and then erase the first channel. I had a
little ad agency where I went around and sold
people ads. I made the music beds, wrote the copy,
and did the voiceover. It actually led to a late-night
FM jazz show I hosted.
When did you move to the Portland area?
I moved to Portland about 15 years ago.
What brought that on?
My wife got a scholarship at Lewis & Clark [College] to
go to graduate school. She now teaches there. We had
really young kids at the time. So I went from working
at the Sherman Clay [Pianos] store in Seattle to
working for the affiliate here in Portland. I sold
Steinways for almost 20 years. By day I was selling
Steinways, and by night I was recording them. In
1997, I just felt like I needed something new that was
all me. I decided to build some microphones for a few
of my friends.
Recording a grand piano is such a
pleasure, and a task.
It’s a daunting task. On five different occasions I
recorded Vladimir Horowitz’s nine-foot concert
Steinway. That was part of the inspiration right
there, trying to figure out how to record a concert
grand piano. I recorded Tom Grant doing jazz, and I
recorded some of the piano professors in Seattle
doing classical.
What was the impetus to build, or
design, your own mics?
There was a Wall Street Journal article. At the time I’d
been collecting mics for 30 years. In a single day, my
[Neumann] U 47 went up $4,000 and the Wall Street
Journal suddenly called them collectable investments.
I had a guy who was going to sell me a [Telefunken]
Ela M 251 for $11,000 and the article said they were
worth $18,000. I called him and said I’d give him
$11,000 for his, but he said, “No. The price went up.”
I got mad. I said that it shouldn’t have to cost $5,000
or $10,000 dollars to have a good sounding mic. I
went to the NAMM show and met some guys in Hall E
that were trying to sell microphones from China. I
took a mic home, and it sounded awful. I literally got
on a plane and flew for 26 hours to meet these guys
in Shanghai. I said, “Listen, this sounds bad. This is
what I want it to sound like.” I showed them a
response curve of a [Neumann] U 67. They sent me a
prototype, and I said, “No.” Three prototypes later,
they were starting to get close. I said, “Okay, build
100 of those.” Rob Schrock [Electronic Musician]
reviewed our initial A-51, and he said, “I was
reminded of a U 67.” We were off to the races. Of
course, a year later the big marketing giants jumped
in and copied our first mic.
What was the price point on that mic?
I think it was $400.
So it was really affordable.
At the time, when I was only buying 100 mics, that was
what it had to be. Now it’s under $200. All of our
designs are proprietary. There’s nothing off the shelf.
We’ve moved from $200 or $300 mics into $1,000,
$2,000, or even $3,000 mics.
You had started out with very affordable mics and
then branched into the higher-end. It seems like a
different trajectory.
If you’re a high-end boutique company that started out
with a $10,000 mic and then you want to migrate
down into the $1,500 or $2,000 mics, you have the
credibility of your name. But if you’re a little humble
company, like ADK, starting out with a $300 or $400
mic and you suddenly start to build high-end mics,
credibility is difficult to achieve. Everybody used to
say that it was a great mic for the money. Now, Chuck
Ainlay [Tape Op #97], Bernie Becker, the late Mike
Shipley, all said, “Hey, it’s flat-out good. Period.”
Marketing defies me. People don’t know where to
pigeonhole us. They go, “Who is ADK?” Our $200 mic
sounds good! I don’t build anything I wouldn’t
personally use. I have had people say that they
bought the Thor mic for $400, and if I have anything
better than that, they don’t want to know about it.
Okay, fine! Am I the best bang for the buck under
$500? Am I the surprise in the boutique market? I’ll
let the public and the A-list engineers tell you.
You don’t have a background as an
electrical engineer?
Right. I hire that.
Where do you find people?
I have a mic wizard in Belgium, JP Gerard, who’s my
lead design engineer. He hired an aerospace engineer
PhD from Australia to develop the capsule technology.
I was the middleman, with years of emails going back
and forth. The Australian PhD would say that the spec
was perfect, but JP said that it didn’t sound right, so
he had him do it over. He’s just this little ball of
energy and will not suffer fools gladly. It’s got to be
spot-on. It took us five years to develop the capsule
technology, and then we actually spent another two
and a half years testing which transformer matched
up with which of the five capsules.
Donny Wright here at SuperDigital
showed me the case that has all of the
different 3 Zigma heads and bodies
that you can swap out. He said that
sometimes people will take that
overnight and try to find the combo
that they want for a certain
instrument.
joaoveludo@gmail.com