64 Facts About Abe Jacob

Abe John Jacob was born on October 7,1944 and is an American sound designer and audio engineer.

Abe Jacob brought many new techniques to musical theatre, including head-worn wireless microphones, powerful concert loudspeakers with dedicated electronic processing, delayed speaker zones, under-balcony speakers, front-fill speakers, mix position in the audience, FFT analysis, scene recall, digital mixing consoles, and delay used to focus audience attention.

Abe Jacob sparked the creation of the Meyer Sound Laboratories UPA loudspeaker, which became their flagship product.

In 1998, Abe Jacob won an Ovation Award for his sound design of Harriet's Return at the Geffen Playhouse.

Abe Jacob never received a Tony Award, largely because the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League began giving out Tony Awards for sound design in 2008 after his career highlights.

Abe Jacob served on the Tony Award committee from 2011 to 2014, but then the committee halted the sound design category.

Abe Jacob is set to receive a Special Tony Award for "modern theatrical sound design" in June 2024 at the 77th Tony Awards at Lincoln Center.

In 1999, the United States Institute for Theatre Technology bestowed upon Abe Jacob the Distinguished Achievement in Sound Award.

In 2016, Abe Jacob was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Live Design Awards ceremony.

In 2017, the Theatrical Sound Designers and Composers Association granted Abe Jacob the Distinguished Sound Designer Award.

Abe John Jacob was born on October 7,1944, in Tucson, Arizona.

Abe Jacob's parents were Abe Taft Jacob and Victoria Jacob, both of Lebanese heritage; his grandparents owned a supermarket in Tucson.

When he was four years old, Abe Jacob was crossing the street with his aunt, mother and maternal grandmother when a car struck two of them.

Abe Jacob appeared in several children's theatre performances in Tucson, but at age nine he was done with his acting career.

In 1955, Abe Jacob moved with his father and new stepmother to the Haddon Hill neighborhood of Oakland, California, where he attended Catholic school classes and served as an altar boy at Our Lady of Lourdes along with his new best friend, Tom Gericke.

In September 1958, Abe Jacob entered Catholic high school at St Ignatius College Preparatory in San Francisco, while Gericke attended St Joseph Notre Dame High School in Alameda.

In 1964 and 1965, Abe Jacob worked at the Berkeley Community Theatre on Ben Kapen's summer series theatrical program known as Melodyland.

The 1965 year was different as Abe Jacob worked the stage manager position for the first and last time, shepherding four productions: Leslie Uggams in The Boy Friend, Godfrey Cambridge in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pearl Bailey in Call Me Madam and Richard Chamberlain in Private Lives.

Bailey was such a difficult client that Abe Jacob determined never again to be stage manager.

Abe Jacob was finished with his college coursework at the end of 1965, but his diploma ceremony was in June 1966.

Abe Jacob designed a sound system for them and mixed their show at the Boston Armory in October 1966.

Abe Jacob designed the sound system for the whole festival, and he incorporated the stage requirements of the various bands on the bill, after which he determined that he would need a total of 24 microphone inputs on his mixer, which was unheard of at the time.

Abe Jacob augmented the proprietary 16-channel stereo sound console designed by McCune head engineer Bob Cavin with two 4-channel mono Altec 1567 tube mixers to get 24 inputs.

McCune veteran Mort Feld mixed most of the acts while Abe Jacob worked the stage.

Abe Jacob accepted the assignment and mixed their concerts from 1968 to 1970.

In Manhattan, Abe Jacob was supplied his own office space on 55th Street by Albert Grossman, who had seen Abe Jacob's work at Monterey.

Abe Jacob toured with the Jimi Hendrix Experience for most of 1968.

Abe Jacob auditioned the JM3 at the shop, with Meyer playing a Nagra tape of the Ringo Starr drum solo on the song "The End" to help Abe Jacob determine that the new loudspeaker was clean and powerful, reproducing crisp transients.

Abe Jacob began in 1970 to wean himself from Hendrix tours, as he had more concert dates with Peter, Paul and Mary.

Shortly thereafter, Peter, Paul and Mary announced their breakup, and Abe Jacob was suddenly without two of his most important clients.

Abe Jacob remarked later about this turning point that he felt exhausted from too much touring, and not just rock and pop music, but corporate events for Holiday Magic, a multi-level marketing firm that organized meetings across North and South America, supported by sound systems from McCune.

Butler requested Abe Jacob help with poor sound in the Boston staging of Hair, so Abe Jacob flew to Boston in February 1970 to see what he could do.

Abe Jacob brought a rock music esthetic to the theatre for the first time, adding more loudspeakers for more volume, and he used more microphones in fixed locations, more band and singing microphones, and one of the early VHF wireless microphones by Edcor used on a few songs.

Butler said "Abe Jacob made a big difference" in the sound of Hair.

Theatre sound historian David Collison noticed that Abe Jacob called himself a sound designer, which was not common at the time.

Abe Jacob was covering assignments for McCune, working for Three Dog Night.

Producer Robert Stigwood arranged for Abe Jacob to take over the next day as sound designer.

At rehearsal, Abe Jacob found a critical issue: the show relied on multiple wireless microphones from England which were not working well together, taking hits from radio frequency interference caused by intermodulation, a kind of spurious radio signal formed in the presence of two or more transmission frequencies acting upon each other.

From his experience at Hair, Abe Jacob recognized that the technology for wireless microphones was not yet advanced enough for multiple units working at the same time.

Three nights of preview performances had been cancelled, losing $36,000 in ticket sales, but two days' worth of Abe Jacob's fixes allowed the show to open on the fourth preview night.

Abe Jacob stayed with the production, arguing for further improvements to the sound such as uncovering the orchestra pit which had been sealed by Taplin for isolation reasons but had been stifling the musicians with heat, and was giving a muffled sound to the instruments.

Abe Jacob replaced the insufficient JBL Paragon home hi-fi loudspeakers with the McCune JM3, rigging two over the proscenium, and flanking the stage with two more to bring the spatial imaging down to the level of the performers.

Abe Jacob trained union sound operator Michael "Mike" O'Keefe to run the mixer for Jesus Christ Superstar; O'Keefe and Abe Jacob continued to work together off and on for decades.

Abe Jacob's was the second such credit, following Jack Mann's sound designer credit for the 1961 staging of Show Girl, a short-lived musical revue starring Carol Channing.

Abe Jacob said of their rock festival parody that it was both funny and personally meaningful.

Abe Jacob designed the sound for the touring rock opera The Who's Tommy which was successful on the road.

Abe Jacob participated in the earliest discussions about staging and choreography; the first time sound design was integrated from the beginning.

For Pippin, Abe Jacob used shotgun microphones as foot mics, overhead area mics and scenery spot mics.

Abe Jacob was called by O'Horgan, Stigwood and Wagner to design sound in late 1974 for Sgt.

Abe Jacob assembled a quadraphonic sound system based on a four-bus mixer from England of the sort used by Pink Floyd in 1973 for their touring production of Dark Side of the Moon.

In 1976, Abe Jacob designed a complex and inventive sound system for Rockabye Hamlet, but the show lasted only a week.

Abe Jacob designed the sound to include unseen, offstage performers for some parts, and he specified a Mellotron keyboard sampler fitted with tape loops of pre-recorded arrangements such as cello and brass parts, the backwards tape sounds emulating "I Am the Walrus", and musique concrete elements to mimic the Beatles' sound collage "Revolution 9".

Abe Jacob specified that the piccolo trumpet part in "Penny Lane" would be panned around the room to four speaker locations, an enhancement to the Beatles' stereo recording.

Abe Jacob had previously argued for better mix positions, but with smaller victories such as moving the sound operator from the stage wings to the rear of the balcony seating.

Abe Jacob designed sound for his third and final Beatles tribute production in 2010, which was his last Broadway credit in Playbill.

Abe Jacob found himself working for two famous choreographers in 1975, starting with Fosse calling him to fix some audio problems Chicago was having during tryouts in Philadelphia, then with Michael Bennett who needed advice about how the offstage band would work in A Chorus Line.

Abe Jacob bounced between Philadelphia and New York for six weeks.

Abe Jacob was asked to bring a more subdued, naturalistic tone to A Chorus Line which was supposed to look like an audition-in-progress for most of the show.

Abe Jacob put a row of shotgun mics at the front edge of the stage, and Bennett devised a choreography to fit the very visible microphone positions.

Abe Jacob augmented the setup with more shotgun microphones to pick up sounds from mid-stage and upstage.

Abe Jacob wanted to use four McCune JM3 loudspeakers but the rental cost was nixed by the producer, and Altec 9846 self-powered cabinets were used instead, powered in this case by distant amplifiers so that the sound crew could more easily correct a potential amplifier problem.

Two 16-channel stereo mixers were specified by Abe Jacob, custom made by Louis Stevenson of Houston.

Abe Jacob supervised sound design for both, and accompanied the California troupe.

Munderloh headed the sound department of the Toronto staging, then Abe Jacob flew to London where he visited the play City Sugar and heard excellent sound by freelance sound mixer Jonathan Deans working for Autograph Sound.