Joseph D. Tarsia, founder and original owner of Sigma Sound Studios in Philadelphia, PA, and New York City, passed away November 1, 2022, at the age of 88. As a recording and mixing engineer, Tarsia was the “sonic architect” behind the sophisticated blend of R&B, soul, and funk music that became known as the Philadelphia Sound, thus contributing to that music becoming a national and international phenomenon. Joe was a major figure on the Philadelphia recording and music scene for over four decades. I worked for him at Sigma Sound for nearly 25 years, starting there as an assistant engineer in 1973, and with his passing, I have lost a valued friend and mentor.
Sigma Sound started off in 1968 as a single-room, 8-track recording facility on the second floor of its 212 North 12th Street Philadelphia location, but it soon expanded to encompass three multitrack recording rooms in two Philadelphia locations, plus another three in New York City, along with several voiceover and edit rooms. During the more than three decades that followed Sigma’s opening, the studio’s recording capabilities went through 8-, 16-, 24-, 32-, 48-track, and beyond into the era of digital audio workstations. The studio’s staff went from a single employee (Joe Tarsia himself) to a staff consisting of the dozens of engineers, technicians, and other support people that called Sigma home.
Born in South Philadelphia, Joe Tarsia graduated from Bok Technical High School in the early 1950s, where he had studied electronics, followed by 2 more years of night classes in electronics at Temple University Technical Institute. He was then hired to work as a lab technician at Philco Corporation. During his 10 years at Philco, he worked on such projects as the early application of semiconductors to TV, radio, and audio products. In the evenings, he moonlighted in TV repair.
One day, someone asked Joe if he could repair a tape recorder. The recorder happened to be in the recording studio of Swan Records, a Philadelphia label owned by Tony Mamarella, the producer of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand music TV show. At that time, Bandstand originated at Philadelphia station WFIL-TV to air nationally on the ABC television network. Not only did Tarsia fix the recorder, but he was bitten by the recording studio “bug” and went on to rebuild and improve the rest of that studio’s equipment. This led to him being asked to do similar work at some of the other recording studios and record labels operating in the city.
That resulted in Joe being offered, in 1962, a full-time position at Cameo-Parkway records in Philadelphia. Cameo-Parkway was then the largest independent record label in the US, thanks in part to a special relationship that it had with American Bandstand and its host Dick Clark, which made it easy for the label to get national exposure for its artists. Tarsia was hired in both the music mixer and technical maintenance roles, and he eventually became Cameo-Parkway’s chief engineer. While engineering hits by such artists as Chubby Checker and Bobby Rydell, he also worked on a major expansion of the label’s recording studio facilities. As he sharpened his mixing skills in the studio, Joe developed his ideas of not just what a recording studio should be technically but what also contributed to a positive studio experience for artists, musicians, and producers—concepts that would later make his own studio, Sigma Sound, a success.
In 1964, two things occurred that eventually led to the decline of Cameo-Parkway. American Bandstand decided to move production of the show to Los Angeles, bringing an end to the label’s capability of easily getting its records played on the show. It was also the year of the “British Invasion,” during which UK artists like The Beatles started dominating the US music scene. All of this led to a drop in the popularity of Cameo-Parkway’s artists. Seeing that the label was struggling to maintain something of its previous success, Joe Tarsia began to wonder whether he should leave to start his own recording studio.
About that same time, Tarsia started working with the songwriting and record production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, along with producer/arranger Thom Bell, all of them independents who used Cameo-Parkway’s studio facilities to record a few regional hits at first, followed by national hits by artists such as the Soul Survivors, The Intruders, and the Delfonics. Joe recognized that the future of the Philadelphia music scene—what would later become world famous as the “Philly Sound”—was along the lines of what Gamble/Huff and Bell were doing. He realized that if he started his own recording studio, he could bring that clientele with him and be part of that scene. So Joe Tarsia decided to leave Cameo-Parkway and set out on his own.
In 1967, he leased the facilities of the former Reco-Art Recording Studio on the second floor of 212 North 12th Street in Philadelphia, took out a second mortgage on his house to finance the equipment he needed, and opened what he now called Sigma Sound Studios on August 5, 1968. “I named it Sigma Sound because the letters of the Greek alphabet have always given me a sense of logic and precision” is how Joe explained his choice for the studio’s name. Precision and perfection had always driven Joe Tarsia to do the best possible job and run his studio in a way that provided the best possible creative environment.
Sigma Sound was an instant success. Gamble/Huff/Bell and many of Tarsia’s other clients from his Cameo-Parkway days followed him over to his new facility. Some of the early records out of Sigma Sound included hits by Archie Bell and the Drells, Jerry Butler, Joe Simon, and Dusty Springfield.
After Gamble and Huff got national distribution and promotion for their Philadelphia International Records label via Columbia Records in 1971, the “Philly Sound” really began to take off. Sigma Sound had by then been upgraded from 8-track to 16-track, and a second studio on the first floor of the 212 North 12th building was added in 1973. The following year, 24-track recording was added. Sigma Sound became one of the first studios anywhere to feature automated mixing and was among the first US studios to offer Dolby noise reduction for multitrack recording and to synchronize tape machines for 48-track recording.
By 1974, a third multitrack studio was opened, this time at the 309 South Broad Street location in Philadelphia that had previously housed Cameo-Parkway, which had been acquired by Gamble, Huff, and Bell. By the mid-1970s, those studios were operating 18 or more hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week, in order to meet the demands of the then-thriving Philly Sound production community. Sigma Sound and the Philadelphia music scene also attracted artists from outside of the city, most notably David Bowie, whose album “Young Americans” was recorded at Sigma in 1974 and ’75.
In 1976, Tarsia expanded Sigma Sound to include a New York City recording facility, taking over the premises of the former Broadway Recording Studio in the Ed Sullivan Theatre building at 53rd and Broadway. Eventually, Sigma Sound NYC had three multitrack recording studios occupying two floors of that building. The New York studio attracted a clientele that included such artists as Ashford and Simpson, the Brecker Brothers, Madonna, Steely Dan, and the Talking Heads.
The 1980s brought complete renovations to the two main music recording rooms in Philadelphia and the addition of two new voiceover studios. Other additions included audio post-production for video and digital multitrack recording. The 1990s saw the first use of digital audio workstations, initially for voiceovers and radio spot recording.
While continuing to engineer sessions and keep Sigma Sound at the competitive edge of recording technology, Joe Tarsia was active in other areas of the music/recording field, both nationally and locally. In the 1970s, he was one of the co-founders of SPARS and served as its first president, and he participated in the Philadelphia Music Alliance, the local chapter of NARAS, as well as other community organizations, and of course, the AES.
In 2003, Joe Tarsia sold the Philadelphia studios and retired (the NYC studios had been sold in 1988). In 2015, the Pennsylvania Historical Commission erected a historical marker commemorating Sigma’s 212 North 12th Street location in Philadelphia and the music recorded there. A reunion of Sigma Sound’s employees was held in 2018 to mark the 50th anniversary of the studio’s opening, and in 2020, the 212 location was added to Philadelphia’s Register of Historic Places. Currently, the building is under consideration as the site of a museum devoted to Philadelphia music.
But those are not the only ways that the legacy of Joe Tarsia and Sigma Sound Studios will continue. The many hit records that were recorded at Sigma Sound will live on as part of our collective musical heritage, and Joe Tarsia’s constant striving for excellence and his desire to always do the best job possible will live on through the many engineers and other staffers who worked at Sigma who learned from and were inspired by him, and they will in turn pass those ideals along to the next generation of audio professionals.
Arthur Stoppe
Mountain Wind Media
Sigma Sound Philadelphia 1973–1998
