WGNS was born out of necessity. Inspired by the total lack of underground radio in the Washington, DC area, Geoff Turner began making punk rock mix tapes for friends from the basement of his parent's suburban Maryland home. What started out in the eighties as a six-channel Radio Shack disco mixer and an inside joke (WGNS = We Gots No Station), has evolved into a full- time, 24-track recording studio and partnership with Charles Bennington. In 1995 Geoff and Charles moved WGNS from a trashed rental house in Arlington, Virginia, into the studio's spacious current location in the District, right off the U Street corridor. Over the years WGNS has hosted an impressive array of punk and indie rock luminaries including Foo Fighters, Girls Against Boys, Guided By Voices, Hoover, June of 44, Liz Phair and Yo La Tengo.
I really started when I was 16. I had sort of done it out of wherever I happened to be. Charles and I knew each other in high school and he'd come back from going to college and I asked him if he wanted to take the studio one step further and really develop it.
We were in a band [Senator Flux] at the time and the band had signed a contract and we decided that we had to take the band seriously. We moved to Virginia and had a group house with three members of the band and then whatever punk rock dregs to fill in the rent. The band didn't last much longer and we were suddenly out in Virginia with a whole bunch of equipment.
We were eight-track for three months. We had a Tascam 58, which is actually a great machine that we sold to Fugazi. I think we kind of thought it was this experiment we were gonna run; just live in this house, have bands over to our house. The house itself became so part of the studio.
We started in the basement and we actually had a lot of flooding problems and we ended up moving the control room to a spare bedroom when somebody moved out. And then we had computer editing up on this top floor, so by the end we actually had all three floors wired somewhat together so you could run mixes all the way upstairs and back and forth.
A lot of bands started showing up, which was cool. People were actually coming and doing albums there. I remember being encouraged that people were taking it seriously and some bands were coming from out of town to come in and record. To this day we don't advertise at all. The closest we come to advertising is that we have a webpage [www.wgns.com], but otherwise there's always just been this word-of-mouth thing going on.
The evolution of the studio, equipment-wise was: it started out as a pair of cassette decks and a mixer. Then Geoff had a 1/4" four-track and that was when I met him. I was in a band in high school and we recorded there. Geoff kept the four-track thing going while I was away at college. I came back and we started hanging out together. He bought an eight-track — TEAC 32 or something. Then by the time we moved to Arlington, the plan was to get a whole new set of equipment, so we had the Tascam 58. Then we got the Tascam MSR-16, which is the 1/2" 16-track.
The 1/2" was the one we bought from a used car salesman in Baltimore. We bought an MS-16 which is a one inch version of it. We used that forever, for like six years. We sold that to Juan Carrera, who does Slowdime and the Pirate House. It's still chugging away there. We just bought an MCI JH-16, 2" 24-track, and we love it! It's this cool, old mid-seventies model.
It's got a really nice sound, just for straight through the deck. You get a real analog-y sound.
Very smooth. The first record I did with that was the Sorts record [More There]. We had just rolled the thing in. Since then it's been like getting an old Chevy up and running. We've replaced a lot of parts. We've got the thing really tuned up. With this deck, it just dawned on me the importance of just having really proper tape alignment.
How do you go about finding somebody who can work on an old deck like that?
Well, in our case, because of this particular type of deck: Blevins Audio Exchange in Nashville. He generally is the person who knows all of the people who are techs across the country.
There's a bit of a syndicate of people that are keeping the decks vital. You have people like Blevins, who bought a lot of old stock and actually just deals specifically with certain machines and vintage audio equipment and also are really cool about it.
He knows the difference of all those revisions on the board.
You get a weird relationship going with all the pieces of equipment and how its wired. It's sort of like, where can we improve the totality of it via the weakest link in the chain? That's something we've been concentrating on the last four years: just getting everything somewhat optimized within a budget.
Other than like two large chunk loans at different points, we pretty much only ever bought stuff financed on money we make in the studio. So it's kind of a tough way to start up a studio if you really want to do that, because it's slow. You can only afford to get another piece when you've practically burnt out the piece that you have. We've ended up making really cool decisions on equipment, because we can only ever afford to buy one piece at a time.
It's a good ethic. I think it's good for any sort of business to never really go beyond your means.
What about recording was attractive enough to you that you wanted your own studio?
I used to do theater when I was a kid-on stage and backstage — starting when I was about seven. I was in musical comedy. I got really stuck on that notion of the satisfaction you get when something is completed and presented and you know you put in all this work and you've done all these tweaks and just suddenly you have this thing. Past a certain point I stopped being as interested in being in the "Fantasticks," or "The King and I" and I got more into playing punk rock. So that kind of picked up where the acting left off. I started to see my first recording studios when I was pretty young. I was in this band [Gray Matter]; we went out to Inner Ear and I saw Don Zientara's home studio, which was an eight track studio out in Arlington. I think it just hit me on the head. I think also, as I got older, I became aware of the fact that as a musician, having an awareness of studio techniques was invaluable, so that nobody would make your record sound the way that you didn't want it to sound. We want bands to come in and have an experience that actually represents what they're all about, but in the context of what we can offer — this is how we want you guys to sound, because we think it's the most honest.
Within the context of independent rock, you two have recorded a pretty impressive variety of bands. Is there any non-rock genre that you would really like to work with in the future?
In DC there's an incredible international music scene, I would love to record a week of really slamming salsa music and follow that with some dub thing. And that really does happen around the studio even more and more. As far as courting groups of people, you can kind of do that if you have time, but again I'm more into letting things come in the door.
It would be great if we had tons more bands that were not just electric instruments, recording-wise. Once you've recorded five million electric guitar amps you start to wonder what all those other mics you own are for, because you've really narrowed it down to an arsenal of mics that can record guitar amps well. It's really fun recording horns and strings in here; it's a nice big room and you can actually spread people out.
I've heard that you guys use a lot of ambient mics, especially on drums. How do you go about applying them?
It always depends, but we have a lot of success with more distance micing on drums, especially now. Like in the last couple of years, we did some work in this room and set up this wood floor and created a real drum corner. It's nice to create a sound. We were just trying to take a very even-handed approach to it. What people hear coming out of the speakers sounds kind of like what it did in the room, where there is a lot of sound bouncing around. Traditionally, I've really liked that sound — very realistic. Distant mics really bring in the room a lot more too. A good record is going to sound right because it was crafted that way. It's like that's why lo- fi was such a fascination with people: it had nothing to do with the recording technology behind it other than how people fucked up the recording technology in such a way that it was like nothing you had ever heard before.
There's this notion that I really started to think about when I started doing this sort of work: there's something that happens to make a great record. You can go into the biggest, best studio, you can spend four months, you can have a really expensive producer, you can have people with incredible lists of credits and something can just not happen; it can just go wrong. I consider recording to be — this sounds weird — in some ways, a crap shoot. A great record can happen when the band is really turned on, the person they're working with is really turned on, just everything works, but it's utterly random in some ways. You can never in absolute and all finality set out to make the perfect record. No matter what, something can go wrong. A bad vibe can happen or just a funk.
Depressed band people sound bad no matter what.
