How does one end up as an archiving specialist?
That's a good question. I actually started in the United building when it was Ocean Way [Recording], back in '98. Right out of recording school, I did an internship there. Most of my time was spent in Sherman Oaks at Record One [part of the Ocean Way Recording Group at the time]. It was a good starting place, because I got to see all the best engineers, producers, and artists in the world. They all came there. Everything was top notch. At that point in time, we were still using tape. The Sony PCM-3348 [Multitrack Digital Recorder] was hot shit back then: Digital 48-track on 1/2-inch tape. I cut my teeth on analog and digital tapes, which, for what I'm doing now, was very fortunate. I worked there for several years, then I went to Capitol Studios [#114] and worked there for a bunch of years. We were still using tape, and then one day all the tape machines were in the hallway and every room had a Pro Tools rig! It was a switch where it was tapes out, Pro Tools in. I loved working at Capitol, but it was difficult to move up because it was a union shop. It was really hard to become a full-time assistant at Capitol, because the main assistants had been there for decades. They would not give up the seat, which I don't blame them. They had good benefits, and they were getting good pay. After Capitol, I decided to go freelance; but unfortunately it was 2008, when the economy collapsed.
You were hoping to be more of a freelance engineer?
Exactly. Tracking, mixing, and that kind of thing. I was looking for work and doing projects here and there. In 2011, a friend said, "Hey, I know somebody who's a vendor for Warner Bros., doing archives." I asked, "What the hell are archives?" He said, "Remember when we used to do tape transfers over at Capitol for Guitar Hero?" I replied, "Oh, yeah. I can do that." So, I got a part time job doing Warner Bros. archives work for a vendor. This guy was actually a mastering engineer for Warner Bros., but he had a side business doing transfers. Before then, Warner Bros. had various people doing archives, and there were no standards for it. They did about 2000 titles and then they started getting complaints from the end users who would get the archive and go, "This sounds like hell," or, "Something's weird with this," after they were transferred. So, Warner Bros. said, "We have to redo everything." They came up with standards and a way to do things. So, that's how I learned how to do archiving, by using the updated Warner Bros. standards. That was the best place to learn it. Looking back on it, and seeing other people's work right now, it was the highest standard out there and probably still is to this day.
In what ways?
How the machines should be calibrated. How to do noise reduction. It was very meticulous, which was great. I started part-time. Within a couple months I became chief engineer, and I did that for about five or six years. The first thing I did was The Ramones' catalog! After that job, I got a call from United. They were looking for more avenues to make money. They said, "We heard you're the guy for archiving. Do you want to come work for us?" It was a big pay bump. I had to build the room out and I had to buy all the machines.
Did they give you a budget to work with?
Yeah, but we ran into an issue. We bought a Studer A 827 Gold Edition [reel-to-reel deck] from a guy in Nashville, but the guy took our money and never gave us a tape machine. They said, "We're not using third parties. We're not going to eBay or Craigslist." It had to be through Guitar Center, Vintage King, or some reputable dealer. You can't go to a Guitar Center and buy a Studer A 827! I ended up using my own money and buying most of the gear. They said, "We can reimburse you," and I was like, "No. If I buy it, it's mine. I'd rather have the machines." So, I kept all the machines from being there.
You took off before United Recording shut down?
Oh, yeah. I was doing a 50-50 split with them, and my contract came up for renewal. For some reason, they decided they didn't want to do the 50-50 split anymore, and that they wanted to hire me on and put me on salary. For what we were projecting for the next year, I would have lost about $70,000. I said, "That doesn't make any sense." They flew down the vice president of the real estate company that owned United. We had a partnership, everybody was making money, and I was told I shouldn't make that amount of money from a guy that probably flew down in a private jet. He said, "You can move up within the company." I said, "Within the real estate company? No thanks." I asked, "What happens if I say no, and I don't sign this?" He replied, "You're free to go off and do your own business. When you shut down in six months, we'll buy all your gear." I'm still here, so I think I made the right choice!
Wow! Did you move into this building right away?
No, I had a place in Hollywood for a while. That was supposed to be a stopgap. The rent was incredibly high for a small amount of space. I stayed there two years, and then found this place in Burbank. For my clients, it's safe, there's parking, and it's easy to find.
How long have you been independent of United?
It was august of 2019 when I left.
Has work been steady?
Yeah. There are always ebbs and flows, especially with the pandemic. I left right before the pandemic hit. Luckily, everybody started going through their closets and through their storage units, because everybody had a lot of time. I had a ton of business during the pandemic, and then when the pandemic started to slow down and things started opening back up, it got a little slow. But then it started ramping back up. Usually, the end of the year is a slow point. People are wrapping up projects and getting ready to go on vacation for the holidays. Lately, I have been working six or seven days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, just trying to get through hundreds of tapes. It's a good problem to have.
What are some of the most difficult transfers you've dealt with?
I had some tapes that were in flooded basements in a swamp in Louisiana. One project I did was SS Decontrol, a punk band from Boston. The first album, The Kids Will Have Their Say. Al Barile, the guitar player, had these tapes, and they were kept in a basement in Massachusetts, which would flood all the time. It was bad. He showed the tapes to Ian MacKaye [Tape Op #138], and he was like, "Just throw them in trash." They made a deal with Trust Records, and Joe Nelson from Trust mailed the tapes to me. I get the package, open it up, and I'm like, "Joe, what the fuck did you send me? I don't know if I can do this." It was caked in mold and the boxes were crumbling from water damage. There was a 1/4-inch of mud on some of the tapes. It was one of the worst ones I've ever seen. Joe said, "This is what you've been training for your entire life." [laughter] And I said, "Let's do it."
How do you clean that?
By hand, with Ronsonol lighter fluid, foam swabs, foam paint brushes, and lots of masks.
The lighter fluid won't damage the tape?
Lighter fluid is the best thing to use on tape! Do not use isopropyl alcohol; that will damage the tape. My wife is a chemist, and we did a study on using different solvents on tape stock. Isopropyl alcohol is horrible. It's polar, so it's attracting stuff from the tape. Ronsonol lighter fluid is nonpolar and has a high evaporative point. It goes on clean, comes off clean, and does not harm the tape at all.
Then do you go in with white gloves and a pad?
Inch by inch. Do the inside and the outside for 2,500 feet per reel of tape. It took me about 100 hours to clean seven or eight reels of tape.
How do you bill for that?
I charge by the hour, but with something like that we work up a project rate.
Can you have someone come in and do that part of the job?
Yeah, but I'd rather not. I can't trust just anybody with something like that, where the work is that delicate and intense. I probably wouldn't sleep knowing that somebody else was trying to do it. It would drive me insane.
You don't want to hear, "Oops!" from the other room.
Exactly. If there are going to be any mistakes, they're going to be made by me. But a hundred hours of cleaning, and the tapes played perfectly. I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to play half a tape. Every single reel played perfectly.
Do you clean them and then bake [dehydrate] them, or do you bake them and then clean them?
With these, I did a first pass cleaning to get all the gunk off the outside. I don't want to bake that into the tape. Then I'd check it and see if there's any sticking. If the tape comes out cleanly, then I can go ahead and start cleaning the inside of it. But if it's stuck to itself, then we need to bake this for a while to get it unstuck from itself.
Was that one of the worst things you've ever seen?
It's up there. It's definitely top three!
Another part of your job involves replacing all the splices.
Splices and leader tape. All the old paper leader is disintegrating; it just snaps in half. The leader joints dry out, and then I'm winding the tape and, "Pow!"
It comes apart.
Scares the hell out of me every time. There's a lot of care that I have to take with all these tapes. And that's the other thing: It's not like, "Oh, this is a band I like. I'm going to take care of this one better than this other one." I can't do that.
No, no, no.
Every tape is somebody's favorite song or album, and we have to treat them all equally.
I just assume that every single thing has some importance to the world.
Exactly. It could be to one person, or to 20 million.
I never know what I'm going to find. Tapes are frequently mislabeled.
All the time. They needed to teach documentation more in school back then! Track sheets get lost over time. I remember I was doing the Yes catalog.
Talk about tape splices.
Oh, it was crazy. On some of the albums they would tape the track sheet to the outside of the tape box with Scotch tape. But it's just loose-leaf paper.
And it tears off?
Yeah, when you're putting it on the shelf or whatever. There'll be a little piece on the corner of the tape box, and that's all we'll have. With Eddy [Offord, producer/engineer], if there was a blank space on a track, he'd fill it with something. It wasn't, "Oh, track one is always going to be kick drum" or whatever. I'd have to recreate the track sheets by ear. "Kick drum, sitar, harmonica, theremin." There's a lot of detective work in what we do.
Do some people just want you to do a transfer to digital with no sleuthing?
