Analog Auteur, John Vanderslice (Pt. II)
A true indie rock renaissance man, John Vanderslice creates albums the way they used to be made—elaborately produced, at a prodigious pace, and always on analog tape. Having already covered his personal history as a recording artist and producer at his Tiny Telephone studio, here Vanderslice digs into the current state of the analog recording culture and explains just what is being lost in the era of ProTools.
SW: Would you say at this point that it’s mainly electronic music that benefits from digital?
JV: Yeah, if you’re making music history, if you’re blowing up song forms—look at Radiohead—the most fucking unbelievable band in the history of music. I’ve spent more time inside Radiohead than anything else, even more than The Who, The Beatles, The Kinks, David Bowie—the bands that I grew up obsessing about every day. But Radiohead has unlimited access to money and equipment, and they are using some very fancy stuff to make their albums. When I see two-inch, 24-track decks floating around for $1000, I don’t see that as an argument for recording on a shitty computer. I mean, I just bought one of those for nothing. I bought one of the best sounding 24-track decks for nothing, a deck that has recorded half the albums that you’ve ever heard recorded from 1972 to 1978.
SW: How’d you come across that?
JV: I sold it to a friend’s studio, and he moved to Iowa City and sold it back to me. The market [for buying and selling vintage recording equipment] has utterly collapsed.
SW: Why is that?
JV: Because this is not an era of sentimentality. And, hey, sometimes that’s beautiful. I love that people don’t give a shit about all of these old questions, and they don’t obsess about cabeling and microphones. They just make art—there’s a lot of good about that. I have very nuanced feelings about this whole thing, but you can’t say that the last 70 years of recording technology are irrelevant. I’m not a traditionalist on any level, but I think you have to acknowledge history. It’s great if you want to go make wine, and you say, ‘Fuck it! I’m just going to make wine.’ That’s the American spirit. The more I go to Europe, the more I see in relief what the American spirit is. It’s just “fuck all,” and I love that.
SW: Is it already getting to the point where there are very few people who are conversant in using analog?
JV: Yeah, and no one cares anymore. The debate is way over. Sometimes I just feel like an echo of an echo talking about it.
SW: Is it just because there is so much involved with using it?
JV: It’s just death. It’s the past. How could that not be something to get beyond?
SW: Do you have problems with tape-stretching and things like that?
JV: Do you mean the tension of the deck actually damaging the tape? No, because we have good tape machines. If you have properly-calibrated machines, it isn’t a problem. In nine years, we’ve never had a problem with one reel of tape. We’ve never had a dropout. We’ve never had anything get zapped by an x-ray in flight. We’ve never had a client lose a tape. Tape is very stable. Part of it is that people have been working on magnetic tape for a long time, and they’ve sorted it out. We haven’t had a problem with data loss, either, if people are backing up stuff. It can go both ways.
SW: How long did it take you to understand how to use analog? Was it the process of learning tricks of the trade and that kind of stuff?
JV: Yeah, it definitely took a while because what’s harder than dealing with analog stuff is engineering, and [I’ve] learned that over a long period of time by watching people work. It’s like writing. There are a million ways to do it, and there are a million ways to be good at it. And there are so many valid ways to be a good engineer, and I fell in love with that part of the craft. It’s like surgery; there are so many things you have to know to be good at it.
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Author's biography:
Matt Fink is a freelancer journalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He has spent the last seven years writing album reviews and features for publications such as Paste, Under the Radar, American Songwriter, and the All Music Guide, and when not hunched over a laptop, he can usually be found shaking in fear while interviewing artists ranging from Yoko Ono and Beck to Bright Eyes and the White Stripes. In his free time, he likes to take photographs of his cats and continue his secret life as the world’s worst clawhammer banjo player.
