J.D. Foster | TapeOp

Ask JD Foster. From his days playing bass with the likes of Dwight Yoakam, The Silos and Lucinda Williams, to producing and engineering the records of Richard Buckner, Marc Ribot, Eszter Balint, and Green on Red, JD Foster has left his distinctive mark in recording studios across the map. From his Manhattan home JD spoke to me about his recently completed production — and recording — of Marc Ribot's recent solo guitar record Saints, his fanatic attraction to gates, and why a producer is, or isn't, very important to the recording process.

How did you get involved as an engineer/producer?

I started as a bass player and I really wanted to do the sideman thing. It all came to some sort of fruition when I packed up my stuff and moved from Florida to Los Angeles with only a couple of bucks in my pocket. I did whatever gigs I could get in L.A. and ultimately ended up playing with Dwight Yoakam — on his first records, the Tonight Show, The Grammys and all that shit. I had reached some goals, then I started thinking about other things I should pursue. I've always been a freak for records and I wanted to be involved in making some.

When you were a player, say back in The Silos, were you doing a lot of your own recording?

Not really. The reason I got into having a home studio was that I started getting some scoring work — I've done a fair amount of scoring for Court TV and some feature documentaries — but other than that the home stuff has been more for working out song arrangements and experimenting... trying things out.

When you are in the studio with an artist, how do you translate your arrangement and musical back- ground into technical speak?

I try to speak the same language as the artist. When you're chasing down the overall vibe of a recording, you know, the arrangement, instrumentation, tempo, sound, feel...probably the biggest factor is communication. It's exciting to figure out with the artist and engineer the direct technical way to record the sounds they're hearing in their head.

You've worked in many different studios. Do you depend a lot on the in-house engineer?

I like working at studios where the house guy is an engineer who's work I know and trust. Feedback from a great engineer is way important, and the best way to learn new tricks. When I was recently working with Larry Crane at Jackpot!, we would discuss which mic to use on every source. I always have an opinion on how to get a sound, but I certainly want to hear what somebody like Larry or Andy Taub or Craig Schumacher or John Smith has to say, because these guys do it day in and day out. Working with a good engineer allows me to focus on performance, vibe, direction, and so on, while my ass is being covered on the technical side. I did, however, just finish Marc Ribot's solo record [Saints] which I engineered and mixed myself, and that was cool too.

When you are formulating the making of a record what is your role in the decision making process? Do you choose the studio, the players, instrumentation...?

On Richard Buckner's Devotion and Doubt for instance, when we first met Rick asked how I felt about working out in Tuscon with John Convertino and Joey Burns [of Giant Sand/Calexico]. He also wanted Lloyd Maines to play steel. He had some things in mind and, I mean, how hard can those choices be? All those guys are great, and working at WaveLab was right down my alley — I'd worked there a couple of times before with Dan Stuart. And I brought in Rich Brotherton, Champ Hood and Marc Ribot. On other records I've worked on I've had input into what players to use- and I do like to work in a studio where ya know you can get the sounds you need. However, budget plays a role in all choices as well.

How do you use new or old gear to inspire your next move?

I don't want to seem like some blatant advocate for consumerism, but I do feel that plugging in some new (to you) piece of gear can make you look at things in a slightly different way. Look at guitar players, if you give them a new pedal to play with they might come up with something totally different, and that works for me as well. For that reason I've acquired a bunch of cheap audio toys — I'm always trying to find some quirky little junk that sounds good in some way. And I'll buy any microphone under ten bucks if it looks interesting. You can balance some horrible noise against something beautiful.

Do you spend a lot of time getting things to sound good when it is going to tape or do you work with it later?

I like it to sound right going to tape. A lot of the time I'll cut tracks with effects. And certainly cutting in the right room, with the right mics in the right spot is pretty tried and true.

When you are recording, do you keep tape rolling all the time?

Sure, with hard drive recording, but who can afford to roll all the time with analog? But it's actually saved my ass to have a DAT going. As a matter of fact, at the end of a session during the tracking for Ribot's first Prostizos record [engineer] Andy Taub mentioned that we had about six or seven minutes left. So I say to Ribot, "Whatcha doin' next?" He says, "Aurora en Pekín". So I'm like, "Alright, cool, how long is it? Five minutes? Go." Of course the tape spools off the reel on the last note, so what you hear on the record is actually the mastered version of the DAT we had running. And that's how the record starts.

In the case of a "live" recording, say with the Prostizos records, is there a middle place where all the sounds are right and the performance is right?

First of all, both the Prostizos records were limited in budget. We had several very busy New York pros who make their living playing, so we didn't have a lot of time. We had three days to track and burned a day and a half of that just getting settled in — we didn't get a performance until well into the second day. Whereas when tracking Devotion and Doubt I feel like that came together much earlier. It's hard to say why that is. But it's interesting because I think sometimes it's harder for a band that plays live together to gel in the studio. In a session where people who respect and know what each other have done, but haven't played together before, magic can occur more easily — the randomness of the happy accidents.

As a producer, how do you know when that happens? Do you run into conflicts with the musicians a lot?

"How 'bout a bloody nose fuckface?" No, not too often. I feel like my job is basically to sit back on the couch and point out what's cool, or what's not. That's what I'm hired to do, give an opinion. Obviously I'm somewhat on the same page with Richard Buckner and Marc Ribot — they keep asking me to come in and do what I do. It's all a matter of trust. With people I work with for the first time I like to give a little speech: "We're all here for the same reason and all I ask is that we remember that anything is worth a try." Things go smoothly when everyone is open-minded.

How do you help an artist pick what are the best songs?

It's an interesting process. For instance with Richard Buckner they are all going to be good songs. If they pass his test.... With Ribot you're looking more for the performance so you do cut a lot of material. On Saints we filled up 110 Gigs of hard drive on three or four tracks of audio, you can guess what kind of sorting that implies. I think a lot about sequencing. Not so much while tracking, but later, as the songs take on their final form. One thing I really try to do is to make records that people want to listen to in their entirety. But this is a bit of a challenge in the age of the CD, even a short CD, and I encourage short records. The agenda of being able to listen to the whole thing has a big play on what tunes you choose. Even something that you may think is a better tune and performance sometimes won't work as well in the final sequence.

What do you look for in sounds, i. e. mic characteristics?

Ambient vs. dry and clean vs. dirty. For instance, it's super subtle, but on all the tracks where we used fiddle on Devotion and Doubt, it was cut with a real mic and a shitty mic. I don't even remember now what the good mic was, you know [laughs], maybe a AKG 414, but the other one was a no-name-plastic- dynamic tape recorder mic I have. There's something about it that gives this sort of spiky edge to the beautiful condenser sound that really appeals to me. You try to find an interesting sound that is true to what the sound needs to be.

Larry said that when you were tracking at Jackpot! with Richard Buckner, you did cool stuff with gates. How do you use the gates on your instruments?

This last year I finally got my gear out of my house and into a small studio space. I go in there and experiment with plugging stuff in and see what weird sounds I can make. It's nothing new but I got really obsessed with key gating. Using rhythm sources off other things that were already on the track as the key for a new source. For example, put down a keyboard pad and then, say, have shakers key it during the chorus, and then have the guitars key it during the bridge. It really makes for some interesting but totally locked-in rhythms. At Jackpot, Buckner had this sort of strummy guitar part and, well, there's plenty of strummy guitar parts already, so we put down this Casio keyboard part playing just whole notes all the way through the changes and gated it so that the strummy guitar was the key opening up the gate on the Casio. So it's the rhythm of Rick strumming the guitar but the sound coming out is this one-finger cheap Casio part.

So are you using your home set- up to fine tune some of these experimentations?

Not only fine tune them, but find them.

What exactly do you have going down there?

I have a Tascam 388 8-track, an ADAT, and some Siemens V276 mic-pres. The RNC for $200, I mean how can you go wrong? I have some cool microphones too: a Reslo and a couple of old RCA ribbon mics. I recently bought a Neumann Liepzig tube mic which we used for all the vocals on Buckner's thing at Jackpot!. That's an amazing microphone. I also own a pair of Altecs alt shakers, an EV665, a Stedman N90, mics that have a quirky thing about them. You know, the type of stuff you won't see walking into every studio — those are the kinds of things I collect. And I have a couple of broadcast limiters and some old tube stuff and lots of junky sound-making toys.

In terms of the new Ribot record did you have a pretty high standard set up for how you recorded the guitars?

The thing is, you have Marc Ribot playing guitar so there is a lot of variance in what is going to happen. He 's amazing at using effects, and the guy's a genius — he really knows how to play the guitar. Also, there's a place that I like to work in New York called Sperry Sound. It's a large room with beautiful ambience, and that helps. Robot's main instrument on the recording is an Audition hollowbody, a sub- beginner guitar that Woolworth's was selling in the late '60's and early '70's — somebody gave it to him. It's held together with duct tape and the action is so horrible that you can't tune it above a low C#. He did an earlier record [Don't Blame Me] with this guitar and he's used it on every record we've done together, as a limitation really. Limit your options and see what kind of art you can build. As for tracks, the most on any tune is 5 and a couple are 2. We only used four channels of mics on any pass. We had a pair of Vintech — NEVE mic preamps and a Mytek A/D converter, but we also used a Beringher Ultra-Gain, recording onto Logic. So we used some $1800 mic pres and some $180 mic pres. We switched amps around some. The one constant was a Shure SM57 for close-micing the amps. Marc also has a Sennheiser that someone put him onto, it's a small diaphragm condenser mic, I think it 's a KMH-40 but I'm not sure, with a pretty nice sound that was up close to the guitar, and we would vary that with a Microtek Geffel UMT-70. With the second amplifier mic, which was as much room mic, I was using either a RCA 74-B or a Reslo ribbon mic, and sometimes the Stedman N-90. I'd move the second mic around quite a bit. The tunes using acoustic guitar were recorded in a very small Manhattan apartment using the AKG C-12A and a Sennheiser 409 close up. And when I mixed at the Magic Shop, the main balance issue was between the mics that were close to the guitar, the amp sounds and the room.

You talk about balancing ambience sounds against dry sounds a lot. What exactly does this mean for you?

I'm refering to the distance the mic is from what it's recording — some sounds need to be upfront and intimate for definition. But, in a good-sounding space, getting the mic further away from the source sounds can totally change the overall feel of a track. Another side that's not really technical as much as it is feel... I think that the human condition of nostalgia is an element of music. It seems to me that when and where they hear something has a giant effect on how people remember music and how it affects them. When you listen to recorded music... the performance stays the same, only you change. How is it that a record not only defines its own sense of space but plays at defining the emotional time/space of each listener? Some records have this huge dimension of depth and others have total intimate presence. I believe the ambient size of a recording can play as big a part as anything on a record's ability to communicate emotion.

What draws you to a production job and how many calls do you get?

Calls? Not enough! I only take a job where I feel I can make the magic work. I'm not about conquering the market, or coming up with the latest radio-ready sound. It's not that wouldn't feel good if a record I've produced is successful on its own terms. The main thing for me is, does this record need to exist?, then deciding with the artist what the direction should be. Should it be intimate? Should it be big? Do all the songs work together in a natural flow? Ultimately there's one criteria for how I will work on something: Is it something that I can put enough emotional investment into... to trust my own instincts about? I won't mention any names, but I've seen producers that are just sitting up there bullshitting about what's cool or what's trendy. Who fucking cares? I mean, what are we trying to do here? I'm saying I've got to fucking care about the music before I walk in, then hopefully we'll record something great.