John, how the hell did you end up in L.A.? You're from Florida, right?
Yeah, I grew up in South Florida. I moved down there when I was 12 and ended up in the University of Miami. When I graduated, there were three places to go: New York, Nashville, or L.A. I did not want to stay in Miami. New York I would've gone to, but I had a lot of friends in L.A. Joe Barresi is one of my good friends and there were a couple of other people who graduated before I did, and so I came out here.
Was that a tough move?
Yeah. I moved out in May 1990, so I've been here for 15 years now. Fortunately I came out here with a job.
Really?
It was the whole thing where you send out a bunch of resumes and nobody calls you back. I had one interview at The Complex as a tech. I figured it would be a job and I could at least get in, but after the interview I found out that everybody quit so I had no place to go. But I had been hanging out here with Joe and the manager of a studio in the Valley called Cornerstone. He liked me, so he said to Joe, "Hey, did your friend John find a job yet?" Two weeks before I moved out, I had a job. Very lucky.
You also have a minor in electrical engineering?
It was either a minor or one, three credits short of an official minor. Miami was great because it's a music degree and also a strong electronics background. You have to be accepted into the music school, then you also have to take the electronic classes.
Which includes math?
Exactly. Calculus, physics, stuff like that.
Was that pretty tough, going through school like that?
Yeah, it was really intense, but I think when you're young you don't really know any better. You're just kind of goin' for it, you know? I would go from a jazz arranging class to an acoustics class. In one class we had to design a studio, complete with blueprints. In the other class, you had to do a big band chart. So I would go back and forth between writing blueprints and coming up with a chart, then writing out all the horn parts. It was crazy, but it was fun.
Does all that kind of come into play in your life now?
Every day. At the very least I spent $40,000 and learned how to read a chart, which helps. I know where bar 53 is. I can say, "Get in on the end of two on fifty-three."
That's nice. I can't do that!
It all helps. There are a lot of people who don't [know], but they can pick it up. It's whatever I can do to be helpful, and sometimes that's the thing that gets the session cruising.
On this project here you're hired as an engineer, but on projects where you're hired as a producer, do you find yourself arranging?
Yeah, absolutely. The production thing is so much fun for me because you're involved from the get-go. With a band like The Black Mollys, they sent the CD and we worked on the songs. A couple of them were just little ideas and I'd make suggestions. Tory [Stoffregen], the main guy in the band, was really great. I'd have a couple of really dumb ideas that he'd be completely fine with trying, but there were also ideas that he hadn't thought of that worked. That was the whole process. You'd go in and rehearse with the band and it was the same thing: "What if you do this? What if you play this figure on the toms this way instead of that way?" And to the bass player, "What if you do this little thing?" Sometimes just these little suggestions can really focus things. I'm totally into that and then, you know, just taking it and making it sound like a record in the end.
One of the things I see sometimes with people just starting out is a bulldozer effect. How do you initially learn to come into a situation and make calls without making yourself look like an ass?
The most important thing is always to make sure that the musicians don't ever feel like they're in a recording studio. They have to be able to feel like they're doing their thing. That's where the whole psychology of production comes in. When do you say something? When do you not? It comes down to trust — once a band trusts that you have a vision and that you're on the same page. You want to make the players feel comfortable with the situation. You don't want to start making a bunch of suggestions after hearing the first three chords they play or after hearing the song for the first time. I've seen it happen! You just want a player to feel comfortable. Obviously you don't want to yell at them or tell them that they're being a jerk. I've seen that happen, too. Mostly you just want to get the best performance out of the performer, but you also want to get what you need. Every personality is different and you just have to really be aware. There's one particular drummer I worked with on a record a few years ago, and he gets bored really quickly. He's a great drummer. He gets bored. So he goes out there and they start playing. It's a great band, but by the third take there's just no energy to it. The producers asked me, because they were in from England, "What do we do?" I said, "Give them a break. Tell them we have to take care of something and to go to the lounge for 15 minutes." The drummer walked away, went out, then it was "Okay, we're ready to go." We got it on the next take.
He was just tired of doing the same thing over and over.
Yeah, exactly. Bored. He had only played through it three or four times, but you know, he's a session guy and session guys are smart. Session players do it all the time — they're hearing it, they know what they want to do. You're going to get their best performance when they're concentrating. That, to me, is the whole game. With other people, you've got to let them find their way into it. Some guys you've got to guide a little more. Do a take, say, "I like this, I like this, I like this, stick with that." It's really context and person-related, but I think if you're aware of that, things go smooth. If you try to superimpose something on it, try too hard, too much or try to get too clever, I think that undermines the thing in the end. There's a line and sometimes clever things work, but it's gotta come from somewhere deeper. Those are the records I always feel like I'm listening to over and over again. And every situation is different. A band situation is completely different than a singer/songwriter. The trickiest thing is replacing somebody in a band because they're not cutting it.
Have you had to do that?
I haven't had to do it personally, no.
You've seen it happen?
Yeah, and most of the time it's actually done okay. Again, that's the producer finding a way to make it work, as long as everybody understands. Honesty is a very powerful thing if you allow yourself to let it happen. I think bands need that. They need to feel like they can trust whomever it is they're working with. Sometimes it's a matter of speaking bluntly, but not maliciously. You can't say, "You suck!" But you can say, "What happens if you try it this way? What happens if you try it that way?" If you bring something positive to it, most of the time you're going to get a good response and good rapport with people. That's how you get something that you're going to want to listen to over and over again. The worst thing is to feel like the whole record has been a struggle. You put it on and it sounds like a struggle. There are a lot of records that have been Pro Tooled to death. They sound like they were such an effort to make. Those are the ones you listen through maybe once and put away. Those are not the records I want to make.
How do you avoid Pro Tooling to death?
Getting good players. Rehearsing. People complain about studio budgets and all this other stuff, but in the '50s and '60s studios were extremely expensive and people were really prepared when they went in. This whole thing about writing in the studios didn't really start until the '60s and the '70s. Sgt. Pepper took six months, but conversely, Rubber Soul, Revolver, and Help! were all done within 18 months of each other, so what's the difference?
Yeah, the songwriting alone is a miracle.
Exactly. But people used to have to be prepared. The Black Mollys — I rehearsed those guys. They were all good players so we rehearsed for, like, four days and went into Sound City and recorded 14 songs in four days. I got all the drums, bass and some of the guitar parts, then we went in and overdubbed guitars and vocals. But the core of the record, which was those guys playing together, which was the way that record had to be done, was done. Yeah, you gotta go in, you gotta tweak some stuff. But I am totally not, "I've gotta be on the grid" and all this other stuff. It's people playing music together. That's the important thing.
Do you find yourself ever working on projects where it's handed over to somebody that does more tweaking?
No. I'm at a point where I don't want to do gigs unless I am doing the entire gig, unless it's for certain clients who I've worked with a bunch or someone I'm helping out. I have some Nashville people who called me because one of their artists is out here in L.A. and they need a vocal fixed. They're really great people, so of course I'm going to do it.
And lord knows where that's going to get mixed down.
Yeah. And this Robbie Williams record, I want to mix it, but I may not get a chance. Clearmountain is going to do it. How do you say, "No" to Bob Clearmountain? [Tape Op #84] You just always do the best job you can and make sure that everything sounds as good as you can make it. Like I told Bob, if I have to pass something on to somebody, I always want to pass it on in the same way I would like it handed to me. I just want it to be taken care of. I want to be able to push up the faders and work.
Don't just send them a wreck.
Exactly. I've mixed a couple of records, low budget things, in Pro Tools this year. On one of them the bass was out of tune on every song. No cross fades anywhere, just everything cut together. So every time you're listening, trying to get into a song, all of a sudden you hear a click somewhere. You got like 30 something tracks, you're scrolling up and down, and it totally kills the flow of work. Mixing has such a performance aspect. People don't realize that. You get into it. And when I mix in Pro Tools, I end up re- recording things a lot and trying to get them to pop, to do what I need them to do. So you get a lot of those things, like stereo vocals where the vocal is in the middle, yet it's a stereo track.
Why?
Exactly. Why?! There are a lot of things — organ parts or piano parts, that are essentially mono, but they're on two tracks. When I hear something mono, I'm gonna want to pan it one way or another, so the first thing I have to do is listen to everything and combine it down. It's a lot of extra effort. But fortunately too, a lot of people will allow me to make decisions, like the Roger Manning stuff [The Land of Pure Imagination]. Roger did a really cool record.
Were you brought in just for the mixing?
I mixed and mastered it. First of all, it was really cool that he even contacted me to do it because he had me come over to listen to some stuff and I just laughed. When you hear stuff that makes you smile, you gotta be involved with it. His thing, it's just so cool, with so many influences, so many little references. He really let me do my thing to it. There were things, filtering things and panning things, stuff that happened that he didn't think about that he was at least open to.
The record blew me away because some of it sounds really '70's L.A. I'd just been listening to a bunch of the Carpenters box set, Pacific Ocean Blue with Dennis Wilson, some early L.A.-era Fleetwood Mac, and it reminded me of that. Where did you mix it at?
I got a little set up in my house, just a room. I've got a monitoring system that makes sense to me, a couple of these little NHT [speakers], the smaller ones. They're called the M double O's [M-00]. I got a pair of those and a little subwoofer. Pro Tools. A lot of this rack stuff comes home with me. I take the computer home, one interface and that's it. Like I said, I do a lot of re-recording.
In what way? Like just piping something back out through stuff and back into certain...
Yeah, exactly. Say I want to re-work the kick sound. I'll most likely run through the Chandler LTD-1s because I have four of those that aren't here. I always use those on drums when I track — if the kick needs more low-end, it needs this, or it needs more of that Neve- y kind of tone. So instead of patching it in and leaving it in the whole time and having to recall it later, I just get it close. I really like the FilterBank EQs in Pro Tools, so for fine adjustments it's the FilterBank stuff runnin' out through a guitar pedal. I'll run it out through the Little Labs PCP and just loop it through that. If the bass needs some more tone, I can re-amp it, go through a SansAmp. I can do a bunch of different things.
Do you ever print effects like spring reverbs?
Sometimes, but I'm really into Altiverb. Roger had some great Master Room reverbs that he was nice enough to lend to me because he wanted that tone on his record. I sampled them in a couple of different ways and used them quite a bit. I got a [Roland] 501 Space Echo and sampled that reverb too. It's great.
And you have plates, sampled plates.
Sampled plates and there's a couple of cathedrals in there that sound amazing. I love them. I started using reverb again because of it.
Do you have a little console?
No.
