Tom Moulton. Who’s he? Well, he is the man. He is the father of remixing. He is the one who invented ‘accidentally’ disco break and 12″ maxi single format. He is behind thousands and thousands of disco remixes.

“I never made a dance record, I made records you can dance to.” – Tom Moulton

[1]‘And of course all the songs were 3 minutes long and I went; ‘It’s a shame because the minute the song is over they start mixing in this other song and they don’t know whether they should dance to the new song or keep dancing to the old one.’ And then people would just walk off the floor. That’s when everybody would change and you could see that they were trying to get more intense and more involvement. I said; ‘There’s got to be a way to make it longer where you don’t loose that feeling. Where you can take them to another level.’ And that’s when I came up with this idea to make a tape… So that’s what I did.’

All started back in late 60′s with self made overlapping tapes for a local bar (Sandpiper). After a while people went crazy for Tom’s tapes at the club. Funny fact is that Tom never spun the black discs, so someone had to act dj while he’s tape was rolling.

How 12″ single was born? After two seasons of making tapes for Sandpiper club Tom started to cut own records for dj’s. Early 70′s on one Friday he went to Media Sound where he used to master his records and cut to 7″. Place owner Dominic was going away that day and didn’t have time to do the job. So Tom asks how about Dominic’s assistant (the Puerto Rican sweeper José) to do the job for him. So they started to work on new Trammps tune and that worked out really well. So well that José ended up to master all of Tom’s records later on. One day when Tom went to master Al Downing – I’ll be holding you (orginal track on youtube) with José. The thing was that the studio was out of 7″ acetates and Tom was really eager to get the record. Only way to go was to cut it on 10″. The difference on cutting one track on 7″ and 10″ is that 10″ has more space, so they made the grooves on the vinyl spread. This forced them to cut it louder and sounding way better. Next track was on 12″ and it was Moment of Truth – So Much for Love. Era of disco 12″ had begun.

Tom’s first 12″ promo was South Shore Commission – Free Man and first 12″ commercial release was Double Exposure – Ten Percent.

How did the disco ‘Break’ got invented? Tom got hands on Don Downing – Dream World.

[1]“I got a record for Scepter Records, it was called ‘Dream world’ by Don Downing. That was the very first record I ever went into mix. It immaculated! [Immaculation is when the key goes up.]
Alright, so in the second part of the record, towards the end of the record it immaculated to another key. So what happened is I went to make a long version of it and of course I want to get back to the beginning of the song and of course the key drops down. And I went; ‘Oh, this is horrible! So what am I gonna do?’ I said; ‘Like I feel that I can do, is take out everything that’s musical.’ So that how it went into a drum break. Then, I would start putting in percussion back in, then I would bring the bass. So in the long version the song actually sounds like it’s immaculate twice, but it only does once. But that’s how it was created.
People said; ‘Oh, How did you do that?’ And they should go on; ‘You’re so great, it really takes a genius to create something like that!’ I said; ‘No it doesn’t! – This was just the way out of the situation.’”

“It’s just something that was created by accident – Totally by accident.”

So this is how things got started. Busiest years were during 1974 to 1977. So if you think of disco classic, most probably there is a Tom Moulton Mix of the track. Google, check youtube!

I’ll list some of my favorites:

BT Express – Peace Pipe

Patti Jo – Make Me Believe in You

Andrea True Connection – More, More, More

Camouflage – You’ve Got the Power

Just scratched the surfafce, there’s plenty of good interviews about Tom. I recommending to check this radio interview by Jarrell Mason on youtube: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. Also text above marked with [1] was borrowed from disco-disco.com interview I truly recommend checking it out! The interview is: HERE!

Liked what you just read?