Wayne Mitchell, Senior Service & Installation
Representative
Wayne Mitchell has had a life long interest in audio and electronics, starting in fifth grade. He was given thirty cents a day for school lunch. He spent ten cents for a sandwich and saved the other twenty cents until he had enough to buy a small portable reel to reel tape recorder. Things were less expensive then.
Any thing that made noise was fair game. Family members were the usual victims. Splicing bits and pieces of tapes together to rearrange conversations of brothers and sister turned out to be a lot of fun for Wayne but greatly under appreciated by those family members who heard themselves saying the most unimaginable things. To preserve his tape recorder from possible harm he turned to recording music. Wayne studied violin and other string and keyboard instruments and played in the school orchestra.
Through out Hi school he was soundman for his band and was making recordings of his and other local bands. Some of these made their way on the air in Athens Ohio with the aid of a friend at the local station.
In 1969 Uncle Sam decided Wayne was needed for a little job in South Viet Nam and the recording jobs were handled by his partner Swingin' Dave until Wayne's' hitch in the Army was up.
Returning home with a few bucks and some new recording equipment, it was back to the bars again. The band decided to do some recording in a real studio and Wayne took along the bands demos and practice tapes of the songs they wanted to record.
The studio was a converted gas station in Chillicothe Ohio, ran by Joe Waters called Appalachia Sound Recording Studio. The studio was in the process of building and acquiring equipment and was bare bones recording, not even a reverb for special effects. The two recordings were pressed and of course friends and relatives bought a few and even a few radio stations played them, mostly when friends called for them on the request shows.
Wayne eventually became chief engineer at Appalachia Sound, and it grew into a respectable contender in the central Ohio market and turned out numerous albums for bands in several surrounding states as well as commercial spots to numerous to mention.
Wayne went on to work in Los Angeles where he met up with Pure Prairie League, one member who had worked with Wayne as session steel guitar player as well as producing some of his own projects at Appalachia. Wayne was invited to hire on with the bands sound company to work a winter tour and left L.A. to tour with the band.
After the tour Wayne returned to Appalachia Sound now known as the Recording Workshop to serve as an instructor before moving on again to New Jersey to take up a completely different line of artistic expression. Wood carving had always been a favorite pastime and when offered a job at the world famous Bonn Studio he accepted and joined a team of talented painters and carvers producing true to life sculptures of wild life in authentic natural settings. Former First Lady Nancy Reagan owns a rose sculpture designed for her as a gift by the artists at Bonn Studio. When a tragic fire destroyed the studio, production stopped forever.
Wayne remained in New Jersey for two more years where he ran a small video company of his own then relocated to Phoenix Arizona where he is currently Senior Service/Installation Technician for Gabriel Sound and Engineering.
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