Standing on the Edge: Life, Synthesizers, and Changing the Face of Music

In Shaping Sounds, visionary music producer Robert Margouleff shares his stories of pushing the boundaries of musical innovation, art, and technology while helping create some of the most significant and influential music of our time.

Beginning on the set of his first film, Ciao! Manhattan, with Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick, Margouleff captures the tragic beauty of New York’s East Village and Warhol's Factory as he discovers a powerful new way to score his movie: the Moog synthesizer. This discovery leads him to meet a studio engineer who would become his long-time partner, Malcolm Cecil, with whom he would collaborate to invent the world’s largest analog synthesizer, ‘TONTO’ (The Original New Timbral Orchestra). Together, Margouleff and Cecil used TONTO to help unleash Stevie Wonder’s genius on his era-defining classic albums Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness’ First Finale.

In legendary studios like Electric Lady and the Record Plant, Margouleff became a pioneering producer and engineer for artists like Billy Preston, Jeff Beck, DEVO, The Isley Brothers, and David Sanborn. A true sonic innovator, he was an early adopter of immersive audio and surround, developing new mixing techniques for home theaters that brought some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters to life.

Shaping Sounds is so much more than a chronicle of music history. It's a story about creativity, collaboration, and artistic courage. Margouleff interweaves his personal experiences with the teachers, friends, mentors, and influences that shaped him, revealing how empathy and curiosity fueled his life's work. This memoir is a rich and entertaining narrative of a key period in music history that brings readers deep into the world of record and film production and will inspire new generations of music-makers and dreamers.

Robert Margouleff is a Grammy Award-winning engineer, record producer, electronic music pioneer, studio owner, and filmmaker. Along with his partner Malcolm Cecil, he invented the mega-synth known as ‘TONTO’ (The Original New Timbral Orchestra), one of the largest and most advanced analog synthesizers ever built. Margouleff and Cecil associate-produced the four albums that established Stevie Wonder’s classic period—Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness’ First Finale—programming new sounds that would transform popular music during the 1970s and beyond. From there, Margouleff produced and engineered for dozens of major artists, including Devo, Billy Preston, The Isley Brothers, Oingo Boingo, Weather Report, and David Sanborn. He was an early adopter of immersive audio, founding Mi Casa Multimedia to deliver surround-sound audio to home theaters for hundreds of feature films, including The Lord Of The Rings, Se7en, and X-Men. Though music was his career, Margouleff began as a filmmaker, producing Ciao! Manhattan with Andy Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick and other denizens of the famed Factory. The film endures as an iconic piece of pop culture. In addition to Shaping Sounds, Margouleff has written for several music industry magazines and is an in-demand public speaker. See www.margouleff.com

Writer, musician, and educator Jim Reilly studied both jazz guitar and journalism in college and has spent the past twenty-five years or so combining those two loves. He has authored four books: the fictional Bass Player, plus biographies of three of today’s most influential and impactful musical instrument designers: StickMan: The Story Of Emmett Chapman & The Instrument He Created, Steinberger: A Story Of Creativity And Design, and Chasing Tone: How Rob Turner & EMG Revolutionized The Guitar’s Sound. His work has also appeared in numerous print magazines and online, including Bass Player Magazine, the Boston Globe, and Canadian Musician, and has been featured in Canada on CBC Radio One. An accomplished musician, Jim continues to perform solo Chapman Stick concerts and holds down the bass chair in Calgary’s DC & The Struggle (when he’s not at his day job, holding down a middle school principalship). The exploration of creativity, musical and otherwise, continues in print and on his Words & Music podcast. Jim currently lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, during the school year and hides away near Kelowna, British Columbia, in the summer months and any other chance he gets. See www.jimreilly.ca