Tiny Telephone

Tiny Telephone is a studio set up by the band MK Ultra in San Francisco.  John Vanderslice is a member of that band and helps run the studio.  Todd Costanza is a member of Granfalloon Bus and interviewed John. Oh yeah, Todd's also the brother of David Costanza ("The Barn" Tape Op#4).  Read on...

John, I've heard you play quite a few times over the years and I've heard your recordings. I think you have a definite sound, that you know what you're going for, you know what you want. If I'm correct in saying there is a sound that you're after, what albums do you have that typify that sound?

David Bowie's Diamond Dogs, which is a fairly experimental record.  I think he did it in 1974.  A wide range of sounds, it's kind of out of genre, you know, it really shifts.  There's even hints of disco, like in the song "1984."  Many original sounds and textures, many acoustic instruments treated with effects or distorted.  That appeals to me.  And the underpinning is hi-fi.  It's a good sounding record; the drums, the bass, everything sounds natural and real, and that's a key for me, that it has to start out hi-fi.  I don't mind if the recording or the mix is pushed in a lo-fi direction, meaning maybe everything is heated up through a preamp or distorted, or kind of crunched through a compressor.  I don't mind that as long as the signal starts out hi-fi and the initial sounds are good.  I think on all the early 70's Bowie stuff they started out with great sounds and then really pushed it in the mix.

In terms of fidelity, I was going to bring up the supposed lo-fi thing that's going on. To me it seems like sort of a marketing scheme, because when I hear it I think of musicians working within their means. You have so much money to work with, you make an album and then somebody hears it and they call it lo-fi.

It's a cover up, isn't it?  I mean people are afraid, and they're rightly afraid of being overproduced.  The thing is that many bands have no control over their sound or their recording because they don't know enough, and everyone falls into that.  I mean, it took me ten years of fidgeting around with microphones and guitars to wake up and start to listen to initial sounds. It takes a long time to learn it, and I think, just like it's against (a musician's natural instinct) to deal with money and the business side of it, it's also against a musician's kind of natural intuition to be too obsessed with tones and recording techniques.  So the default is lo-fi, because then you don't have to be embarrassed about making an overproduced or slick record. But really the best thing is for a band to have enough experience in recording, like you guys, you know.  You've been in the studio, you know engineers, you pay attention to what engineers are doing.  So if you work with a particular engineer you're not going to be surprised at the sounds they are getting.  You'll know that that's a fit for you.  In your case Granfalloon Bus works with Greg Freeman and that's a perfect match.  Many bands hook up with engineers not really thinking about what kinds of sounds the engineers are going to get for them.  It's more of a personal connection.  I think that the best thing for any band is to start out listening to their guitars, listening to their amps. Actually getting down and sitting in front of their amps and listening to their signal.  That's really... that is rare.  It took me six years.  And finding out about equipment... You know, I had an Ampeg VT40 amp for five years, and I was embarrassed, I thought Ampeg was just some dumb company.  So I put a sticker over the Ampeg logo.  It wasn't until I got a good guitar that I realized that the amp was actually fantastic and that it was this classic '78 Ampeg VT40 tube amp, and then I kind of started fooling around with the EQ on it.  You know, just fooling around: "What happens if I use this 20dB cut?" "Well, it destroys your signal."  So then I decided just to run it at 0dB, no cut off, no roll off.  Anytime you roll off anything on a mic or an amp you might cause trouble, you know.  So I sat down in front of my amp and realized that I had a really good amp but that my settings were poorly chosen.

We went a little astray there...

Sorry, that's me (laughs).

I guess what I'm trying to find is the difference with a lo-fi band, someone like Pavement, who's considered a lo-fi band, they come out with a new album, spend more money on it, and then you hear people say, "Oh, it's too slick." So if you're the engineer or if you're the musician, what does "too slick" mean to you, how do you avoid it?

Well, I think that it's signal processing that makes records sound too slick. I think adding delay and reverb and chorus, in the mix, especially, I think that if you're just going straight to tape... Let's say you have the best of everything.  Let's say you have a brand new Studer 24 track.  You have extremely good preamps, and good compressors and you just run your signal direct to tape without fooling around with aural exciters or any other B.S., that you do no EQing.  If you bring that stuff straight to tape, get a good drum sound and then mix it back, get a rough mix of everything without processing anything, adding no reverb, adding no EQ, or very minimal EQ, maybe EQing the kick and snare to tape, but maybe that's all you need to EQ.  If you have good guitars and good amps, and you choose your mics well, you won't need to EQ guitars.  And the same with bass.  If you bring that stuff up, do a rough mix without adding any effects, I think it would be impossible to find a slick recording there.  It just won't happen.  What happens is an engineer will compress an overall mix.  That's a fast way to make things sound real radio and slick.  It takes out all the rough spots, which can be good, but if you over-compress it just makes everything soft and in the pocket.  And adding reverb on drums and reverb and delay on vocals.  Very quickly these effects add up and put a cushion between the ear and the band.  And it makes it soft.

So there's a fine line between lush and shit.

Oh yeah. Generally I like everything close miked and with very little effects, but with the initial signal there, so you hear a drum and it's a kick drum and it's a snare and it's a drum set in a room and you can feel it.  But I think that that's a way to avoid slickness.

We're nearing the year 2000 and I'm interested in the marriage of analog and digital. Now that you're starting the studio, what does technology offer that could really work now for continuing with analog recording but including digital?

Just right now, the state of digital, where it is right now, I wouldn't touch it.  I wouldn't record using a digital deck and I wouldn't record using a digital board.  I also wouldn't do any editing with Pro Tools.  That's my personal, intuitive feel, and digital people would certainly argue with me, but that's fine, that's why I've got my own studio.  Our thing is that we're in 1973; we have a deck from '73 and we have a board from '75.  You could stop at '73 and just have gear, that's in good shape, made before '73 and you could make the best sounding records, if you had the money.  And that's a long process of buying gear, but I think that, just from my experience, I would avoid going to digital until you make a 1630, which is the tape you send into the CD manufacturer to make a glass master from.  Or the CD-R.  In other words, I would absolutely avoid going to digital until that point.  I personally prefer vinyl.  Our next record is going to be pressed to vinyl and CD.  I like vinyl, but if a CD is recorded in analog, mixed in analog and is well-mastered and not fooled around with too much in the mastering process, in the digital realm, then it can sound great.  It really can sound very good.  So I'm not totally anti-digital, but I would say that you absolutely, 'til the last second, have to stay in analog.  And I've never, honestly never, heard a good ADAT recording in my life.  We had ADATs for three years and it's a long... it's like coming out of the closet.  It's like waking up.  You have to face the music that you hate digital, but if you've invested money in it it's very hard.

You did your early albums in digital, right?

Well, we did our first CD in a mixture of 8-track tapes and ADATs.  And I wasn't happy with it, definitely.  The second CD we decided to record at Dancing Dog and they had a one-inch 16 track and about $100,000 worth of vintage gear.  It was owned by Dave Bryson of the Counting Crows.  He had a tremendous amount of old vintage gear that he was just stockpiling.

I want to switch over to how you record as a band. Let's say there's a continuum going from completely live, just miking everything, even though they're on separate tracks or whatever, and just playing live. Say that's one extreme. And the other extreme is say, just setting a click track and doing one instrument at a time and doing everything piece by piece. Where is your preference and where do MK Ultra fit in that.

Well, for the second record, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, we isolated everything.  We stood in one room, but the two guitar amps were in different rooms and the bass amp was direct.  We had a DI signal only.  The drums were recorded in a very small room, a very dry room, and we didn't use a click track on anything, but we were going for a very separate feel.  No bleed whatsoever. So on this CD we decided, "Well, why don't we stand in a room.  Let's not use headphones, let's just have our amps and have a little bit of bleed.  We'll use baffling, but we'll do, you know, what Led Zeppelin used to do.  They'd just sit in a room.  They'd use some baffles.  They'd use small amps, generally, and we'll deal with the bleed later and we'll play live.  We're not going to worry about mistakes, we're not going to do punch-ins, we're just going let the tape roll. But we're going to make sure we borrow a lot of gear, get really good microphones in here and get everything just direct to tape sounding good.  And we'll deal with it later."  That's what we did and I think that it's good, but there's limitations to it also.  I think it's a good way to work, but on a CD you might want to have different sounds.  I think it would be great to have a click going and have the drummer play alone.  Do some kind of inventive baffling.  You know maybe putting a mic behind a baffle so you're getting the refraction of the drum off of a wall.  That might be a half a second delay, who knows, depending on how big your room is.  Maybe just have the drummer play and have things added on later. I think that it's good to mix it up.  I regret now that we didn't mix it up, but you don't always have enough time.

Mix it up from song to song within an album.

Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I think it's really important to mix it up.

Last time I was in here we were talking about the direction of this studio and you referred to it as a guerrilla studio.

It definitely started out as a guerrilla studio.  Meaning you just come in here and do fast and cheap recording and it's exposed dry wall, it wasn't clean, and probably your playing and recording would reflect that, you know.  You just come in here.  You wouldn't worry about much.  That's when we had ADATs in here and it was pretty much a demo studio.  Then last year we went to a Bay area studio, a 24 track two-inch studio and we actually got some money from Discovery and Adam from the Mommyheads produced a demo of ours.

What's Discovery?

They're a Warner label.  So, we got some money and we felt pretty snazzy, you know, and of course you're going to get mowed down whenever you feel snazzy. So we went to this studio and it was pretty expensive but we bargained on the rates; they were slow.  We brought our own engineer, and we made the worst recordings we've ever made in our lives.  We were pretty confident.  We felt you can't go wrong.  You go into a big studio, sure, you know, but the vibe wasn't quite right and who knows what was going on with the board and the wiring... They were worse recordings than the demos we were making in here, as far as feel, and even sonically they were dismal.

Was it a $1000-a-day studio?

It was about $350 without engineer.

What made it dismal?

I think there was something in the chain, possibly the board, in the signal chain that was just screwy.

Did you say the name of the studio? Are we allowed to?

No, I can't because I want to bash it even more.

[Laughter]

But anyway, I decided at that point, after we got these recordings and dropped $3,500 for three days or four days of recording, that I was going to have to control the recordings.   This was the first idea I had. I thought I really should convert the studio I had, which is really just a 17,000 square foot warehouse that is not even complete, not even built yet. That I should borrow some money and complete it and have a place for my own band, MK Ultra, to do recording in, because we were getting ready to make a new recording.  So that was my initial impulse, after going to another studio and getting burned and going, "Shit, I 'd rather be in my own place and know the walls, know the room, know the board, know the deck and own it.  And that way, maybe when we get some more money from a label, we're not going to piss it away.  It's actually going to go into our own pockets."  There were many precursors, you know.  Kyle, from Fuck, who opened his own studio, that was certainly in our mind.  We thought, "Look at these people.  They're controlling their own recordings and they're putting their money into actual capital."  It's stuff that generally, if they choose wisely, it's going to appreciate.  So that was the immediate impulse, to convert this place from, at that point, just a guerrilla studio.  We borrowed some money and bought an old Ampex MM1000, which was Greg Freeman's, the same deck that Greg Freeman had at Low Down.  It's the best 16 track ever made. It's the one, you know.  You can pick one up for $3,000.  People are going out and spending $4,000 or $5,000 on ADATs and they can go and get an 850lb. analog deck that's the shit.  It's the one.  It's the best.  Many, many techs and engineers will say it's the best sounding analog deck ever made.  And it certainly was responsible for every multitrack recording from '68 to '73, you know.  So we bought a few choice, kind of antiquated pieces of gear that no one wanted anymore because big studios have to have new gear and most smaller studios are going digital or buying smaller stuff.

So a bad experience in a "good" studio turned you out on your own here and now it looks like you are going to be recording other bands as well, besides MK Ultra. What are you going to do in here to give it a feel where a band can come in, maybe a band you like, someone who is local, and give them the confidence and feel to put out a good album.

Well, there are two things for us.  One is to have very good hi-fi or near hi-fi gear here for people to access.  We generally just go direct to tape, very little EQing, we try to use good microphones, we have two Neumann M582 tube mics.  They're small diaphragm, all purpose mics.  We use them as drum overheads.  We encourage people to borrow microphones, like when Granfalloon Bus was in here you guys borrowed the C12A, and there you have three great tube microphones that can be responsible for 80% of your signal on the record.  You know, you're doing all your vocals, acoustic guitar, drum overheads, which is most of the drum sound. And good mic pre's.

What are your mic pre's?

We have the Neve 1272's, which are pretty much the poor man's Neve modules that you can get from Brent Avril, who's in Sherman Oaks, CA.  They're $1500 a pair.  They're great. They're fantastic.  I mean, if you can't get a good tone out of there you are in trouble, you know.  You better just get out of town.

You're getting a new board...

Yeah.  It's a Quantum Audio Arts board from 1976.  It was hand built.  It's a 31 x 8 board.  It's actually a quadraphonic board.  It was made for quadraphonic recordings.  It came from Studio 55 in Los Angeles.  A big mainstream studio. At the time it was a primo boutique board, it's discrete mic pre's, very good Neve style usable EQs, four band parametric, all the way to 20,000 cycles.  I mean, you've got to love that.

Who advised you on this board?

Well, I actually talked to a number of people about the board.  The first thing I did after finding out it was for sale was I got the number of the engineer that worked at Studio 55 on the board for 12 years.  His name is Gabe Veltree. And he had no financial interest in talking to me about the board.  He has no financial connection to whether the board is sold or not, so I knew he was a totally disinterested third party.  So I just called him and said "This board you used to work on is for sale through a third person, and what do you think of the board?  You worked on it for 12 years."   He's a big name guy.

You just rang him up?

I just called him up.  On a Sunday.  That's pretty ballsy.  Anyway, he was incredibly nice to me, and he vouched for the board.  He said "$7000 is a steal, you should grab that thing.  It's a great board.  We did so many records on that thing."  Twelve years he worked on that thing.  He did the first Tom Petty record, he did Pointer Sisters, like "He's So Shy," "I'm So Excited," Barbara Streisand, a bunch of stuff.

There'll be ghosts in that board.

There are going be ghosts in that board.  Barbara's going to be fucking screaming in that board: "Get me my coffee!"  So, that's the idea.  What you want to do is call up like a 50 or 60-year-old engineer whose been working for forty years, you know, maybe he's mastered records at CBS, maybe he's worked at Ocean Way.  Find out the pros and just say "Hey, I'm a young guy and I need some advice."  They will keep you on the phone longer than you want to stay on the phone, because they are just impressed that anyone cares anymore and that you respect them.  So that's what I did.  Just called up local people.  Steven Jarvis.  Engineers.  John Croslin, who recorded Spoon, he's a brilliant engineer.  He did Spoon's Soft Effects EP, which, if anyone hasn't heard that, sonically it's totally original.  It's a very, very good  recording.  I called up these engineers and I said "Tell me, what do you use, what kind of mics, what kind of compressors, what kind of mic pre's."  The same stuff comes up. Urei 1176s.  Summit tube pre's and compressors.  Manley.  Same kind of gear.  Neumann tube mics, you know, pre-'74.

You said you called up Dan Alexander as well.

Called up Dan Alexander.  He's the owner of Coast.  He knows you, and he knows your brother even more.  So there's a connection with Tape Op, because the first issue I got was the interview with your brother.  He didn't mention Dan by name (in the interview) but he said he was getting this gear from a guy who was refurbishing the floors in his house.

I just brought him up because I've been to his studios and seen his stuff and he kind of has a warehouse full of this gear like you are talking about. He's a wheeler dealer.

He buys and sells gear and he will talk to you.  He will tell you what he knows, and that's good, you know.

But he told you something.

Oh, "Go digital."  He said, "Go digital."  Well, you know...

Does he mean either you have to have half a million dollars or go digital? What was his point with that?

Well, his point was that he didn't think it was worth it for a young studio to buy an old Ampex deck because there's upkeep on the deck and it's funky.  It's not punch-in friendly, which I personally like.  I think that anything that discourages bands from doing punch-ins is good.  Including vocal takes.  I think that you really should rethink the idea of punching in parts and making every word perfect.  I think that's a major major mistake.  So he wants to do digital editing.  He wants crystal clear recording.  See, all the problems with analog are actually, and people should realize this, all the problems with analog are the best things about analog.  Noise.  The suppression of high end and the multiplication of low frequencies, not to mention tape compression, which is everything.  You compress to tape and it's some of the best compression you can get.  It's very smooth and natural and subtle and it keeps everything in line.

You mentioned it discourages punch-ins, but its seems kind of studio standard to have someone do 100 vocal takes. I was just hearing this from Adam of the Mommyheads. Do a bunch of takes and then piece the whole thing together.

Well, I'm trying to get the Mommyheads in here to do their next record and I'd love to see Adam try and punch-in on this deck.

I agree with you on that. If you can't sing the song all the way through then get out of the studio.

(Laughter.)

Well, in the end it's all personal preference.  It's not like I'm going to challenge someone to a duel if they want to do 100 vocal takes.  But just for me, personally, I found it to be a revelation when I had to keep continuous takes down and not fool with them and then you come to the studio the next day and everything sounds good again.  It's like, "Wow.  You know, there's something about this mistake here that's very, very pleasant."  And if you take out all the mistakes, just like with digital, the whole thing with digital is it's mistake-free, you can put that thing up on the Mac and hack those tracks to death, you know, and it's lifeless.

I love mistakes. We had a great one here when we were recording. The Blue Angels. Did you hear that on the track?

Yeah, the Blue Angel jets come right in at the end of the song.  The Blue Angels are Navy fighter pilots who fly over San Francisco.  So that bled on the microphone when Granfalloon Bus were recording in here.

Of course that's not a mistake of analog.

But it's a state of mind to be open to that.  So yeah, I think anything that discourages punch-ins and encourages takes as they are is good.  That's my stand.

That's good. I hope you carry that on here.

Yeah, we will.

So are you in a desperate business state where you'll do anybody's demo or are you trying to hand pick some bands to come in here? What do you hope for?

Our whole thing was that this was our rehearsal hall before it was our studio. We still rehearse here.  The rent is low.  It's rent controlled.  We decided that the studio was never going to be seen as a money making venture; that's a major mistake and it's going to make everyone neurotic.  So we decided to borrow some money.  We'll charge pretty low rates and we won't look for business.  We're never going to advertise.  It's word of mouth.  We've been discouraging people recently because it's been too busy and also we're trying to finish our record.  So that takes up a lot of time.  But the goal right from the start was to have house engineers.  Greg Freeman, primarily, is our house engineer.  I wooed him.  I mean, in a way, this place was built to woo him over here.  So Greg Freeman, Damian Rassmussen, who used to manage Dancing Dog and work there, and did our second record.  Two very, very good engineers.  Also, Rick Stone, another good engineer who used to work at Dancing Dog.  Those are the three engineers who work here.

Do you encourage bands to bring other engineers in?

Actually, we probably won't.  I'm not even sure if we will allow it, at this point.  I don't want a lot of people passing through here.  The gear is relatively delicate, you know.  We'd rather keep it down to being blocked out 15 days a month and having all the engineers, who we know, have keys to the place.  We're friends with them, we've known them for years and we know they're responsible.  It's going to be kind of a family affair.  And we do really hand pick bands that come in.  If we like a band we will approach them and say "Listen, we'll cut you a deal, we'd like to be part of your next recording," as in the case of Granfalloon Bus.  There's been many other bands that we've encouraged to come in here.  The Keeners, Action Slacks, a whole bunch.  The Mommyheads right now.  Engine 88, you know.  We got them to do almost a CD's worth of material in here.  That was great for me.  So yeah, we're going to be hand picking bands and probably discouraging bands that we don't know from coming in here, just because it's going to be too busy as it is.

That's good. I'm happy for you. Let's just do one last thing. We've talked before about headphone treats, a personal favorite of mine, for the stoners who like to put on the headphones and go, "Wow." Do you have any good headphone treat ideas?

Well, I think that I rely on nonstandard instruments, generally, for those kind of sonic treats.  We have a Moog Source, which is the first programmable Moog. It's a very simple, late Moog synth.  You can pick one up for $500.  If you ever find one buy it.  They're incredible.  Two oscillators and a noise generator.  You can make some incredible tones with that synth.  We wrote a lot of patches on that and it has an incredible range.  You can get very high tones and very low tones and if you mix them down very low and you pan them you can barely hear them.  Until you put them on headphones, then they're there. Also, we have a very early Roland guitar synthesizer that we use a lot, and again, you can make sounds that are totally original.  Tones that you've never heard before.  We use a lot of samples.  I've sampled a lot from classical CDs, like early 20th century Schoenberg and Weburn and a lot of Hafler Trio.  I probably shouldn't say this, but a lot of more avant garde, experimental cut and paste music.  And then we drop those samples in more as kind of a texture feel.  Can I add, and this isn't really a sonic treat, but the one thing that I've discovered in the past two weeks, that's been the most important discovery for me personally?  It's not my idea, it was suggested to me by Brent Avril, who sold us the Neve 1272 mic pre's.  The idea is to put the whole mix directly through the 1272s.  Up the gain, lower the output and get a little bit of amp distortion.  This is when you're mixing down, instead of compressing, to warm up the signal.  I have to say that this is the sound I was looking for my whole life.  It's that kind of crunched, heated, slightly broken up sound that I've been looking for.  Talk about getting away from overproduced.  You put anything through 1272s and crunch them hard and they will begin to sound, well, slightly metallic, crunchy...

Does it take away the dynamic range?

It does.  It compresses.  As you know, compression is distortion.  If you're getting some distortion you will be compressing, but sometimes you have to compress a bit to get everything in line.  But you can always back up from the gain, and it was the sound, it was what I was looking for.  It converted some good recordings into something that I would feel comfortable mixing direct to a disc.

So you've found the exact sound you're looking for.

Yeah.  Totally.

You can quit now.

Yeah, I can quit.  I'm just going to do that for every damn song we do.  It's amazing what it does.  It tightens up everything.  The kick and the low end, everything comes together.  And in a way it makes everything more monochromatic and unidimensional, but in a good way.  In the end it makes the sound more focused.  It's a trick.  It's worth spending $1500 to get two of those things.

So are the kids allowed to try this at home?

Yeah, it's the way.  It's the thing to do.