Heil Sound, known worldwide as a manufacturer of high-performance, dynamic microphones, is marking 2016 as “50 Years of Maximum Rock & Roll” with a year-long celebration. Certainly, his popular microphones for studio, live sound and radio users are part of the continuing success of Heil Sound. However, that represents only a very small part of the audio legend that is Bob Heil.
Ironically, no one seems more surprised at Bob Heil’s success than Bob himself. Wide-eyed, a face pre-amped with a friendly demeanor and a perpetual smile, Heil is that rare breed who is as liked as much as he is admired. Peter Frampton calls him one of the most sincere guys in the business, and in a business that is often short on sincerity, it is perhaps the highest compliment.
Yet, even with his impressive list of achievements, Heil never developed a big ego. Heil Sound went on to tour with The Who (he created the quadraphonic sound system for the band’s Quadrophenia tour), Humble Pie, The James Gang and many others. He built the first electronic crossover in 1967, using only a couple of little transistors and two filters, built the first modular console (the Mavis) and developed the iconic Heil Talk Box, made famous by Joe Walsh and Peter Frampton. He was a pioneer of horn designs, and the first to make them in white. “I got tired of seeing green and gray speakers,” Heil explains.
In 1978, he published “the bible” of the business, the Practical Guide for Concert Sound, and dog-eared copies are still found shoved in the back pockets of burgeoning sound engineers everywhere. (His update, Volume Two, was published in 1984). Other firsts include being the first sound company to be honored with an AES “Pioneer Award,” and the first manufacturer inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I Learned to Listen
In 1940, Heil was born in the coal mining and farming community of Marissa, IL (pop. 2,000), about 40 miles southeast of St. Louis. Heil began playing the sax and accordion, but moved to organ. By the time he was 14, he was making good money at restaurants, playing “the popular music of the time, up to six or eight hours a day,” he tells.
Heil’s early mastery of the instrument was discovered by one of the great organ players of all time, Stan Kann, who during the 1950s held court at the mighty Wurlitzer pipe organ at St. Louis’ Fox Theater. Kann arranged for the very young Heil to play there.
“When I started at the Fox at the age of 15, the organ hadn’t been serviced very well, and I learned to voice and tune those pipes,” Heil says. “Stan taught me to do that, and set the path to my entire life — I learned to listen. Who would think that tuning these organs would be the basis of my life? But it was.”
During this time, he also developed a love for ham radio and became an avid amateur radio operator, designing and building transmitters, amplifiers and antenna systems — all of which would play a critical role in his journey as a pro sound pioneer.
After eight years of playing six organ nights a week, he opened Ye Olde Music Shop in 1966, a music store in his hometown of Marissa, even though “I barely knew who the Beatles were, and I didn’t know a Fender guitar from a Gibson.” But kids started dragging amps to him for repair, and he would take them apart and not only fix them, but make them better. “One kid had a little amp called a Fender, and — it wasn’t anything more than a modulator for a ham radio, and I fixed it in 15 minutes.”
His reputation as “a guy who could fix things” grew, and regional bands including R.E.O. Speedwagon and Michael McDonald’s early band, The Guild, started calling on him.
Ye Olde Music Shop became a dealership for Hammond, Fender, Martin, and Gibson, but through his pro audio lines — McIntosh, JBL — Heil quickly established himself. “Michael McDonald’s band was really my guinea pig. I’d buy all this McIntosh stuff and use it on them when they were trying to fiddle around with their little Shure Vocalmasters.”
He got a call one day from the president of McIntosh, asking why Heil ordered 50 of its 2100 amplifiers. Then Heil bought half a dozen 3500s, and “McIntosh became really excited.” Soon he was doing a lot of the bigger live events for bands in the area.
One day, while visiting friends at the Fox Theater, he noticed its huge old speakers sitting out in the alley. The theater was replacing them with smaller (and inferior) speakers. Being nobody’s fool, Heil took the ones they were throwing out. With those, he built an outstanding P.A.
I Heard You Have a Big P.A.
One of the many challenges in the mid-to-late 1960s was getting a console to run the bigger systems. Heil bought a Langevin console, but even that couldn’t handle the input levels. By luck again, two kids from nearby Southern Illinois University who worked for him had this friend who was an engineering student. Heil called on him, and he masterfully rebuilt the console. The 19-year-old’s name was Tomlinson Holman, who went on to be corporate technical director for George Lucas, running the division that is both a reference to Lucas’ first film and an acronym: THX (Tomlinson Holman Xperiment).
Peter Frampton was playing with Humble Pie in the late 1960s when he first worked with Bob Heil. “Back then, things were mostly a regional affair, and he was always the guy that would help us out. When we were just starting to headline, he would give us a super deal and look after us.”
For most in the business today, it’s hard to image those early days, but Frampton remembers it being a time of great improvisation — on and off the stage: “When I started touring with Humble Pie, speakers didn’t even have cases. And you’d just have two crew members take the gear to the airport and give it to the loading guy with an extra $50 to load all this big heavy equipment — it’s a wonder the plane didn’t go down!”
The Fox Theater by then was also being used as a rock ‘n’ roll venue. One night, he received a call from the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia on a tour stop at the Fox Theater, asking for help. The band’s gear — and sound mixer — had been “detained” in New Orleans and Heil was asked to provide a sound system for the show. “Hey man, I heard you have a big P.A.,” Heil heard Garcia say. Heil listed the components of his system, and Garcia ended the conversation with “Well, get it up here!” The Grateful Dead loved the P.A. so much they took it on the rest of the tour.
Garcia later suggested to Heil that maybe “Ye Old Music Store” wasn’t the best name for his company, and that he should consider naming it “Heil Sound” — which Heil did in 1973.
Meanwhile, back home, that little Ye Olde Store in that little town had become the largest Sunn dealer in the country. Heil started to offer some tips based on his recent experience on what a P.A. needed to be, and they told him to design one for them. This became the Sunn Coliseum, one of the most popular and reliable systems of its time.
Heil took the new P.A. on the road and was in Chicago when a Sunn executive called, asking if he could get that big P.A. of his to Boston for an English band in trouble. “I told them there’s no way I could get there in a day, but they told me to ‘just’ rent a 707 and get it up there,” Heil laughs. So he did, and he set it for a sound check. It turned out to be The Who, and they were in a bind: The band had just started its first American tour in years, “The Who’s Next” tour, and had suffered a couple of embarrassing shows because they were using a completely insufficient sound system.
The system blew The Who away. “It really changed live sound. In 1973, Townshend called me over to London. Quad sound was all the rage, and he told me he was thinking about this opera where he would move Roger’s voice around the hall… could I build him something that could do that?” Heil told Townshend he could build a live quad sound system. Townshend told him if he could build it, he would write the opera for it. Heil built, Townshend wrote Quadrophenia, and that 300-pound board is currently in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Back in Business
In the early 1980s, Heil “hung it up.” he says, “It was a weird funky time. Bands were breaking up, punk was coming into being… so I just closed the plant.” He opened up a successful satellite TV dealership, and in 1989, was named the #1 dealership in the country out of more than 6,000. Heil also became the guru of the home theater movement and was providing high-end home theater systems — really high-end, as in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. He eventually closed that portion of his business — but not before providing more than 2,000 systems across the country.
For years, Heil had developed mics for ham radio operators and broadcasters, but inspired by Joe Walsh, returned to making products for musicians. Launched in 2006, Heil’s PR series microphones quickly gained acclaim in the live sound world. Since then, the company’s PR series vocal mics have become a “go to” mic for many high-profile artists, while the PR30 and PR40 are staples in not only concert sound, but also broadcast and studio use.
Heil also wasn’t above having a little fun along the way, such as “The Fin” — Heil’s take on a classic Turner mic, but updated with a modern dynamic element and four LEDs that create a glow when connected to a phantom power source.
Heil, fond of wearing bright colors and Converse shoes, likes to tell tales of his experiences working with the Grateful Dead, The Who, Walsh, Frampton, J. Geils, Jeff Beck and scores of major touring acts from the 1960s and 1970s. However, he never got caught up in the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle — he doesn’t drink or take drugs, and his musical taste leans toward his parent’s generation rather than his own.
In 2007, Heil was honored with a prestigious Parnelli Audio Innovator Award, joining the elite ranks of audio pioneers such as John Meyer, Bruce Jackson, Bill Hanley, Roy and Gene Clair, Stan Miller, Al Siniscal, Kenton Forsythe, Dave Shadoan and Ross Ritto, Mark Engebretson, Bob Goldstein and Patrick Quilter. “To me, this is a bigger deal than getting in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” says Heil, “because the Parnelli’s are voted on by my peers. It is truly an honor.”
In 2014, the University of Missouri-St. Louis made him an honorary Doctor of Music and Technology.
Since then, he’s remained at the forefront, always creating for the pro market right across the river from St. Louis in Fairview Heights, IL. He recently revising his Heritage Mic, combing an authentic vintage look with a great sound. Otherwise you’ll spot his mics being used on tour by artist like Kenny Chesney, Eric Church, Lady Gaga, Pearl Jam, and many others. Yet somehow, despite all the tools available to a pro audio professional, Heil still relies solely on one: “A thing called my ear,” he’ll tell you. “Hearing is a physical process. Listening is a mental process! And there are not many good listeners on the planet.”
