Meet Erik Sonderlon | Musician, Engineer, and Builder of Things

We had the good fortune of connecting with Erik Sonderlon and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Erik, we’d love to hear what makes you happy.
Watching something go from a thought like “i want to do that or make that” and going through the process of making it happen.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I came to Los Angeles many years ago as a singer-songwriter. Had a few bands and always had a need and desire to make recordings. And quickly, I found other people asking me to record them and their bands. I worked at a rehearsal studio in Los Angeles called Cole Rehearsal, and I met a lot of great musicians. Some I played with and many I recorded.

I was being asked to record so much that I decided to invest in some gear. I got a little Pro Tools rig, and I used to have it on a AV cart, like the kind you find in a high school classroom with a G3 tower on the bottom, the interface and some preamps, and then the monitor on the second tier with keyboard and mouse. I used to wheel that around the rehearsal studio. and keep the studio phone next to the monitor so I could see it ring because I’d usually have headphones on.

Eventually, I made a leap and decided to build out my own studio in Hollywood, Cosmo Street Studios. All the while still playing, sometimes singing in bands, sometimes playing bass, sometimes playing guitar.

After a while I was looking to expand my microphone collection. I was tired of swapping out the piano mics for the drum overheads, as I only had one pair of good condensers. And I started looking around to see what I could afford, and I stumbled upon a forum of people who were building their own mics, claiming that they sounded as good as Telefunken 251s or AKG C12s and I was interested.

So, I studied schematics of those classic mics until I really understood the circuit flow and I ordered some parts and a couple of cheap import donor bodies and cobbled together two microphones. When I first plugged them in, I had them in the middle of the floor, because I wasn’t sure if they were going to blow up or set my place on fire! But when I didn’t see or smell smoke and I saw the faint glow of the tube filament lighting up, I decided to plug in the audio cable to the preamp and have a listen, and I was blown away. I had never had mics that sounded as good as these. I really never had access to some of those great microphones.

I started using them, but I didn’t like the way they looked because the metalwork was cheap. And so then I started to investigate how to work with metal. That’s where I learned about CNC mills and CNC lathes. And then I learned about the programs that you needed to draw 3D designs and then turned those designs into tool paths. I downloaded a program called Fusion 360 and learned that and decided to invest in a small CNC machine. I spent a year prototyping each part, making changes along the way to arrive at the current microphone, the Sonderlon S1C.

Jon Brion was an early adopter. He bought the first one. We spent about five or six hours at United Studios on Sunset, listening to the two specimens I brought in, plus a few extra capsules. He was comparing them against his favorite 251, which he dubbed the God Mic. He asked me to show up at midnight as he likes to work through the night. So that was midnight to 5 a.m. And he bought one, and that gave me so much information, just sitting with him and his engineer, Greg Koller, learning about what my mic actually sounded like in the hands of some real professionals against an incredible specimen of a 251 in a beautiful studio. I would have paid them for that experience.

So, Mic Building is definitely a part of my thing now. It’s sort of like a hobby business. I sell a few every year. I still write songs, I still play in other people’s bands, and I still have my studio where I record bands and singers.

I just love music, I love technology. It’s something that I’ve always been interested in since I was a kid. I remember my parents bought me a small cassette recorder for Christmas. It must have been in third or fourth grade and I figured out that if you put tape over the erase head, you could overdub onto it by running the tape back and recording something else. Just things like that, getting a Radio Shack mixer and having two cassette texts hooked together, bouncing back and forth, eventually getting a four track and a drum machine. And I was always acquiring instruments and then trading them for some other instrument, kind of cycling through things and learning all I could. I wish I still had some of those.

But, it’s all part of the journey. I’m still here doing it. I’m still very fascinated by music, fascinated by technology, fascinated by songwriting. I love working with bands, singers. And then location sound is a recent venture. It was always intrigued by the equipment that location sound mixers used. It seemed so odd and precarious to have this really expensive equipment on this odd looking cart on a film set. So I started to dip my toes into that. I’ve made a few short films with friends, some paid, some not paid. But it’s a lot of fun to be on set and work with that different kind of gear. But yeah. I hope to do much, much more of all of it.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.

Let’s see, We would defiantly have to venture out to the Santa Monica Pier and that area.
We would get street tacos at some of my favorite stands.
We would catch a show at one of the iconic small music venues like the Viper room, The Troubadour, Roxy or The Whisky.
Hike Runyon Canyon in the morning perhaps?
A little fine dining somewhere on the West Side.
Maybe catch A Dodgers game?

And If they were a friend of Bill’s I’d take them to a meeting! Haha!

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Shoutout to my family, all the artists who trust me to record their music, and to those early adopters of the Sonderlon S1C Microphone.

Website: https://sonderlon.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/erik_sonderlon_colvin/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erik-sonderlon-colvin-3392216