This man should need no introduction. At the height of "grunge-mania" he had recorded the records for Mudhoney and Nirvana that started it all. And he did tham fast and cheap. On the back of Nirvana's Bleach was the famous sentence, "Recorded in Seattle at Reciprocal Recording by Jack Endino for $600." Faced with 100 clone bands trying to get the same results (yeah, right) he fled to doing recording work in other countries and sticking to working with "rock" bands that he dug. He was also a member of the awesome Skin Yard, where his guitar skills were in fine form. We tracked Jack down in Seattle while he was tracking the new Zen Guerilla album for Sub Pop at Studio Litho for an in-depth interview.
I'm curious about what you were doing before Nirvana and all of that. Obviously you had been recording and playing music before any of that stuff hit and how you got going into recording in the first place.
Well, I started with an electrical engineering degree and ended up working at the Navy yard in Bremerton, Washington, for 2 1/2 years. It was a pretty stupid job after college and so I decided I was going to do something else. I had a plan. I already had some recording gear but I figured I would get some more, learn how to use it and when I'm ready I'll go back to Seattle. I lived in a mobile home for a winter with just a reel to reel 4-track machine, a six channel Tapco mixer, three mics, a little cheap drumset, a Fender Twin, a bass amp, a bass and a guitar. I just recorded myself for a few months and then I moved back to Seattle and started hooking up with musicians and found myself in a couple of bands. I ended up meeting Chris Hanzsek when he was recording my band Skin Yard for the Deep Six comp, which was in '85, and I said I had a bunch of recording equipment and I was looking to work in a studio and he said he had a bunch of recording equipment and was looking to open a studio so we became partners. We then moved into the defunct Triangle recording building in June of 1986.
What did you call that studio?
Reciprocal.
Oh, yeah, the famous one.
I only owned a very minor part of the equipment so I eventually stopped being a partner and just let Chris take over. In keeping with the freelance guy that I've been ever since. It never really was my studio at all, it was really his place. I was at Reciprocal for five years — that's where I worked and it was fun. The first time I did a session at another studio, with different speakers and a different room, I almost made a complete idiot of myself.
Oh, no.
This was like 12 years ago or something. I didn't realize it, but Reciprocal was a very strange room and it had a very strange, very small control room with big weird acoustics. I was totally used to compensating for it. Once I got into a normal studio, I was just floundering. Everything sounded totally alien. Now I can pretty much go anywhere and I pretty much know what to look for and how to get my sound regardless of where the hell I am. Once you work in other rooms it makes you a much better engineer and when you come back to your studio, it'll give you a new appreciation for the improvements you can make. You'll suddenly realize weaknesses that you weren't even aware of. And you'll go, "I should put a bass trap over in that corner or I should move the speakers up over there."
You did a lot of work out of Reciprocal, but it wasn't all grunge music, right?
No, most of it was rock though. There was the occasional bar band or blues band or god knows. There were some jazz people that I knew that I recorded sometimes.
A bigger variety then?
Yeah, a little bit, for a while we had to record everybody who walked in the door when we first opened up. And then as I sort of started specializing in rock, I ended up just taking those jobs. Reciprocal closed in 1991, Chris closed it down because he had pretty much outgrown the building.
I assume you'd rather being doing rock recording.
Well, pretty much. I like variety and I like doing other things when they come up, people just don't call me with other things though. There are plenty of rock bands around here, so I have no lack of work.
What stuff have you done recently besides the Zen Guerrilla session?
I did an album for Nebula. Zen Guerrilla just got finished. I was in Portugal doing a band for the month of March and prior to that I did a record in Mexico City in September. I did a record for The Black Halos for SubPop. I got to go to Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, in November to mix a record by Elevator Through for Sub Pop. This is a band that used to be Elevator to Hell, before that they were Eric's Trip. They've got this very psychedelic record with a Syd Barrett cover on it and I mixed it and it was pretty fun. Hotrod Lunatics, RC5, Us of All were here in Seattle. Guillotina in Mexico. I got to go to Chicago in January and do a record for Thrill Jockey for a band called the Nerves. I got to work in a studio called Uber studio and made a record with no digital reverb or delay anywhere which I don't think I've had a chance to ever do before. The actual room was so good that I didn't use any reverb on anything. We just used the room for everything.
Just put extra mics up for that?
Yeah. The drums were amazing with the room mics thrown in and when we wanted room on the vocals we just put a mic back in the other end of the room and we threw a little bit of tape delay on the vocals so technically, there's no digital anything. So that album's coming out in July, I think.
How do you end up getting jobs in other countries?
All of these records I've done, a lot of them get to other countries. That's basically it. People just track me down somehow and they say, "Hey, we picked up the Accused record that you did eight years ago and we want your sound", so that's how I've ended up in nine countries other than the U.S. Sometimes I don't make a lot of money on these things, I just go for the travel and the music is interesting and it's different from what I get around here. It has to be a decent band, obviously or I wouldn't make the trouble.
Do you listen to previous albums and demo tapes and stuff before you take on any project at this point?
At least, I've got to at least hear a demo or something. It's nice if I can actually see the band pay live, it's really the best thing, I don't always get the luxury of that. It's funny, when I recorded Mudhoney, I didn't actually see the band live for like a year and a half or something after I did their first single.
No way.
I was so busy touring with Skin Yard at the time that I just never had a chance to see Mudhoney. In that time they became such a draw here that you couldn't get into their show. I still haven't seen Pearl Jam for the same reasons. I don't really care to see them in a coliseum. It's not like seeing Green River in the Ditto Tavern.
Given the stuff you're doing, you're probably not getting paid exorbitant amounts of money for production jobs.
With the kind of music I do, the money's not there...it's not that the money's not there, I'd rather not emphasize money here. I do actually get major labels from other countries. I've got two gold records from Warner Brazil on my wall and I've done a couple major label records in England and a couple in Denmark and I've done some major label records in Germany and actually the Mexican band I worked with was on Warner Mexico for a while. Here in the U.S. I pretty much got stuck with indie stuff, which is fine because the politics of the industry here are much more of a pain in the ass as we all know. In other countries, the major labels seem to act more like the indies do here. They're just smaller operations and there's not all this turnover in the personnel and you don't have somebody leaning on you in the studio, checking daily mixes or whatever. I've done major label records in countries where I never even met or spoke with anyone from a major label. The kind of music I do in general is rock and you have to realize that rock is not that big a part of the big picture. You know? Guitar rock and roll is not that big a part of the big picture in terms of the money that's made from record sales. Particularly in the last five or six years it's definitely not been getting a lot of press. I'd say most of the innovation has been happening in other genres.
You want to do the kind of work you're going to keep enjoying over the years.
You can't work 14 hours a day, six days a week, month after month, year after year on something you hate, you know what I mean? I would commit suicide if I was doing really horrible music. It's really fun when I get a band that I really like. It's a blast, I'll kill myself; I'm a total workaholic.
You want to make something really good with it.
We ended up doing a 26 hour day on the last day of the Zen Guerrilla record. We all got sick and lost a bunch of time in the middle of the project and ended up in this frenzy to try and finish it because they were on tour and had to leave town so we had to finish it and we just ended up staying up all night. We were still doing vocals at six a.m. and I was mixing and it was a frenzy and we got the damn thing done. Everybody's happy and you know, I just went home and collapsed and died for about a week. It was just like, "Okay, I'm going to work all night. We are going to do what's necessary."
Do you ever have very many things that go overtime?
Nope. Damn few. Sometimes I wish I could go overtime on a few things, you know? You have to work within the time and money that's allotted.
How long did you have for Zen Guerrilla? Like two weeks?
We had a couple of weeks, yeah, it was fun. I did a record for Watt that's gonna come out on Estrus and we think we did the whole record in about five and half days. Those guys are totally used to it; they were just like, "Okay, let's go, next thing, okay, okay, let's do the vocals. Okay, let's see...okay, guitar, okay, solos, okay get out there, let's do the solos." It's great. I've actually done bands that did the whole thing live in like a day. And sometimes it actually sounds alright.
That's one of the things I think that friends of mine in Seattle were mentioning, when you first started getting some acclaim, was that you can get a good drum sound really quickly.
I can still do that actually. You know what? That's funny because I hate my drum sounds.
Really?
In fact I hate all the records I've ever done. I hate music. I hate everybody. Fuck you all. Nah, just kidding. But really, I do get frustrated with drum sounds. I hate snare drums, I just can't ever get a damn snare drum sound that I like. Then I realize that there aren't really that many records that have a snare drum sound that I like. I don't know how anyone else does it either, you know? You always end up coming back to a 57 pointing at the damn thing and you know, I tear my hair out trying all kinds of shit and I keep coming back to the stupid 57 on the snare again and it sounds the same way it always does. I don't have the time to experiment sometimes, you know? People can't sit around there waiting for me to spend like three hours on a snare drum.
It's seems like diminishing returns sometimes too. I mean, you can frustrate the whole band and drag the project to a screeching halt trying to fine tune one little element.
Exactly, sometimes you just have to go, "Okay, we have a week to do this, let's go." You know if I have a week to do drums, that's a different story. Let's get a bunch of snare drums in here and screw around with mic'ing. What is the killer snare sound? I think most people have just given up and are now using samples these days. I'm just old fashioned, you know, I still wanna, you know, I want it to be different every record.
What record would you say have ultimate really great sounding snare sounds?
Don't ask me, I can't even tell you.
I was just wondering if you had...
It's just some gauge notion that's in my head, some ideal floating around out there that I'm trying to reach for, but...
It might not even be something that exists, you know.
You hear it on records that are like, really expensive and you go, how the hell did they get the snare drum to sound that good. I guess the best way to get a good drum sound is to have a good drummer. That seems to be the bottom line. With a really good drummer you just hang a mic over and it's amazing, no matter what he's playing. You don't get drummers like that too often. You get drummers that are just wailing on the high hat and they've got a little wimpy snare drum and cymbals all over the place and you just deal. Get rid of all high hats and see what happens. All our lives would be so much easier. 90 percent of the time I'll record the high hat on a separate track and I'll end up erasing it later. Seriously, 95 percent of the time you'll just end up using the overheads and there's already too much high hat in it anyway.
What do you always end up going to for the kick drums?
I'm pretty much a D112 guy. It's pretty much it for me. Sometimes I'll play with a 421 or an RE20 but basically I'm a D112 guy. There just is no replacement for me.
We have both. I just keep switching them back and forth and I keep leaning towards the RE20.
They're both good mics the D112 is a lot cheaper.
That's one thing I always tell people if they're looking to set up a small studio.
An RE20 would be more useful overall. Like to use it on bass. I wouldn't use the D112 on anything else, except I did use it for vocals a while ago and it was pretty weird. I had a female singer who, when she hit certain notes, there was this real sharp edge to it. We tried every mic, suddenly it was like, "Wait, what about this one." And damned if we didn't end up cutting all the vocals to the D112. Who knows if I'll ever do that again, but it worked.
I've started using the RE20 a lot more for vocals, depending on the singer of course.
Ben sang through that thing on all the Gruntruck records and for that matter, Chris Eckman of the Walkabouts always sings through a 421, if I remember right. You know what I use mostly as a vocal mic? I use a Beta58. I'm serious. I use a Beta 58 on almost all my vocals for this rock stuff. I was in a studio the other day where we had a beautiful Neumann U47 and we had the Beta 58 next to it and we put the singer up to the 47 ran it through a compressor, listened to it and hated it. Put him on the 58 and everybody immediately went, "Oh yeah, that's the sound." With certain rock voices, you get a voice that's really loud and out of control you just need a dynamic mic, I don't know why.
Do you take stuff around with you, like mics and outboard gear and things, when you go out to work in different studios?
When I'm here in Seattle I do. I don't bother taking stuff on the planes with me. The only thing I carry around with me everywhere is a spectrum analyser. It's an Audio Control 3050A. It's made by a company up here in Seattle. It's actually to the point that I have one here and a friend of mine is storing one for me in London, so when I go to Europe I can get him to send it to me over there and I don't have to deal with the customs thing. Another friend of mine in Brazil has got one down there so if I go back there there's one there I can use. When I go from room to room, let's not even get into it, I mean speakers in rooms... you might calibrate your tape deck and have the best pre-amps in the world, but I'm sorry, the rooms and the speakers are such a tremendous variable.
As far as control rooms?
Just the control room's acoustics and speaker frequency response and how they interact with the surface of the board and how far away it is. It's all so radically, wildly different from studio to studio. It's just beyond belief. I always have my analyzer with me and I just plug it into the main output of the board right into the speaker output actually, the thing that's going to the speaker amp, so that whatever I'm hearing on the speakers including solos, in other words if I solo a channel basically, whatever's in the speaker is in the analyzer.
Control room output, yeah.
I glance at it from time to time and I'm thinking, is there enough bottom? I've basically watched enough records and enough of my stuff through this analyzer that I pretty much know what a fairly balanced rock record looks like on this spectrum analyzer. I can sort of look at a kick drum and go, "Oh man, I need to scoop a little more here." And it really saves my ass in times when I'm not quite sure what I'm hearing in the speakers. If I think it's really bright and I look at the analyzer and it's not, I believe the analyzer.
Exactly, it's not gonna lie to you.
It's really saved my ass a number of times. I use it a lot for mastering as well. It's almost like another speaker in a way, it's a speaker for your eyes. It's a strange thing. I've been carrying it around with me everywhere for ten years and I've never run into any one else who does that but once I got it it was like, how did I ever live without this thing? I carry a few mics around with me because some of the budget studios around here that I work in sometimes are deficient in terms of mics. I have a couple of 421's, I've got my Beta 58, I've got a couple of D112's, I've got a couple of cheap condensers and just various oddball microphones that I've accumulated over the years and I just bring them and add them to whatever is compiled at the studio. I don't have anything fancy, I've got an Audio Technica 4033, that's like the one decent condenser mic I own and it's nothing to write home about, it's alright.
They're good little workhorses, though.
It's decent. I've used it on my own vocals sometimes and it sounds alright. I probably should have had a pair of them but, you know, whatever. I prefer a [AKG]414 and I'm not gonna buy one.
With the kind of jobs you're doing, do you get much choice of what studio you're gonna work at?
Well, I know every studio around here, so I pretty much know when someone gives me a budget and the type of music they're doing, I pretty much go, "Okay, we can go here and spend five days or go here and spend ten days. What do you wanna do?" Sometimes the time is more valuable than the equipment. You can do a rush job in a really expensive studio and it's still gonna suck because you didn't have enough time, whereas you can take your time in a really cheap low-budget studio with a Mackie and a little 16 track. If you're careful about recording the sounds properly and you've got the time to really make sure that it's played right and mixed right, it can end up sounding way better than going to a thousand dollar a day room and trying to do it in three days. Which a lot of people try and do.
I tell people that you're gonna be better off going to a small studio with someone who is into your kind of music and you'll get a really good job.
You did a little editorial in the back of your last issue and I have to say that I agree with you a hundred percent on this. The gear isn't that important if the music is good and if you spend the time and your engineering is good. The point is, it doesn't matter really what you're recording on, it's what you're recording that matters not how you're doing it. And it's like the biggest lesson that you can possibly impart to anybody. You don't need to spend a million bucks to make a good sounding recording. But people continue to just find newer and more inventive ways to waste money in the studio. Particularly when they get onto a major label. The producer has to bring a rack of pre-amps with him even if he's recording at a studio with an API board. He's gotta bring his own pre-amps with him from L.A. at great expense. Maybe dogs can hear the difference between these things, I can't. So let's get a rack of expensive compressors with us for tracking. You don't need a rack of compressors for tracking. Save it for the mixing. I bring compressors with me, okay, but they're just run of the mill compressors that I like using. I'm not a snob.
But how much of that is habit that needs to be broken?
I just think there's a lot of time and money wasted in the studio on things, that in the long run, make no difference. I find that the most important pieces of equipment are the room, the tape machine, the time that is spent and the guy doing it. That's all you need to record a good track. The rest of it is all bullshit. Mixing is another story, you can go crazy with mixing, but if you do that, go to a specialized mixing room where you've got a nice little place. You've got someone who specializes in mixing and has all the equipment. I've seen people waste money on recording and I've even had the opportunity to waste a bit of it myself because it seemed like that was expected of me. It sort of left a bad taste in my mouth.
Did it feel like you were just puttering around and not really getting to the job?
Yeah, because some of the records that I've spent a few months on; they're not significantly different from the ones that I've done quickly. There's a little bit of a sheen to them from just having lots of time and getting things exactly right and some of them sound pretty amazing but some of the cheaper records that I've done have a little more life to them. When I'm flying to other countries I don't bring anything. I'm dealing with customs, I'm going as a tourist, I don't want them asking a lot of questions. I deal with whatever I have and that's really made me a much better engineer When I get there I'll whine and complain and I'll say, "Well, I really need another compressor or give me another mic" or whatever. And you try and get what you can but it's just amazing to me how I've been forced to work in every thing from Rockfield in Wales for two months doing a record (which is a legendary studio that's been there since the 60s Neve VR boards with flying faders, Studer A27's, giant rooms a wonderful place) and then you've got like a studio I worked at called the La Cosina in Mexico City which is a basement ADAT studio and the backdoor of the control room opens to the outside and all this dust comes in. The ADATs are full of this gritty dust. I made a couple of really good sounding records at this little studio in Mexico for this band called Guillotina. I'm actually pretty happy with these records and I don't even like ADATs that much but you know I just sort of forced myself to get used to them. I'll come home and I'll be scratching my head, "Going damn, why do people spend all this money recording." There's a lot of ways to do it. Frankly, I don't like recording records in two days, whether it's in two days whether it's a small room or in a big studio. Like I said, time is one of the most important factors.
What about time spent on pre-production? Do you get time to go to band's rehearsals or sit with them and work out rearranging anything?
Yeah, I do that when I can. A lot of times it doesn't happen. They send me a tape and I listen carefully and I make comments and I say, "You know, this one's a little long. Do you realize this chorus goes 8 times maybe it should go six or something like that?" A lot of times that's as far as I can go because the band is in another country. With people here in Seattle, I'll go to their shows and go to a practice if I can. I love to have a chance to go see a band practice and just sit in the corner and be a fly on the wall with my little hand metronome and see how fast they're playing the songs at practice and then go to a show with my little metronome. I have a little note pad and I'll just note how fast people are playing stuff and then when they get in the studio it's a good argument settling device. People freak out and they play everything at half speed in the studio and you can say wait a minute, here's how fast you played it the last five times I saw you. That really saves a lot of hassle.
No one's ever mentioned that before.
Really?
I've had bands that did it for themselves and it was just wonderful. Every song, we'd just print a little bit of metronome click at the beginning and then kill it as soon as the band gets going.
That's what I do because I hate click tracks. There's a Brazilian band that I use clicks with because they practice with them. They're just used to it. They used to be a pop band where they did everything with MIDI and they slowly got away from that and are now more of a guitar band but they still sort of retain their habit of recording. The drummer plays really well with a click track and when he doesn't have it he freaks out and that's fine, because it works with them really well. It certainly makes it easy to splice the different drum takes together if I need to. 98 percent of the time I strongly discourage people from even attempting to use a click track. If the drummer is good enough to play to a click track, chances are, he doesn't need it.
It's very true. Lots of times it's just like a reminder thing or something like that.
Yeah, maybe give it to them for like the first couple of measures of the song just to make sure that they start at the right speed and if they speed up a little, bit deal. It's music, it's supposed to breathe a little bit. If it slows down, that's another story. Slowing down is the kiss of death. What can you do, you know, you just have to say, look, you're slowing down. Sometimes you just have to accept. The chances are, you may hear it but nobody else will ever hear it.
That's true.
There's plenty of things on records. I was listening to a Zeppelin record and I heard John Bonham slowing down and I was thinking, my hearing is getting a little too good, you know? Maybe I worry about this stuff too much. There's a big old vocal punch in on the first Zeppelin record. I heard edits on "Whole Lotta Love".
What about tape speeds? You were saying how you would never want to record at 30 if you can avoid it.
Well, I'm just about to start a project where I'm gonna record at 30. It's a pop record for these Brazilians and the guitars are gonna be a smaller part of it. It's gonna be a lot of vocals, some keyboards, some percussion things like that. The thing with 30, it's a love/hate relationship I have with 30 ips analog. As far as recording media, I'd rather record digital than record 30 ips analog. And I'm talking like ADAT digital, 44K digital. Anything to avoid it, because the bottom end is just too unsatisfying to me. It really frustrates the hell out me when I'm trying to get a kick drum sound and it comes back sounding like a basketball. I keep coming back to 15 ips analog for rock. There is a sound there and it's not as good... the cymbals tend to sound more grainy, the whole thing is a little bit grainier, which is kind of hard to describe to people. Machines always have an extra octave of low end at 15 ips as opposed to 30. Now the really good modern machines the Studers and Otaris, mostly the Studers, at 30 ips they're usually flat down to about 40 Hz which is the fundamental of low E on a bass, so at least you're getting all the music you're gonna get. Most of the records that we all idolize as classic rock recorded before 1973, from what I can tell from talking to the old timers that I've met, people didn't really start recording at 30 until around the early 70s sometimes around 73 or 74. There's an audible shift that you can tell in records. You can pretty much tell when people shifted from 15 to 30 because records took on a whole different sound and I'm not sure it was necessarily a change for the better. I was just reading Mix or one of those, and there's some guy who invented some radical scheme whereby the ideal type speed is 18 ips and he's making some sort of 1 inch, 2 track or something for an ultimate mastering machine that runs at 18 ips and has this elaborate biasing scheme of its own. It's supposed to be the ultimate last word in analog recording. It just cracked me up.
That's kind of fun. It's the ultimate plus no other tapedeck can read that tape.
Yeah, I'm not sure if there was really any point to it.
So you're going down to Brazil to do the pop band?
No, they're flying up here. I've been there twice to record them and this time they're coming here, so I'll be entertaining some Brazilians here. It's gonna be great.
What's the name of the band?
They're called the Titans. They're coming up in a couple weeks. I've got the Quadrajets next week.
It's surprising how many foreign bands you work with.
After the grunge thing I was besieged with grunge wannabees. I was besieged with Soundgarden and Melvins and Nirvana clones. I blew most of them off. I was kind of bumming, this sucks. It was alright the first time around but that's part of the reason I started taking all these jobs overseas.
Yeah. I remember you did a Blue Cheer album.
That was crazy. Let's not get into that. It's a terrible record. You know what they did when they mastered it?
What?
They added reverb to it in the mastering! I was horrified when I got the record.
You've gotta be kidding?
Their manager decided to do it. This crazy German guy said it didn't sound stadium enough. The record is dreadful, I'm so pleased that it's impossible to find.
What's it called?
It's drenched in stadium reverb, the whole record is just drenched in reverb, it's just astounding. Yeah, well, there's been a couple of other records that they've made since then that are equally obscure. But it was one of those things that I couldn't turn down, you know it was just like, you know, I mean, would you do it? Of course.
Yeah, sure.
"Sure. Okay, I don't care what they sound like, I'll do the record."
