So, you're my first-ever interviewee.
Really? So you're cutting your teeth on me. I'm the victim.
I invented rock...
I wanted to ask you if you have a ballpark idea how many records you've worked on as an engineer, or as a producer...
I think it's about 40 or 50. I don't really keep track. If you go to www.johnagnello.com you can count them on the discography (laughs). It's got to be between 30 and 50. You mean start to finish, or just mixing, or what?
As opposed to when you started working in a recording studio, period. You started as an assistant at the Record Plant, right?
'79 at the Record Plant. I walked in the door & the first thing they told me to do was clean up the room because Kiss was starting Dynasty that day. It was basically just following people around cleaning up from the previous night's session. And Damn the Torpedoes was being done there at the same time. So my first two weeks of studio experience was, you know, seeing some heavy shit going down.
You were talking the other day about the way projects sometimes used to interact with each other there because it was a big enough facility that several records would be going on at the same time, and how that was happening at Water Music with this Error Type 11 record you're doing now and the Misfits record that they're doing in the big room there with Ed Stasium.
Oh yeah. The Record Plant was a 4-room facility, and everybody knew everybody. The whole environment was a lot smaller back then, there wasn't a studio on every block, you weren't able to make a record in your house like you can now, so the people who made records generally did it for a living. It was way before the proliferation of small studios and project studios. It was a smaller, tighter community. There would be four rooms going on at the Record Plant and people would be walking in and out of each other's projects. You know how Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith wrote "Because the Night" together? That was at the Record Plant. They were working in rooms next to each other and they were just talking and they ended up writing this song together which is fuckin' amazing. And that happened a lot back then, it was really fun, how people knew each other. An environment where you could just hang out. When we were just now working at Water Music, the Misfits were in the other studio there and the first day we were there (the Misfits) grabbed Artie and Phil from Error Type 11 to come sing on one song of theirs, and then another day we went and grabbed Ed the producer/mixer guy and got him to play tambourine on two Error Type 11 songs. I would walk back and forth, and if he was having a problem with something maybe I'd pitch in. One day they were trying to do tape flanging at one point, a 3-machine flange, and I spent 15 minutes with them trying to help figure it out, and then I'd walk back over and keep working on our thing. It was very loose, kind of open thing. The daily barbecues didn't hurt either.
Camp Water Music.
Exactly. Common ground: meat.
So, of any engineer that I know, you seem the most...
Old? Mature? Unshaven?
The most comfortable with compression I mean, I'm aware of it as a force in the sound of records you've worked on. But it breathes it seems very musical, not destructive to dynamics. So I wanted to ask you how you approach it.
It breathes, it doesn't suck, right? At this point it would just have to be that I've been using it for so long I know how to deal with it, I can tell when it's changing the mix, pumping or whatever. (facetiously) You can tell when you have a song with a lot of dynamics and it breaks down to one guitar and that guitar is louder than the whole rest of the mix.
How much do you compress to tape when you track?
I never compress guitars. Very rarely. When you have a Marshall and you turn it up to 10, that's compressing anyway. I really don't compress drums at all; maybe occasionally room mics just to get them a little more consistent. And I will compress a snare or a bass drum in mix, just for corrective measures, if a guy plays really unevenly. Bass a little bit, vocals maybe a lot, but not really a lot. Sometimes I do it for effect. Although I don't really do a lot of compression, I do have the stereo compressor on the mix, and I do squash tape. More like old-school compression, not necessarily sounding "compressed."
So what I heard as a "compress-y" sound on the basics of the Error Type 11 stuff was all tape saturation?
I had the Distressor on the vocals, but that was really just tapping it. And when I mix some of these songs I'll probably use the Distressor on "Nuke," like the super-compression mode, but again that's just an effect, not the core of it. It's just the Compex or the Daking on the buss, tightening up the mix... but, a ton of tape saturation that's also why I still like using 456, because unlike using 499 or the BASF tape, that really does compress. For example, if you listen to these old records (Queen II, playing on the monitors as we spoke), all the stuff that came out of Trident, like what Roy Thomas Baker was doing, they would slam the tape so hard that the snare would just go "Thwap!," it wouldn't go like "bink," it really had that compression edge to it, that made it thick. It was almost like distortion from the tape, and I just love that. So that's my thing about compression. It's not a lot of compression so much as it's specific kinds of compression, hopefully used tastefully.
I thought the monitor mix that you had up just to do vocals already sounded like a record, like maybe all you'd do in the mix was just brighten it up a little.
Well, especially on a record like Error Type 11, where you only have like 3 days to mix, you can't really spend time fixing shit. You've got to get it down good when you track it and keep in mind where you want it to be in the mix. If I had a song-a-day (mix schedule) I'd probably spend more time experimenting, but I don't; I've got to mix a song every three hours. But I think a lot of that comes from, I hate to say an "oldschool" thing, but the guys I learned from as engineers were great old-school engineers and that was the philosophy, to make it sound great from the beginning, and then the players are psyched, anybody that just walks in and hears it in progress is psyched, and you can all just get off on it. It's more inspiring. I tend to like to print the crazier things I do, like the speaker the subwoofer as bass-drum mic (John sometimes uses a Hartke 15" bass cabinet as a kick drum mic) or the shotgun mic with the SansAmp on it over the snare drum, that stuff I like printing to tape that way, so it's just always there.
Using the bass speaker as a kick drum mic, or the SansAmp snare, that kind of stuff are those things that you go back to consistently?
The speaker on the bass drum, to pick up the super low end, I got out of the Beatle recording book, where I read they had done that for bass guitar and it was super cool because you got that real pillowy sound. I've been doing the speaker thing regularly, but sometimes I move it around and it's more like a room mic that sounds kind of bizarre. On the Varnaline record [Sweet Life] I had Anders [Parker] sing into it for one song and it sounded really strange. I don't know how to describe it. It's on the song "Saviours." The shotgun mic over the snare, I like to get that kind of a gunshot sound... and sometimes it can be cool to go to for a breakdown in a song or something. It's compressed, and it's going through a SansAmp, to tape. To track 1. I've recently developed a fear of edge tracks which I never used to have. I used to put the bass drum there and not worry about it, but now I'd put the shotgun track there because if anything happens to track 1 ...
It was fucked-up sounding to begin with.
The only problem with (the shotgun-SansAmp combination) is you have to take some time placing the mic to make sure you're getting the most snare drum for your money there... it's so easy for the hi-hat or cymbals to get all over everything and then it's just useless.
My friend Chad and I were recently talking about how, after all of our speculation and experimenting with recording gear, the ultimate truth of a "good production," whatever that may be, has way more to do with good songs, good playing, good instrument sounds, and arrangements. How much do you regard arrangements, helping arrange songs, as a part of your job? Obviously if it's Error Type 11 where they're a really focused band already and you've got only a week to do the whole thing, versus a solo person like Mike Johnson, something where the songs might seem more plastic...
Although I did do a couple of rehearsals for them. But it's different for every record. There are certain things I've done where I'd go on for a week of rehearsals and rearrange. But for example like Dinosaur Jr. stuff, there are no rehearsals and there are no demos, because everything's in J.'s head. Once he puts down the drum tracks, the song is on its way to being recorded. On your record (Jawbox) we did a little bit of rearranging, not much. It's important, it's just a question of if you have time to do it. It's different every time. As soon as I get demos I listen to 'em. It's easy for me to get demos and spend an hour on each song just charting them and getting a sense of where they go. It doesn't matter if it's a band or a solo artist. Like with (NYC band) Camber, we spent more time rehearsing and going over arrangements than we did in the studio. The songs really got stripped down and reassembled.
That sounds like my fantasy of doing a record where everyone knows the material, including overdub ideas, so well before you even get to the studio, that the actual recording part is almost a formality because you've already made the record in your heads. You could save so much money on studio time by doing that...
They had rehearsed so much that when they came into the studio, even though it was their first record, they came in and nailed it instantly. It was second nature. It wasn't like "first day in the studio," where people weren't comfortable, "I can't hear myself in the headphones," whatever. It was like they were making their fifth record instead of their first. But everybody's different.
[Our conversation is interrupted by the beginning of "Ogre Battle."]
This is hot. When I was a kid, I was listening to this record on headphones going, "What the hell is going on?" It's just insane. But anyway, a lot of people aren't open to the idea of changing their songs, which is fine too.
I remember being resistant, on a philosophical level, to the idea of anyone "tampering" with our songs, but the ideas that you had, even if they were small, they were a fresh perspective. They ended up improving the songs, and it wasn't like you dictated them to us, it was more like asking us questions, just a little nudge in one direction or other.
I'm a nudge guy anyway. There are guys who are totally putting their stamp on a record, like "here's MY record," but I'm more like a conduit to get where you need to go. I try to be as hands-off as possible, to let everybody do it themselves. Maybe I shouldn't say that, because I do get involved, but it's more like around the side as opposed to "it's got to be like this." The Varnaline record was like that where at the end of the record they were listening and they were so psyched it had turned out the way it was because even though I didn't sit there and beat them up to perform, I sort of pushed them to limits they felt they hadn't reached before, just by mellow reinforcement ...
That's how we felt too, that you set up a situation in which we felt like we could rise to the occasion, like we were actually outdoing ourselves.
