Like Christopher J. Murphy, Allen Adé also deserves his own page on Skeletron.com. Allen was with Rat Race Choir for some 14 years, and was known to most people simply as our "sound man." But, Allen was much more than just our sound man, and we in the band liked to call him "The 5^th Member" of Rat Race Choir.

We met Allen in the early 70's. At first he fixed some broken gear for us. Since we kept having to call him for emergency repairs, I think he gave in one day, and decided it would be easier to just join up with us! He lived with the band at Mittys’ General Store (see page), later at our Southampton house, and our Mahopac house. It was an asset to have him living where we rehearsed. Allen paid close attention to everything we were working on musically, so that he could add something from his arsenal of special effects to bring the most out every song. Special effects, such as Phasing, Flanging, Digital Delays, and Reverbs were carefully picked and combined by Allen to intensify the bands impact. He basically learned each song and added his touches, just as a musician would. Actually I think he may have been a frustrated musician. Proof of this would be his "tone generator" that he played from his mixing seat, which sounded somewhat like a Theremin or a synthesizer buried in echo during our Mittys' days, which was 1970 through 1973.

Allen was also an inventor, as well as our Live and Studio Engineer. He designed many circuit boards and electronic devices that were custom made for ideas he had for our sound applications. And, Allen designed, and built most of our P.A. System --himself. Reading books on speaker cabinet resonance equations, loud speaker specifications, he designed his own speaker cabinets, bought the wood, a table saw, and built them himself by hand. This was part of "PWR Audio." The PWR stood for POWER, and as a matter of fact he built a few too big to get out of the basement! Allen also developed our "Quad P.A.," which was a front and rear speaker set-up, similar to Pink Floyd’s, or ELP’s Quadraphonic Sound Systems. Using a pair of PWR customized E-516 speaker cabinets, Allen hung a stereo set of these speakers in the rear of the clubs or auditoriums that we played, and would send a variety of sounds through them. Vocal echos, background vocals, guitar solos, drum solos, and flanging were all "panned" back and forth around the room to create something you’d have to experience to appreciate. Lets just say it was very similar to today’s home theater surround sound concept, only louder.

Before we had enough money to buy a touring size mixing console, Allen became famous for his pile of Shure Mixers to get 16 channels of sound going through 3 echo units. God knows how he hooked it all up... but it definitely worked. He also kept up maintenance on all our gear, fixed our fried amplifiers, many times during a break, right on-stage. I remember one time he fixed Mark’s blown and charred Hiwatt head with a paper clip, and it worked the rest of the night! Allen also liked to mic Larry’s Leslie cabinet (a Rotating Organ speaker) from inside the back of our truck as an "isolation booth." He would run 2 microphone cables out to the truck, it would come thru the P.A. without picking up stage volume bleeding in from all the other instruments. This was a nuisance at some venues, but it certainly did make the Organ sound clean and crisp. I’m sure many people who walked by our truck wondered why they heard an organ playing out there...

Aside from all I have mentioned above, Al was sort of our Road Manager, and worked strings of long hard 17 hour days for Rat Race Choir, for years and years. He was engineer or assistant engineer on all of RRC’s studio recordings, and it was Allen that snuck us into our first recording session at Warner Bros. in NYC, where he was house engineer.

Allen now lives about a mile away from me. I see him from time to time, and we laugh about the good ole’ days. He inherited his father’s business and works in Gaylordsville, CT.

We would all like to Thank Allen for his dedication, and the pride that he took in being our "Sound Man," he was the best. Hopefully, we may work together again someday in a studio environment.

Thank You Al..., the 5^th Member of Rat Race Choir.

-Dave Chmela