Jake: Do you have any favorite songs or albums you’d like to share?

John: Sure. Favorite albums, you know, are going to vary a lot. And when I’m thinking of favorite albums relative to a listening environment I’m thinking in terms of acoustics, playability, or transferability of studio B to C to D. We call that translation; does the studio translate well? I tend to go after particular producers and their certain bodies of work or a particular production team as opposed to just an artist. And the only artist that I would say I would do that with would be someone like a Pink Floyd because their artistry and music is embedded in their production style and they’re very, very picky about it. I wouldn’t put that with any other band; they’re kind of in their own world. One, because they don’t release very much, and two, when they do release, they’re nit-picky about every [darn] detail, even when they play live. And even when they were [together], once every five years was probably quick for them because of the detail they put into their productions. So for a band, I wouldn’t have a favorite for the purposes of translation, but for a producer, people like Quincy Jones would come to mind and [otherwise] it would be a producer [and it] wouldn’t matter which genre of production [he or she] did. You know his productions are all going to be pretty good because his standards of arrangement and production and the quality of his engineering staff are all quite high. So those Quincy Jones productions by and large, would be good to check out. As far as trying to find out “how did your room do,” Pink Floyd albums would be good to check that out. A lot of artists’ albums I would not try to check anything [with] because one might sound really good but actually might be kind of lousy because they [use] different production teams a lot of the time. So that being said, you know, I’d rather not get into the genres of this band or that band. I don’t think of it that way when I pick people to play. Only in an environment where I want to check out the sounds [would I] pick [these things], you know.

Jake: And how would you define the field you’re working in?

John: As far as my own studio and the kind of places that I work in (whether its a commercial studio where I record somebody and track somebody, [or] whether its my room where I’m mixing people and doing the posting of their work) I work pretty much most of the time in the music business […]. So its music CDs, music sound… I do live sound too. I don’t do a lot of it; I used to do a lot of it. Now I [do] just occasionally when there’s a huge concert where they’re looking back and finding teams that they’ve used in the past for large concerts. [Then] I’ll go out and do one, but other than that its mostly in the post production and production of music albums. Other than that, I have done film soundtracks, I have done sound design for film soundtracks… but I don’t do that regularly. There’s only been four or five in a period of 25-30 years as opposed to albums, [where] I’ve been doing those at a rate of about usually four to nine albums a year.

Jake: So broadly, you’re an audio engineer, in the audio engineering field.

John: Yeah. I’ve also designed systems for people. I’ve designed sound reinforcement systems for theaters. I’ve designed sound reinforcements for churches. I’ve designed sound reinforcements for schools; I’ve designed many studios and control rooms for a lot of local studios. They just pay me to consult. I go in there and its a lot cheaper than them going in and hiring an acoustician to do it. And no I’m not in the same league as [acousticians] are; you can’t tell me “I need a reverb time on my room of X” and expect me to tell you exactly how to build the room and what types of things to put on the walls. I can’t do that; I’ve never been in that category, nor do I want to be. That’s a very specialized field. I wish I could afford to hire those guys to work on one of the studios that I work in. I’ve worked in some of the studios they’ve built for other people and some of them I liked and some of them I didn’t; you know, which I also find kind of interesting.

The studio I found that changed what I look for (and how I think about what I look for) was actually designed by a friend. Actually, it was a type of system for [the] acoustics of a control room, which was starting to get fairly famous or infamous at that time. If you owned a studio previously, he was infamous, because nobody liked to hear it. If you didn’t have a studio yet but you were thinking about building one, now he was kind of famous and you wanted to know what he had to say since he was a famous acoustics kind of person. And for me, he had designed a room (which was one of the first of its kind in California) which was a live-end –dead-end room. It happened that some of my friends worked in and owned that first studio he did. So I was there for opening night and saw both the friend that designed it as well as the people who owned it and they went through the whole deal about what to listen for (did you bring something that we could play? and all this stuff) and the room was really a beautiful sounding room that I really liked. So I rented some time to do an album I was working on. Soon after that (a couple of weeks maybe), I was in there and it only took me one session to realize how, not only did it sound good, but that everything went faster in that room. It was as if I was doing everything more quickly than I normally do and I wasn’t rushing; I wasn’t going any faster than I normally do, but I was saving time. And the more I thought about it (after a couple of days working in there), the more I asked myself, “wow, what the heck’s going on?” I was estimating five hours but I did it in four, I estimated seven and I did it in five. Its like, “What the heck is happening?” It turned out… when you start EQing something or when you start panning stuff and you’re doing everything with reverbs and delays and stuff, typically you’ll do it and then you’ll have an idea and you’ll start fine tuning it. What I was realizing was those things happened effortlessly and very quickly in that room. All the EQing, it was either white or black, and usually when you’re EQing its kind of like “well that’s better but maybe a little more” but in that room it was kind of like “oh no there it is, oh went a little too far, no there it is!” and then you just move on to the next thing and after a little while its like “this is cool!” You almost felt like when you panned things, when you move them in the space, it was almost so clear that it seemed like you could reach out and touch where that sound was. And I had never experienced that in any kind of control room I’d ever been in. I’d never noticed that anywhere else.

So I did more work there and I didn’t want to go anywhere else. Then about a year and a half later they were having a little bit of a problem just keeping the space rented all the time and they were looking at possibly selling or leasing it. Narada Michael Walden, another producer, eventually bought it. At that point, I couldn’t get in and Narada is a good friend, too, but I had to beg and barter to get in there for a few hours to work. So it was kind of like “oh gosh, now I need to find another one of these dead rooms” because I really liked working in that room and everywhere else I worked I had trouble… not trouble, I just had what everybody else had, and things weren’t as clearly defined as in that space. And that led me, little by little, to keep talking to Chips Davis (the guy who designed the idea of the live-end – dead-end room and the physics of it) and I picked his brain whenever I could, to build my own, which I finally did, and that was then resolved.

The only problem now is I don’t have a tracking room. Most of the other rooms around here say, “I have a live-end –dead-end,” well, most of them have the idea of it but are not all the way live-end – dead-end. And it takes quite a bit to be that. So anyway, that’s kind of where I’m coming from. And that changed from that point on how I deal with “how did I pick a studio.”

Jake: So I have a small space (approximately 2000^3 ft.) for an average studio apartment to use for something. For example mixing, single-track recording, mastering… and I can afford maybe a thousand dollars to get it to the next level up from just a studio. What should I do?

John: Well, the first thing would be to determine where you are going to place you’re speakers. You don’t want doors opening and closing between the listening position and the speakers. You don’t want glass anywhere in between you at the listening position and your speakers – if there is any glass, which, you know, can mess with a lot of stuff – you have a problem. There’s very little you can do.

Jake: You mean on the walls?

John: On the walls, on the ceiling, on the floor. Anything, yeah. Live-end – dead-end rooms, from the back end of the speakers, on the ceiling, on the floor, on the sidewalls, including the back wall which the speakers are at, facing back at you. They must be 100% dead. Now that gets to be a little difficult if your control room glass, where you can see the artists, is there. We don’t want to block the control room glass because we want to see the artists and vise versa. Bad news is, if we block that, sonically that room is better; practically, that room is not better, Okay? I’ve even been in rooms where they tried to do this and they were using video cameras and the artists felt terrible. Because they don’t see anybody and there’s the booth with, you know, video cameras looking at them! And its like “this is bad enough,” it’s almost like the fish in the fish bowl kind of thing, where everyone is looking at them. So there’s a lot to be said for trying to design a control room studio where its livable to see, it has good visual contact with artists and the artists have visual contacts with the production team and yet, we can still have a dead environment between the speakers and the listener. That is hard in a lot of cases. Which is one of the reasons why when I built mine I did not try to do that. Instead I’m only making the control room. Period. I do not want the studio. I don’t want it because of all the hassle of having artists there, plus I didn’t have enough space to have a high enough space and a large enough volume of room to do drums justice. Mine is 19×21 ft. And that’s a nice size for a control room. It’s much bigger than this control room. But I can put the walls where I want. I don’t have to have any windows if I don’t want to. I can put the doors in the back or the front as long as I know “where do I put the speakers; is anything going to move up in that area,” you know.

Now what I’m going to do to deaden it: You don’t want doors, you don’t want somebody coming in and out of the door which would then change your acoustic space between the speaker and the listening environment because, essentially, from the listening environment, when you’re at the console, that spot from there to the speakers has to be dead. Straight up, all the way to the front, to the speakers, behind the speakers, to the sides of the speakers, on the floor, [and] all the way up to you. And that raises some problems; you’re going to have a board there for sure, [and] it’s going to be a big flat surface that the sound is going to bounce off of. However, if sound bounces off it and goes straight up and your ceiling is dead, at least it’s going to bounce once and deaden out again. So you have to control for all of those things. A lot of people who did live-end– dead-end found out that the back end of the board which the speakers are hitting as its traveling towards you, was a bummer because it usually projected it back up and a lot of control rooms have some sort of other things that it could bounce off of once it came back. So they would be putting deadening material on the back end of the board, all over the plugs to keep them from vibrating and all kinds of things like that. So there are a lot of little things. But generally, its “what area do you want the speakers in,” then it’s “pad it all down” (there’s a lot of ways to pad it down, you can buy normal insulation, you could cover it with fabric, you could put foam on the walls, but its got to be full band).

Jake: Like 703?

John: Yeah, or it can’t be some kind of thin acoustic tile. It’s going to have to be something fairly heavy.

Jake: So lets say that we accomplished deadening with the thousand dollars and we’ve already got the speakers in place…

John: I would say for a thousand dollars, it’d probably only cost you…

Jake: It’d probably cost you twice that much for the measurement equipment.

John: Yeah, but if you just had to buy the absorption stuff… $500, $600. As long as you didn’t buy the custom foam stuff… that’s very expensive, I would not go there.

Jake: So after you spent that $600, lets say you’ve got another thousand. What would you do next?

John: A live-end—dead-end room means that from you to the mixer to the speakers is dead. However, when I went to Tres Virgos, which was the name of that studio before Narada got it, who then switched it to Tarpan… They were under the assumption that the live section could be anything, it could be hardwood floors, a hardwood floor back wall, it doesn’t matter. And it may not matter all the time; however, if you have a flat back wall it’s going to bounce all the sound in one direction. I’ve been in rooms that did that. In my room I tried that and then tried to diffuse it, to see if that was any better. Then I tried different materials on the walls, not just wood, some wood, maybe some glass, but also some wood with some glass. Also some materials to absorb in certain spots. And I found that I liked controlling it with some deadening material. Not way dead, in other words, not what we’d put in the dead side of the room. What I’m meaning about dead is the difference between a hardwood wall and one layer of fabric over the hardwood wall. Or a little bit of sound absorption that was only maybe a quarter inch thick. It would take down some of the upper mid range. And then experiment, shoot the room again, see where we are. Do we need a little bit more in the corners? Because corners are where the bass will start building up on you. So if your bass was a little loose, what I’ve found was when I left the back wall fairly live, like “was it shot when I first went in there?” I didn’t like the bass as much. It was a little too bouncy for me. And as I experimented with “I’ll put a little bass trap here and there; lets not do the whole wall, lets just do the corners” and little by little, just getting it a little bit more dead, the bass way up in the front of the room was changing radically. Because you didn’t hear it bounce off that back wall, the back wall disappeared, [it] sounded like you were outside. [It] felt like you were outside, acoustically. That’s what it sounded like. But you heard it and it changed the tightness of the bass popping. If you had a really tight bass, like a kick drum or a bass where it was played very percussively, you know, that’s like slammin’ the fingers. It’d be a little messy with it all live in the back. As you put a little bit of absorption here and there, you could get it to where it was really tight; it didn’t slop over time. And so it was a matter of just kind of getting it in to tune to do that. So for me that’s what it took, rather than just leaving it all.

Jake: Probably based on something based on the room you were working in previously.

John: Yes, absolutely, and we were using sheetrock on some of those walls and the sound of any audio stuff hitting sheetrock is not always pleasant. It’s very dank sounding. It almost sounds like you’re in a dank cement type room; it does bounce off of it but the bounce that comes off is kind of upper mid oriented. Like 1k, 2k. And you don’t here the extreme his at all. So what I found was it’s nice to put a very thin fabric layer or some wood on the sidewalls, for instance. So my sidewalls are cedar. It could be redwood, could be oak; something that gives you a little bit of reflection, makes everything that’s coming from [the front and going] to the back hit sidewalls then bounce behind the listening position. And then it hits the back wall and comes back to give you a little bit of natural reflection. But then you’re controlling the amount of natural reflection in the back because you’re not letting the whole thing be completely live. You’re deadening parts and parts are going to be fairly live and that’s what I’ve found to be rule of thumb. Lets make it sound very, very natural and that’s taken a bit of doing.

Jake: So as a side note, when you’re shooting the room, what do you use for the microphone, for the hardware, do you use any software?

John: I have; I’ve used white analyzers, I’ve used IVIE, … one of the best systems is the TEFF system and that’s beautiful but its very expensive and I had somebody come in and look at it through there too. Its able to see reflections and tell you exactly how long it took to get back to a spot or how many times it bounced and where it bounced; its really cool, but they’re ten thousand dollar things, so I don’t own one. But what I’ve found was that as you put in these systems and you check the lows, the mids, the highs, and then you start shooting the room, once the room got fairly close I usually stopped analyzing the rooms. I didn’t keep tuning them to the analyzers; I started that way just to get them at least in the ball park and at least close, what I did after that was put them through kind of what you asked me before; what kinds of products would you put on the system to find out well “you’ve heard the Quincy Jones production on this system and you’ve heard it in thirty five systems, what does it sound like in this system?” and then what would it sound like if you left all the EQs out of the circuit and you just brought up a little bit more of the subs? Because it’s a four way active system, and what would’ve happened if you just brought up the low-mids compared to the subs? Just [brought them up] a tiny bit. Would it get more boomy? Would it keep things tight? What would it do? And what did it do to the flatness of the whole room? So what I found was that a lot of tuning had to go into the timing and the placement of the drivers in the room. Boy that’s…

Jake: That’s about half of it right there.

John: That’s a lot more critical than I ever thought. Yeah, you know, I mean people tell you, “hey if you really want a good mono than [one speaker] better not be a couple thousandths closer than the other [to the listening position], its like “wow, [isn’t] that true” plus if you have a system like this, where you got a four-way and [each driver is] dealing with different frequencies […], they’re all traveling different speeds, so even thought they’re kind of lined up visually, to you, [it] does not mean [they’ll be accurate]. Because one’s got low-mids compared to the other one, [which has] got lows; the lows are traveling slower and the low-mids faster and how do you deal with that? I deal with it with time delays in my crossovers. Very short delays you can tune. [… The] placement of the speakers is critical in getting a really tight signal. [That way] your mono is really mono. And that’s when you really start to reach out and grab the stuff, its right there. If you don’t do that, you’ll never experience that kind of a space. But [these things] had a lot more to do with it than I expected. The other thing that I found out was kind of a detriment: […] as I was doing that, I was going “wow, this is getting tighter and tighter. Wow, the image is getting better and better. If I move things… like, I got the board kind of in the middle but its far enough forward so as not to block the speakers [from] hitting me. For a while I had other equipment — outboard gear — off to the right or to the left of that board and for a while I had stacked up, […] not high, but [high enough so that] if I was sitting down at the board it might have been not at my eye level but below almost shoulder level or a little below shoulder level. That messed things up, big time. The whole image was screwed up. And as I was pulling the box out [I was] going “wait a minute, wait a minute, something’s moving; something’s changing. What’s happening?” And it was me, piling up FX boxes on the side. So then I took all the FX boxes out and tried it again. Everything cleaned up. So now I don’t have anything on my sides as the speakers are coming in my ears […] above 28 inches or so. Low! Very low! Because like we were saying, are the speaker’s sounds going to hit the back end of that board? Yeah! And it does get in.

Jake: So that’s all I have.

John: Ok hopefully that helped.

Jake: Anything else you’d like to add?

John: No, I think it’s a good project to do, […] in fact, its probably (I think) worse now than it used to be in that people now are given the ease of having a computer and having things in a work station. They think that because they can manipulate the digital parts of it that some how the acoustics don’t seem to matter as much. […] The acoustics matter a whole lot because you’re still basing all of your trust about “do I need it brighter, do I need it bass-ier, do I need it (whatever I need); do I need more ambiance, less, wetter, drier;” all of those things you’re basing on how you heard it coming out of the speakers and the speakers are extremely affected by the room and the acoustics of the room. […] You look at pictures of control rooms in magazines; and you go “look at that room, there’s crap everywhere in that room, how in the world could they ever work in there?” They can work in there, [but] they can’t work in there very accurately, and obviously a lot of people don’t understand that.

Jake: Doesn’t translate well.

John: Doesn’t translate well; might sound great in the control room; sounds great then you get it home and you go “what the hell am I listening too,” that kind of stuff happens. Its interesting, the publisher of mix magazine in the last issue was talking about exactly what we’re talking about right now saying […] “the audio guys got those computers and everyone seems to […] not even think about that stuff.” But just because you bought a fairly decent set of speakers doesn’t mean they’re going to be accurate. It just means you got one of the pieces that needed to be accurate but where you put them, how you put them in, what amp did you talk to [which are talking] to those speakers, and where did you put them in the room, and what did the acoustics in the room do to them… It’s a huge thing. It’s just as important as “what happened as the sound left the instruments before the microphones pick[ed] them up?” Both of those are extremely important and we’re getting to the point now where most people are more concerned with manipulating them in the digital domain because they have so much […] power to do stuff that that’s all there is and its like no, if you have bad sounds going in, all you’re going to do is band-aid them up even worse. So it’s a good thing to put things like this out there so that people are aware of the problem and then can kind of address it.

Jake: All right, thank you.

John: You’re welcome.