John Agnello | TapeOp

When we interviewed J. Robbins in issue #13 of Tape Op he told us we should interview John Agnello, a producer he had worked with in Jawbox and Burning Airlines. We countered with, "Why don't you interview him?" And, to our surprise, he did. John has a long history of recording and has worked on some of my favorite records of the last ten years. That's no mean feat. -Larry Crane

So, you're my first-ever interviewee.

Really? So you're cutting your teeth on me. I'm the victim.

I invented rock...

I wanted to ask you if you have a ballpark idea how many records you've worked on as an engineer, or as a producer...

I think it's about 40 or 50. I don't really keep track. If you go to www.johnagnello.com you can count them on the discography (laughs). It's got to be between 30 and 50. You mean start to finish, or just mixing, or what?

As opposed to when you started working in a recording studio, period. You started as an assistant at the Record Plant, right?

'79 at the Record Plant. I walked in the door & the first thing they told me to do was clean up the room because Kiss was starting Dynasty that day. It was basically just following people around cleaning up from the previous night's session. And Damn the Torpedoes was being done there at the same time. So my first two weeks of studio experience was, you know, seeing some heavy shit going down.

You were talking the other day about the way projects sometimes used to interact with each other there because it was a big enough facility that several records would be going on at the same time, and how that was happening at Water Music with this Error Type 11 record you're doing now and the Misfits record that they're doing in the big room there with Ed Stasium.

Oh yeah. The Record Plant was a 4-room facility, and everybody knew everybody. The whole environment was a lot smaller back then, there wasn't a studio on every block, you weren't able to make a record in your house like you can now, so the people who made records generally did it for a living. It was way before the proliferation of small studios and project studios. It was a smaller, tighter community. There would be four rooms going on at the Record Plant and people would be walking in and out of each other's projects. You know how Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith wrote "Because the Night" together? That was at the Record Plant. They were working in rooms next to each other and they were just talking and they ended up writing this song together which is fuckin' amazing. And that happened a lot back then, it was really fun, how people knew each other. An environment where you could just hang out. When we were just now working at Water Music, the Misfits were in the other studio there and the first day we were there (the Misfits) grabbed Artie and Phil from Error Type 11 to come sing on one song of theirs, and then another day we went and grabbed Ed the producer/mixer guy and got him to play tambourine on two Error Type 11 songs. I would walk back and forth, and if he was having a problem with something maybe I'd pitch in. One day they were trying to do tape flanging at one point, a 3-machine flange, and I spent 15 minutes with them trying to help figure it out, and then I'd walk back over and keep working on our thing. It was very loose, kind of open thing. The daily barbecues didn't hurt either.

Camp Water Music.

Exactly. Common ground: meat.

So, of any engineer that I know, you seem the most...

Old? Mature? Unshaven?

The most comfortable with compression I mean, I'm aware of it as a force in the sound of records you've worked on. But it breathes it seems very musical, not destructive to dynamics. So I wanted to ask you how you approach it.

It breathes, it doesn't suck, right? At this point it would just have to be that I've been using it for so long I know how to deal with it, I can tell when it's changing the mix, pumping or whatever. (facetiously) You can tell when you have a song with a lot of dynamics and it breaks down to one guitar and that guitar is louder than the whole rest of the mix.

How much do you compress to tape when you track?

I never compress guitars. Very rarely. When you have a Marshall and you turn it up to 10, that's compressing anyway. I really don't compress drums at all; maybe occasionally room mics just to get them a little more consistent. And I will compress a snare or a bass drum in mix, just for corrective measures, if a guy plays really unevenly. Bass a little bit, vocals maybe a lot, but not really a lot. Sometimes I do it for effect. Although I don't really do a lot of compression, I do have the stereo compressor on the mix, and I do squash tape. More like old-school compression, not necessarily sounding "compressed."

So what I heard as a "compress-y" sound on the basics of the Error Type 11 stuff was all tape saturation?

I had the Distressor on the vocals, but that was really just tapping it. And when I mix some of these songs I'll probably use the Distressor on "Nuke," like the super-compression mode, but again that's just an effect, not the core of it. It's just the Compex or the Daking on the buss, tightening up the mix... but, a ton of tape saturation that's also why I still like using 456, because unlike using 499 or the BASF tape, that really does compress. For example, if you listen to these old records ( Queen II , playing on the monitors as we spoke ), all the stuff that came out of Trident, like what Roy Thomas Baker was doing, they would slam the tape so hard that the snare would just go "Thwap!," it wouldn't go like "bink," it really had that compression edge to it, that made it thick. It was almost like distortion from the tape, and I just love that. So that's my thing about compression. It's not a lot of compression so much as it's specific kinds of compression, hopefully used tastefully.

I thought the monitor mix that you had up just to do vocals already sounded like a record, like maybe all you'd do in the mix was just brighten it up a little.

Well, especially on a record like Error Type 11, where you only have like 3 days to mix, you can't really spend time fixing shit. You've got to get it down good when you track it and keep in mind where you want it to be in the mix. If I had a song-a-day (mix schedule) I'd probably spend more time experimenting, but I don't; I've got to mix a song every three hours. But I think a lot of that comes from, I hate to say an "oldschool" thing, but the guys I learned from as engineers were great old-school engineers and that was the philosophy, to make it sound great from the beginning, and then the players are psyched, anybody that just walks in and hears it in progress is psyched, and you can all just get off on it. It's more inspiring. I tend to like to print the crazier things I do, like the speaker the subwoofer as bass-drum mic (John sometimes uses a Hartke 15" bass cabinet as a kick drum mic) or the shotgun mic with the SansAmp on it over the snare drum, that stuff I like printing to tape that way, so it's just always there.

Using the bass speaker as a kick drum mic, or the SansAmp snare, that kind of stuff are those things that you go back to consistently?

The speaker on the bass drum, to pick up the super low end, I got out of the Beatle recording book, where I read they had done that for bass guitar and it was super cool because you got that real pillowy sound. I've been doing the speaker thing regularly, but sometimes I move it around and it's more like a room mic that sounds kind of bizarre. On the Varnaline record [ Sweet Life ] I had Anders [Parker] sing into it for one song and it sounded really strange. I don't know how to describe it. It's on the song "Saviours." The shotgun mic over the snare, I like to get that kind of a gunshot sound... and sometimes it can be cool to go to for a breakdown in a song or something. It's compressed, and it's going through a SansAmp, to tape. To track 1. I've recently developed a fear of edge tracks which I never used to have. I used to put the bass drum there and not worry about it, but now I'd put the shotgun track there because if anything happens to track 1 ...

It was fucked-up sounding to begin with.

The only problem with (the shotgun-SansAmp combination) is you have to take some time placing the mic to make sure you're getting the most snare drum for your money there... it's so easy for the hi-hat or cymbals to get all over everything and then it's just useless.

My friend Chad and I were recently talking about how, after all of our speculation and experimenting with recording gear, the ultimate truth of a "good production," whatever that may be, has way more to do with good songs, good playing, good instrument sounds, and arrangements. How much do you regard arrangements, helping arrange songs, as a part of your job? Obviously if it's Error Type 11 where they're a really focused band already and you've got only a week to do the whole thing, versus a solo person like Mike Johnson, something where the songs might seem more plastic...

Although I did do a couple of rehearsals for them. But it's different for every record. There are certain things I've done where I'd go on for a week of rehearsals and rearrange. But for example like Dinosaur Jr. stuff, there are no rehearsals and there are no demos, because everything's in J.'s head. Once he puts down the drum tracks, the song is on its way to being recorded. On your record ( Jawbox ) we did a little bit of rearranging, not much. It's important, it's just a question of if you have time to do it. It's different every time. As soon as I get demos I listen to 'em. It's easy for me to get demos and spend an hour on each song just charting them and getting a sense of where they go. It doesn't matter if it's a band or a solo artist. Like with (NYC band) Camber, we spent more time rehearsing and going over arrangements than we did in the studio. The songs really got stripped down and reassembled.

That sounds like my fantasy of doing a record where everyone knows the material, including overdub ideas, so well before you even get to the studio, that the actual recording part is almost a formality because you've already made the record in your heads. You could save so much money on studio time by doing that...

They had rehearsed so much that when they came into the studio, even though it was their first record, they came in and nailed it instantly. It was second nature. It wasn't like "first day in the studio," where people weren't comfortable, "I can't hear myself in the headphones," whatever. It was like they were making their fifth record instead of their first. But everybody's different.

[ Our conversation is interrupted by the beginning of "Ogre Battle." ]

This is hot. When I was a kid, I was listening to this record on headphones going, "What the hell is going on?" It's just insane. But anyway, a lot of people aren't open to the idea of changing their songs, which is fine too.

I remember being resistant, on a philosophical level, to the idea of anyone "tampering" with our songs, but the ideas that you had, even if they were small, they were a fresh perspective. They ended up improving the songs, and it wasn't like you dictated them to us, it was more like asking us questions, just a little nudge in one direction or other.

I'm a nudge guy anyway. There are guys who are totally putting their stamp on a record, like "here's MY record," but I'm more like a conduit to get where you need to go. I try to be as hands-off as possible, to let everybody do it themselves. Maybe I shouldn't say that, because I do get involved, but it's more like around the side as opposed to "it's got to be like this." The Varnaline record was like that where at the end of the record they were listening and they were so psyched it had turned out the way it was because even though I didn't sit there and beat them up to perform, I sort of pushed them to limits they felt they hadn't reached before, just by mellow reinforcement ...

That's how we felt too, that you set up a situation in which we felt like we could rise to the occasion, like we were actually outdoing ourselves.

It's also all the Ecstasy I hand out before every session.

The J. Mascis record you just worked on, is it a Dinosaur record or a J. Mascis record?

It's a J. record. He plays virtually everything. It's different. This stuff I just mixed. He started in October and did it with a bunch of different people: Phil Ek, Tim O'Heir, Dan McLaughlin, Kevin Sheilds and his engineer... and then I came in at the end and mixed it. But he started in October and worked until I showed up in May. In his house. That's one of the beauties of working in your house, that there's no clock, just the internal clock.

Describe his home studio.

Some would say it's the perfect home recording environment. His whole house is a studio. The only room that doesn't have some kind of recording stuff in it is his bedroom. Every other room is littered with guitars, mellotrons, pianos, vocal mics, amps, drums... the control room is in the main room of the ground floor, which looks back over the back yard. He has an Otari 24-track and a DA-88 that link up, the board is an API monitor section which has no EQ; all the EQ's are outboard so you have to patch anytime you want to EQ. The board has no mic pre's either, they're all outboard too. He also has a Studiomaster 32. But he uses all API, Daking and Telefunken mic pres, and along with that, EQ. He has a fair selection of mics, a C-12, some Neumanns. It's a really comfortable environment. He was really smart because two records ago he took a fair amount of money (from his advance) and invested it in this gear and recorded in his house. He's reaping the rewards now because he can record at his convenience. Plus it's way out in the woods and it's really beautiful. If he'd only bathe his dog more often it would be perfect.

Do you ever find yourself in a position of wanting to change people's sounds I'm thinking specifically of Zach's drums on the Jawbox record, and how he had a very specific agenda with those really small drums that he tuned up so high... that's so different from a lot of drummers in bands you've worked with.

I had a conversation with Juan (Garcia, an engineer at the Magic Shop) yesterday where he was talking about a guitar sound that he recorded through a small amp, and how that can still sound big, that a small amp doesn't have to equate to a "small," or quirky sound. It can still sound big...with Zach's drums, it was just a matter of going for a good representation of what they sound like. It's a taste issue, and I tend to not get hung up on the taste stuff.

How much opportunity or inclination do you have to alter your tried-and true approaches to recording setups?

I try different mics as often as I can, and I like putting up a mic that I wouldn't ordinarily use for certain things, but especially for shorter-term stuff, it's way more important to just get (the musicians) comfortable and get the tracks down. So there are times when I do experiment, but there are times when the moment is dictated by the need to get good performances. Also for me the days of spending all day getting a guitar sound are so overrated. You hear stories about people recording on 7 1/2 ips, 2-inch 8 track machines, and there's all this hoodoo about it, but when you hear those records next to other records, it doesn't really sound that much different. You can go overboard with that stuff. Performance is what you've really got to go for.

I just ask because sometimes that's been a lot of fun for me in recording stuff, like, "What if we move the room mics over here for this song", or "What if we turn the guitar mic around to face the window instead of the guitar amp." But then for me that's only really fun if it's fun for the band. On the Jawbox record I remember there was a track of ambient mic'ing where you had put a condenser mic inside this giant metal cone at Water Music.

On most things I do, I try to keep the basic tracks, for example the bass and guitar, very standard to the way I do things, very close mic'd, same mics, just to get them sounding beefy and in your face. Then when it comes to overdubs I do a lot more screwing around with pedals, different mics, mic placement, whatever. There are areas where I try to keep it really simple, and areas where I feel better experimenting. The cone thing was great because there are times when I'll walk around and see something like the big metal cone at the back of Water Music and say "Let's use that to put a mic in." But we had a cushion there, three weeks to track at Water Music so it was a lot more like we were able to screw around. But you have to balance that with getting the band going. I actually forgot about that. Those things are great.

I don't know if we ended up using any of it in the end.

Probably not.

I know I've asked you this before, but do you play any instruments?

I'm the world's worst guitar player. I don't have a hell of a lot of musical background. I can sing harmonies off-key consistently: "Eeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuugh." I'm the third guy.

So you were drawn into this primarily as a music fan.

As a geek kid in junior high. We were listening to this Queen II record and it was one of the first records that definitely blew my mind, the process blew my mind. How they did all the backwards recording, stacked vocals, the guitar harmonies, sequencing and crossfading stuff. The overproduction.

Did you ever find out how they did that backwards intro to "Ogre Battle"?

That stuff is demystified now. I've turned tape around for backwards reverb plenty of times so it's probably just a matter of taking the time to play things in time to the backwards drums which they left backwards anyway. But as a 14-year old kid, sitting in his basement, it was mind-blowing. At that point also I was working at Eventide, and I had a lot of experience with them, making delay lines, and there being a studio above, I had contact with those environments anyway. But the Eventide thing evolved from me really being into music and my brother being one of the chief engineers there and that's the reason I ended up getting a summer job there in the first place. I was this prog-rock music geek who at 15 was working a summer job at Eventide and all my favorite bands were using Eventide shit, Yes and all that. I was so psyched. It evolved into me getting really into audio gear, at 15 cranking tunes in my basement, shaking my house, driving my parents and neighbors nuts. And that led to the realization of records being made in a studio and that there was a process of making them and me wanting to know, and leaving college to intern at the Record Plant because I was so much more fascinated by that than by Anthropology with a Sociology minor.

And then you started assisting there.

Forever. And then it was like the pecking order, moving up the ladder, and at one point I became the main assistant. But it became a detriment, because when you were the main assistant everybody wanted you, so the studio wasn't really psyched on you becoming an engineer and leaving, because they had people who depended on your familiarity with the gear and wanted you to do that every day. We had the first moving fader automation on the East Coast, and I was the first guy to train on it. It was GML; Massenberg came and trained us on it and I got stuck in that room forever because I was the only guy that knew the automation.

What was the first record you did as a producer?

An English band called Kerosene, for Sire, not to be confused with Kerosene 454. That was right after I engineered Where You Been . I had been an engineer up 'til then, on Screaming Trees, Cave Dogs, what have you.

How hard was it to go from the one environment you were used to, at the Record Plant, to moving from studio to studio as a freelance engineer/producer?

I didn't and I don't really find it that bad; it keeps it interesting. I like working a lot of different places.

I guess I'm thinking more from what I guess would be a Tape Op perspective, and from a lot of my own experiences too, where you are used to working in what may be a sonically compromised situation, like my 16-track room, and having to try to do a lot with a little, getting to a point of doing good-sounding work through your familiarity with that situation rather than because you have particularly good gear. So you get used to the quirks of a place and maybe that affects how you'd react to a different place. That perspective probably doesn't apply if what you were used to was the Record Plant.

Well, the Inferno (Water Music's B Studio where the board is in the studio and the only separate room is an isolation booth) isn't exactly cush; no air conditioning, we're all sweating, I'm sitting in my underwear, there's the open room thing where you're recording guitar and you're hearing it from the amp as you're recording so the only way you can tell what it sounds like is by playback. So I'd prefer places like Water Music itself, the big room, which is an amazing place; the Magic Shop, stuff like that, but I'm not really shy about going to other places. If I have a couple of pieces of gear I like, and my reference CD, which usually is Where You Been , so I can hear the monitors, I can tell what I'm doing. And if you have basic tracks on tape and you're going to another place to do vocals & overdubs, they're your frequency barometer. If you like what you already have, you can fit in what you're adding to it. I don't really bum out about being in environments that aren't totally comfortable.

You don't bring monitors, right? You're really comfortable with the NS-10's...

They suck, but everybody has them, and I can relate to them. Yeah, they don't sound great and you can get ear-burn from listening to them too loud too long, but at the same time they are fairly consistent and they don't sound good, which makes you make things sound better! I've bummed myself out on Genelecs and speakers like that because they just sound good. You bring up the bass drum and you get a big woody, and you haven't done anything!

What about dealing with low end on them? Because the records you've worked on generally have a really great low end.

I guess I'm just used to them. And when I'm in New York I use my home stereo to judge what I'm doing, and from time to time in the mixing process I've popped into Greg Calbi's [ #86 ] (mastering room) with a DAT or 1/2" to get a reference early on. But I don't do anything special to "get" low end on the Yamahas, I think I just know them. But otherwise... no clues there. A lot of bran, would be my advice.

What is some of your favorite gear?

I love Daking mic pre/equalizers on guitar, they sound really fat and they have a kind of Trident A-rangey sound, and you can dial in substantial bottom on them and they're really exceptional. You can just put stuff through them and it sounds better. Forget about EQ or anything, just the circuit really sounds good. Distressors are hot. The Eventide stuff is great. Big fan of Space Echos; I tend to like a lot of stomp boxes when I mix if I can patch in, unbalanced-wise. Memory Men, Electric Mistresses. I just got my hands on some of these Zevex guys' pedals, like the Woolly Mammoth, that's really cool. Old API consoles, Neve consoles, Trident, I love. Compexes, Neve compressors.

It's mostly pretty classic stuff.

I really care about mics and mic pres. The rest of it you can arrive at by experimentation. But good mics and mic pres, and you're on your way. Good musicians would help too. That's an aside.