Sound System Music To Ears

The organ was humming. Ken Milici, a stadium seat installer in a decal-covered hard hat, was grooving.

"Da-da-da-da . . . da-daaaaa," blared the organ.

"Charge!" yelled Milici, bellowing from a 300-level perch on the third-base side of Safeco Field.

"Da-da-da-da . . . da-daaaaaaaaaaa."

"Charge!"

"Da-da-da-da . . . da-daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!"

`Charge!"

Just think what it will be like when the Mariners begin playing games here. Then the seats will be filled with Bellevue lawyers, Capitol Hill nurses and Duvall 12-year-olds, not to mention West Seattle construction workers like Milici.

It's so long, Kingdome, fading concrete arena of plastic grass and jock rock. Now fans can start thinking in terms of real grass, open air and that vestige of old-time, open-air baseball - organ music.

Bye-bye boom box, hello band box.

There will be new scoreboards, a video screen big and bright enough to be seen from the Bainbridge ferry and a state-of-the-art sound system on which stadium disc jockey Gregg Greene plans to play plenty of songs about sun and rain.

The game on the field will be pretty much the same, discounting whatever effect the cool air blowing in from the north has on games.

It's in the seats where it will be a whole new ballgame. And the shift from the Kingdome to Safeco Field has prompted Mariner officials to completely rethink the ballpark experience.

In the Dome, orchestration was everything. Without the stimuli

of sun or stars or breezes and only an occasional bird, management had to essentially manufacture an experience out of the concrete void.

"Because we're in a confined environment, the video board is really the only thing to look at other than the game," said Kevin Martinez, Mariner marketing director. "It's the only source of stimulation. In Safeco Field, that experience opens up 10 times, especially when the roof is open."

In some ways, Safeco will be even more information-intensive. The scoreboard will show the lineup, in-depth statistics and a detailed box score. Auxiliary scoreboards will keep a running play-by-play, balls and strikes and the speed of the each pitch.

But that information will be more passive, Martinez said.

"You're going to have to go get it," he said. "It's not going to hit you in the face."

Which is not to say there won't be a few of the old in-your-face Kingdome institutions. There will be videos of bloopers and great plays shown on the $7.7 million Daktronics scoreboard screen, which has 1.7 million shades of color and better resolution than most home television sets. The video hydroplane races will remain at Safeco, as will the hat-as-shell-game video game.

The new stadium's retractable roof may steal the show. Marketing research suggests the roof is what fans are most interested in seeing in action, which has the club thinking about closing it at the end of games, rain or shine.

Music will remain part of the show, too, and organ music will be emphasized.

The Kingdome organist retired around 1990, and he was replaced with a disc jockey who occasionally used recorded organ music.

Recorded organ music will be used at Safeco, too. Jerry Frank, keyboard player for the house band at the Columbia Tower Club, already has laid down 30 or so tunes as well as short filler items like the theme song from "The Simpsons."

Frank's recordings were then digitally reprocessed at Seattle's Clatter & Din recording studio, with co-owner Peter Barnes combining two organ sounds - a high-frequency pitch with a stereo effect and a throaty big organ. The end result will be kept on disc in the Safeco sound and video production booth behind home plate.

Gregg Greene and Scott Carty, who share the role of stadium disc jockey, will run Frank's tunes and thousands of other songs through a $2.8 million sound system designed by CCI Systems of Olympia.

The Kingdome sound system, upgraded in 1990, cost $170,000 and had 1,200 watts. The Safeco Field system has nearly 300,000 watts, a measure of clarity more than loudness, and about 675 closely-spaced speakers spread around the park.

"You can tell that you don't have that long reverb that you have in the Kingdome, where it just goes on until the next game," said Ron Simonson, a CCI engineer who tested the system.

Greene, excited about the opportunity to play tunes like "You Are the Sunshine of My Life" and "Here Comes the Rain Again," was nearly as excited as Ken Milici when he heard about the system.

"I'm tickled," he said. "I'm like a little kid on Christmas opening his presents. It sounds so great."