Analog Auteur, John Vanderslice (Pt. I)
A true indie rock renaissance man, turning out a meticulously-layered sonic opus every 18 months, John Vanderslice is a pop craftsman. The master of the concept album—exploring the life of home-bound four-trackers in ice bound surveillance stations—the one-time frontman for MK Ultra is the rare songwriter who takes seriously the fact that the Rolling Stones and the Kinks were at their best when they were making two albums a year. Yet despite his long hours spent plying his trade, he somehow finds the time to also run Tiny Telephone, an all analog studio in San Francisco where he has recorded bands ranging from Death Cab for Cutie to Deerhoof. Part philosopher, part prophet, all auteur, he can talk for hours on obscure recording techniques and the dying culture of analog, and he does so here with Sonic Weekly.
SW: So do you record everything on analog at Tiny Telephone?
JV: Yeah, we are strictly analog. We made a decision many years ago to have rules and constraints, and those rules have changed with every record, but one thing that we’ve never altered is that we are strictly analog. We don’t transfer into digital until we take the half-inch tapes to Bernie Grundman in L.A. and put them up on his rebuilt Studer deck and do a one-time transfer. I personally don’t—for me and my own music—I don’t like the sound of digital converters very much. I’m probably the guy who knows too much. Like when you know too much about recording or cooking or gardening, you lose some of the joy of pure creation and you become a little too obsessed with the process. It’s very possible that I’m way too obsessed with the process of making music, but I just can’t alter it, so I’m stuck with it.
SW: Did you use analog even in the MK Ultra days?
JV: Yeah, everything was analog except that the first record was recorded on ADATs, and that’s why I stopped using digital. I had an eight-track half-inch, and I sold it to buy an ADAT, and I think that I’ve never felt more burned in my life. Digital, to be honest, has improved tremendously since the converters and ADATs. But as it stands in the digital realm, you have to spend serious money to get up to the top, to get converters that are better than shitty ProTools converters. But, again, it might be better if I didn’t know any of these things.
SW: Does using analog make the process longer than if you were using digital?
JV: That’s a great question. My gut feeling is that it makes it shorter, because there are a lot less things to do. I’ve seen many albums on the digital formats drag out to the two-year mark—tons. I would say that half of the stuff done at Tiny Telephone is done on ProTools or other systems, because people bring them in. I’m beyond the point of encouraging or discouraging. It’s an absolute waste of time to convince someone about how to record. I used to, and it was so stupid. There’s an evangelical aspect that was not very sexy to watch, so I gave it up.
I would say that it’s going to come down to the discipline of the person [doing the recording] more than whether it’s a random access format or a linear format. I would say for my own record-making that having 24 tracks absolutely makes finite what you can do on a song, and I think that it makes it pretty organized and simple. You’re finished when you’re out of tracks. Recording 24 tracks is very easy, considering that you lose eight or nine or ten on percussion and drums right away.
SW: Why do you lose so many on percussion and drums?
JV: Well, it’s nice to have instruments spot-miked, like a kick and a snare, and to have a lot more control over mixing. We actually use a lot less. Scott Solter, [engineer] uses a lot less microphones on drums than most people, but we have always been really big on doing percussion on songs, and doing percussion in a way that maybe doesn’t translate as anything but just adds to the fabric. Scott, just the other day, put a gong on top of a snare, and you wouldn’t necessary be able to pull it away from the drum set, but it makes the snare sound very clangy and dissonant and odd and unsettling. For us, it’s very useful.
SW: Can you tell the difference between an analog and a digital recording when you’re listening to it?
JV: Sometimes. If it’s a ProTools recording, I can tell very quickly. But there are some digital recordings that don’t sound digital to me, and there are some analog recordings that sound horrible and fake and digital to me. I’ve been wrong so many times that I wouldn’t say that I have a lot of accuracy. But I have really strong feelings right away when I hear something, and it’s more than fidelity—it’s style. I want to hear style in the recordings. That would override concerns. Listen, I love the Shins, but those records would sound a fucking hell of a lot better if they were done on a Studer. That’s a sad thing to me, because it’s not that what they’re doing needs to be manipulated on a computer. It’s not The Books. Those kinds of things are agonizing. I’ve listened to those records five thousand times, and there’s a certain violence that has been imparted into my soul, sonic violence (laughing). And there’s resentment that there isn’t more of a debate amongst musicians. If someone comes to me and says, ‘I love the sound of ProTools converters,’ I say, ‘Ok, that’s cool. At least you have an opinion on it.’ Most musicians don’t even think that there’s a difference.
SW: So, for instance, how would those Shins albums sound differently if they were done analog?
JV: Well, the words I would use sound very vague. It would sound more organic and wholesome. There’s a brittle, cheap quality to junk-o converters. Now, when people start getting into Genex and very fancy Apogee converters, you can get away from some of those resolution problems at the bottom end. But there’s nothing worse than consumer digital. It will be a shameful period in recording history when people look back on this stuff, especially considering how good it can be.
SW: So when you hear people talk about how digital has made good sounding albums possible for anyone with a laptop, do you agree with that at all?
JV: Yeah, because I’ve been stunned at some of the records that I’ve heard that have been done digitally, especially when the source material is not dynamically complicated acoustic-electric music that [are] being recorded for the first time. If you are Aphex Twin, you’ve written your own programs to do sequences, and you’re manipulating interesting but essentially digital source material, whether it’s keyboards or drum machines. It just depends. But if you’re recording drums, and bass, and guitars, and you’re trying to sound like Harvest-era Neil Young or the Byrds, you’re going to be at a great disadvantage if you’re recording on a computer. That’s right now. In five years—or even two—all bets are off. I have nothing but complete faith in computers. My whole life is sitting in front of a monitor reading blogs, so I’m not a hater. I’m just a realist.
Check back in for Part II, where Vanderslice continues his discussion on the dying culture of analog recording, vintage equipment, and his advice for prospective proponents of recording with tape.
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.
