Ricky McCormick: Recording Studio Theory

-Zackery Belanger
13 April, 2025

Confidence Level: Moderate

Over the past two years I've occasionally pulled out Ricky McCormick's notes to stare at them. There's a great piece by Christopher Tritto describing this mystery in-depth here.

Given what we know about Ricky and his life, I don't think that his notes are a cipher. I do think they are meaningful.

For the following I'm assuming many of the E's are spacers, as suggested by Dan Olson of the FBI's CRRU.

As someone who is recording-industry-adjacent, there is something vaguely familiar about portions of Ricky's text. Many of the repeated 2 and 3-character sequences in Ricky McCormick's notes are a close match the common electrical connectors in recording studios:

TRS: Tip Ring Sleeve

TS: Tip Sleeve, and TS m, maybe Tip Sleeve mini

XLR or XL: X Latch Resilient, or XL could stand for Jumbo

NCB: NCB banana plug, or BNC with the letters mixed

WLD: Usually known as "Speakon" so this one is weird, but this connector type was relatively new in 1999 compared to the others

AUX LR: Stereo 3.5 mm auxiliary

Many of these sequences occur in pairs, which is how you might refer to cables and adapters in a studio. For example, XLR - TRS means an XLR connector on one end of the cable, and a TRS connector on the other.

NCB - AUX LR

TRS - TRS

WLD NCB

NCB - XL

TS m - XL

WLD XLR

These terms also tend to hug the right margin of the notes, as if they are listed after the equipment they belong to.

Audio gear is such a vast market that you can almost make up letter and number sequences and find something named similarly, so it's useless to attempt to assign meaning to everything. If this is an audio equipment list then we may never be able to sort through the whole thing with confidence. However, a few strings stand out to me as potentially being more than coincidence:

2UNE PLSE VCRS - AOLT SENSRS

This sure looks a lot like "Tune Pulse VCRs - Volt Sensors". VCRs in the 1980's and 90's had a "control track [that] encodes a series of pulses.... The control track is used to fine-tune the tape speed during playback" from the Wikipedia entry for Control Track. Light sensors were also used to determine the beginning and the end of tape.

Along with these interesting occurrences:

CUTCTRS (Cutters, as in record cutting lathe? or magnetic tape cutters for splicing)

SPRKS (Speakers?)

CNOSOLE (Console, as in mixing console?)

D.W.M 4 MIC (Sony DWM Digital Wireless Mic? or 4 mm)

DUL MT6 TUNS (Dual MT6 Tuners?)

SAE 6 (SAE MK VI tuner?)

Beyond this, the possibilities get dizzying to me, and I don't know whether certainty is possible here. Maybe someone deep into vintage audio would see more in this than I can, and maybe it would be useful to try to build out this theory by making sure the parts that are listed amount to a reasonably complete recording setup.

I like the idea that Ricky was a music lover who dreamt of opening a recording studio. Maybe he answered an ad for used gear, and furiously scribbled while the gearhead on the other end of the line listed everything for sale.