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my
first young years
As
a little child, I was very fascinated about technical things. If I got something
that could be used as a screwdriver, then everything fell appart that stuck with
screws in my childhood home.
When I got slightly older, I became curious about what was inside the radio, record player, phone, vacum cleaner and similar exiting divices,
many time to my parents dismay.
When I was 9-10 years old, my parents understood my interest in electronic
things, and my dad came home with broken radio sets he got from the radio shop. I picket
them apart and played with them.
Instead of toys that other children wished for Christmas and birthday presents,
I wanted tools and soldering iron, and of course more broken radios.
Around
1962 I was lucky as a young boy to meet my first
mentor Herbert "Hubbe" Forsblom. He had a radio & TV store with a
service workshop in the neighborhood where I lived.
Herbert also built 50-150 watts guitar/PA amps with speaker boxes containing four or
six Philips AD5200M 12" speakers, which made him very popular among the
pop-bands in the Gothenburg area in the 1960s.
To name a few bands like The Spotnicks, (when Bo Winberg didn't have time to build himself) The
Flashman, The Spaceman, The Spaces, The Flintstones/Jackpots, The Streaples,
Apaches, Tages/Blonds.
It was a very useful and educational time for me at this young age to be able to
watch and help him with simpler things as he built these amplifiers and speaker
equipment. I´m very grateful for this time and remember it with great
happiness.
Many musicans I met during this time have been my
customers up to day 50 years later.
My
first experience in the audio business goes all the way back to 1964 when I put
together my first mixer at the age of thirteen year old.
The mixer hade three microphone inputs with volume controls and one mono output.
It was build with AC151 germanium
transistors and based on an article in a electronics magazine.
I sold this mixer to typical (in those days) guitar pop bands as they wanted to get more inputs
on a small amplifier.
I also rebuilt old radios to guitar amps for this type of bands. These where old big
AM tube radios with 8" speakers. Some of them had more speakers and push-pull amps
up to 10 watts with some luck.
The following years I built speaker boxes with 10" and 12" speakers
for local pop bands and I also started making my own
50 watt tube amps mostlyfrom Mullard and Dynaco circuit examples. They were more or less
successful, but in the end managed well.
1967
when I was sixteen years old I started my first company "Orkesterservice
Hansén & Co"
together with two older friends. We continued to build guitar and PA amps, mostly with tube circuits.
We also began
to sett up a recording studio based on an Ampex 960, Revox
G36 and a Tandberg 64.
Thy Were all "home tape recorders" but I modified them to 15 inch speed.
The console was a homebuilt tube mixer in mono with six microphone inputs having
volume, bass,
treble and echo send controls on each channel.
This mixer was connected to a small Uher A122 five channel stereo mixer. By
doing so I
had the opportunity to pan the mic mixer with the only input that had a pan-pot and
still have four (two left and two right) flat line inputs for other things.
The outboard equipments was a Gibbs spring reverb unit in combination with a Dynacord S62 tape echo machine,
one Telefunken M221 condenser mic, an AKG D12 a Beyer M260, Sennheiser MD421 and Shure 545 dynamic
types.
The monitors were a pair of Wharfedale Dovedale
speakers and homebuilt copies of Dynaco mark-3 power amps.
The
studio was housed in an old warehouse in central Gothenburg that would later be
demolished to make room for a new shopping centre.
The acoustics were made with lardge "egg cartons" glued to the walls
and gave a little absortion in the upper register,
but it looked cooler than just curtains.
A
few years later around 1969 we had to move from the studio in the
warehouse because it would be demolished.
We now opened a small music store and
I also started repairing sound systems, electric organs and instruments for
musicans and music stores.
Discotheque started to become big in Gothenburg at this time, so I also did disco
equipment and installations.
In connection with this I also became involved in developing early music
controlled light systems "color light organs" together with Sture
Rönnbäck, who later started AVAB, a company that became world famous for theater
lighting systems.
Now
we are in the 1970s, when I have got a driving license and a car and everything is
spinning like never before.
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