John Goodmanson inhabits a unique place in the world of recording. Frequently traversing the country from his Seattle base to mix projects by major label artists like Wu-Tang Clan and Blondie, his stellar reputation was made as an excellent engineer and producer of the finest indie bands. Sleater-Kinney, Geraldine Fibbers, Blonde Redhead, Silkworm, and Harvey Danger are among the many artists from his growing discography. The fact that he is often asked back to record follow-up projects speaks volumes of how well-liked and effective he is. Being in demand, however, has its challenges, as Goodmanson strives to maintain a foot in both the major label and independent music worlds.
Whether working on his own, side-by-side with long time collaborator Steve Fisk, or more recently with Steve Thompson on major label projects, Goodmanson is adept at encouraging and capturing peak emotional performances from bands, and obtaining killer sounds regardless of the style of music. His mixes are a study in dynamic manipulation and control. He is also a humorously self-effacing, nonchalant, and positive guy — an ideal personality, if you're a musician, to have on the other side of the glass.
BACKGROUND AND SCHOOLIN'
Goodmanson is a graduate of Washington's premier institution of liberal/progressive education, The Evergreen State College in Olympia. The college has several multi-track studios including a 16-track room with a pretty sweet API and a beat up Ampex MM1200, some cool outboard gear and microphones that students can check out from Media Loan, an electronic music lab, and even, when I was a student there 13 years ago, a monstrous Buchla synth. Despite the excellent gear and fine instructors, Evergreen should not be misperceived as a recording school. At Evergreen, Goodmanson delved into every aspect of audio engineering, became music director at KAOS radio, played with his band Dangermouse, involved himself with the ubiquitous student concert series, yet laughs that he "emerged from there with the worst sounding demo of anyone that had ever applied at a recording studio. 'Cause they're totally not about being competitive in the real world at all, they're completely on the theory side and nothing on the practical side."
Nevertheless, he had a great college experience, and after graduation moved directly into a job at the former Music Source, on Seattle's Capitol Hill. Here he recorded bands at night and cut commercials and dialogue replacement (for the TV show "Northern Exposure") during the day, often working 80 hour weeks. It was at the Music Source that John began his collaboration with producer/composer Steve Fisk, himself a former 'Greener, and learned many tricks of the trade — how to work lightning fast, learn by trial and error (and "trial by fire"), and how to deal with artists ranging from hip-hop to punk rock.
Goodmanson realized a longstanding goal to start his own studio when he left the Music Source. Together with Stuart Hallerman [Tape Op #18], owner of Avast! Recording, he opened John and Stu's Place in 1993. Surely John knew he made the right move, explaining: "[I opened] my studio, two weeks later Eddie Vedder's on the cover of Time Magazine, and he walks in the door, and it freaked me out. Those were my first clients at John and Stu's. Jeff [Ament] and Eddie doin' demos for Pearl Jam."
Were your experiences mostly positive owning your own studio?
Yeah it was awesome. You know there's not a lot of money in it. I started doing a lot of work out of town, and then the studio business kind of went south for a while, at the end of 2000. It was too expensive to keep a room sitting empty.
What was your basic setup over there?
It was an Otari 24-track and the Quad-Eight console.
The Quad-Eight from the Hollywood Bowl, right?
Yeah. It's still a great board, man, but you gotta [maintain them]. I had Stuart's [Ampex MM] 1200 forever, which was the best sounding machine but you couldn't punch in on it.
And that studio used to be Reciprocal [Jack Endino's [Tape Op #13] place] and later Word of Mouth?
Yeah, and it was Triangle first, like back in the new wave days. [Note: the studio is now Hall of Justice, run by Chris Walla] [#111]
I have a really good memory for details like this, but I think I remember at Evergreen [Dangermouse] getting ready to play and you were running up and down the stairs trying to patch cables to the radio station upstairs.
It was always like that, and I had to drive to go pick someone up that was supposed to be playing, and I realized on the drive that one side of the entire mix was out of phase with the other, 'cause I had a mono radio in the car. This is a perfect example of student projects at Evergreen, 'cause we went in through some wacky patch cables some student had built, didn't check 'em, and on FM radio you know half the time it's summing to mono, especially a low wattage transmitter like that, so all you could hear was whatever the guy had panned. [long laughter] So it was like two guitars, some toms, no vocals. Just really bad. So we fixed that as soon as I got back. But, [another] crazy night, Fugazi played before any of their records had come out. And they were so anti-commercial that they were letting people copy the 13 Songs record, so everyone in Olympia got a copy. They played in that funny space that was in the bottom of A Dorm. So I was running PA, my band was opening, and I had my radio show that night all at the same time — it was pretty awesome. They were fucking amazing.
That would have been pretty cool to see Fugazi in A Dorm.
And at that point, they were touring all over the place but they didn't charge money, they would just collect donations from the crowd. [laughs] They were so punk rock! Calvin Johnson [Beat Happening/Dub Narcotic/K Records] [Tape Op #32] got up and passes the hat for Fugazi at the bottom of A Dorm! I mean, all we knew was it was the guy from Rites of Spring and the guy from Minor Threat. But they were fucking great. I mean that was a total life-changing experience for me.
SURVIVIN' THE BIZ
Goodmanson recorded some of the seminal bands of '90s Northwest indie rock — Treepeople, Sleater-Kinney, Silkworm, Team Dresch, Harvey Danger, 30 Ought 6, Unwound, Bikini Kill. The list goes on and on. To hear these records is to experience the emotional ferocity of that decade in the Northwest, and I daresay these recordings define Goodmanson's noted production style of pulverizing drums and cascading, crash-diving, in- your-face guitars. Nevertheless, when the post-grunge boom finally hit the wall, studios felt the hit. Seattle's Steve Lawson Productions closed it's two famous analog rooms (Studios A and B) and yanked out their old custom APIs and funky '70s acoustic treatments, causing discern and anger among many, as the studio was sold and became a Pro Tools house for commercials and sound design. Other studios simply went belly up. Goodmanson sold John and Stu's and picked up freelance work, yet things were slow enough that he debated getting a day job to pay the bills.
What are some of the challenges of freelancing as opposed to working for a studio or running your own?
Freelancing and owning your own place are pretty much the same kind of deal: seat of your pants, scrappy. It's pretty rough. I could totally do with some security in my life. I never know, from week to week, how long I'm gonna be in town, when I'm gonna leave, so I can't really plan vacations. When you have time off you're all worried 'cause you're not workin.' It's hard to be away from home all the time. My dogs don't recognize me when I get home. We're probably going to have to move like in a year or so to some place either close to New York or close to L.A. so at least I'm home half the time. 'Cause there's just not enough going on here right now. When I started the studio there was so much happening here, it was perfect timing. It was right after the grunge boom so I never had to advertise for the studio or anything, it was booked solid for a number of years. At that time I could leave and Phil [Ek] [Tape Op #29] would do records down there, or Kevin Suggs. Then Phil went on the road for a couple years with Built To Spill, and all the business started declining so that was when I had to get out of it.
Do you think home studios are cutting into your work?
I don't think they're cutting into mine, but I think they're cutting into small studios for sure. I mean it's helping and hurting because people who couldn't afford to make records are going for 2 days at [a studio like] Jackpot! and then home to their Digi001 to do all their overdubs, then bring it back to the studio when they want to mix it. Which is pretty cool, there's a lot of stuff you can totally do at home, anything rap and R&B related. But live rock band stuff you still have to go to some room. You can't really do it in a practice space — it's just too hard to get it to sound good. But then the freelance thing, I think I'm kind of in a unique place. I don't know if it's a good place, but I do 60% major label engineering and major label mixing, and then also do Sleater-Kinney records and indie projects and demos in between, and it's hard to make those two worlds coexist. 'Cause those major label projects pay so much they don't understand why you would keep your schedule. Like the Sleater-Kinney record before last, suddenly everyone and their brother wanted to record at Christmas time, and Sleater-Kinney, they've got schedules and tours, and they had to talk to me months before. And when I book something that far ahead, it's gonna move. And then everyone wanted to record at once and it was this giant fucking nightmare.
So are you gonna go where the money is even if you'd rather work with Sleater-Kinney?
Sometimes you have to 'cause they were paying me enough money and I couldn't turn it down. I've got house payments to make. But this last Sleater-Kinney record I promised them I wouldn't move it, and I had to turn down 15 grand worth of work. That's a hard pill to swallow when you have house payments. Those are real life, frickin' hard decisions.
How can you avoid that?
If you play the major label game, you really can't. 'Cause they fight with each other, too. Even if they're on the same label they'll say, "No you're coming over to do this or we're getting someone else." There's always somebody who's going to snatch the gig right up if you're not there right away. That universe functions on its own logic.
So now you've decided to put a mixing room in your house?
Well everything started showing up as Pro Tools files, so I felt like I had to get Pro Tools. Not that I had to but I was always on sessions where 300 bucks a day was going to somebody else, which I could have used to pay for my own system. So I did that but it turned into being on the wrong side of the upgrade. [see letters section, July/August 2002 issue]. I just did the HD upgrade, so hopefully the internal mixer sounds better. The promise of that whole thing is that you can do everything inside the box, which, at least on the old system, you can't — unless you're mixing hip-hop and R&B. You can't mix a rock ensemble inside of Pro Tools and have it be as good as if you mixed it on a regular mixer.
You're going to hear the difference, aren't you?
Yeah, it sounds different. For hip-hop stuff it sounds great 'cause all that stuff is coming out of 16 bit samples anyway, but once you've got a dozen phase coherent microphones to deal with, things get a little funny. But the new stuff is supposed to be better so I guess I'll find out. But the idea is that since I don't have a studio anymore I want to have someplace I can do the weird stuff where I'm not charging people — funny editing or funny overdubs. Hopefully vocals, there's always leftover vocals to do.
You mentioned you're toying with the idea of getting a little mixing board or console?
Yeah like a little Soundcraft or something for the mixing so you don't have to use the software mixer as much. 'Cause that seems to be where the flatness [occurs]. But when I first got [Pro Tools] I thought, I'll mix at my house and everything's going to be great and I'll just do everything digital and it'll be super cool. And I know some guys that are doing it and I did it, and my rough [analog] mixes killed the mixes in the computer, no matter how long I spent on it. And I called up Brett Eliason, 'cause he does all the Pearl Jam stuff, and he's been mixing with the Pro Control for a really long time, and I was like, "Dude, what do you do?" He said you just have to max out all the levels, and don't pay attention to the red lights, and try to keep your faders as close to unity as possible so that the mixer isn't working so hard. And the other thing that he does is use all outboard gear, he doesn't use plug-ins really, at all.
CO-PRODUCING AND COLLABORATION
Teaming with producer/mixer Steve Thompson (Appetite For Destruction), Goodmanson has lately been working on bigger projects by the likes of Blondie, Hanson, Wu-Tang Clan, even Brian McKnight. One senses his collaboration with Thompson has not only been fruitful, but personally fulfilling as well. This illuminates the special nature of John's character and skills: he seems to move effortlessly between major label acts and indie projects. How many engineers out there can lay claim to working with the Hansons and the Blondies of the world in glitzy studios like the Hit Factory, Cello, and NRG, as well as with the Treepeoples and the Catheters of the world in more modest studios like The Magic Shop, Jolly Roger Recording, and Avast!?
So AAM [Goodmanson's management] threw you and Steve Thompson together and it clicked?
Yeah we have a really good time doing stuff, and it's cool because our roles are complementary and really defined.
Is he a hands-on producer?
He's not an especially technical person when it comes to gear, he does everything by feel and gut level evaluation rather than getting all nerdy about it, which is [also] the way I like to think about rock music especially. The way that winds up when we do a project is he's the producer, I'm the engineer, and then we co-mix. It's really great to be able to tag- team a mix, 'cause your ears get really tired and you need the perspective that co-mixing provides. And then it's also hilarious 'cause Steve's Mr. East Coast rock-n-roll dude, and I'm Mr. Indie Rock West Coast dude. It's a good balance it seems.
So you don't like to get nerdy about rock music?
I don't like to get nerdy, not too precious, 'cause it's real easy for a lot of people to over think and that's not the point usually, so you have to work really hard to keep sort of a fresh perspective about it. 'Cause bands will totally talk themselves out of what's good about what they're doing all the time. The whole point is to try and hear it like you're hearing it for the first time. 'Cause usually that's your best perspective on it, so it's a weird turning- off-part-of-your-brain kinda thing. You have to have that part of your brain on to hear if there's unusable hum in something, or analyzing what's not working and where something's piling up, but you also have to shut that off so that you can hear what should be the loudest thing. A lot of time with bands when they're all in the studio and you're mixing, everyone's listening to their own parts and you wind up with things where everything's equal but there's no impact at all. It's really important to have something in the foreground and something in the background. And a lot of times you have to manipulate that perspective. So you have to make decisions about what's the important or interesting part of the song. And you know, bands have been working on their songs for a lot longer than I have usually so they get bored with certain things or learn to accept certain things. A lot of times you'll go into a project and if someone's arrangements are overlong, you go, "Did you ever think about cutting that in half?" and they're like, "Well yeah but then we just got used to always playing it that way". [laughs] It'd be a lot less boring if it was cut in half. The whole point is to keep people interested. I hate getting bored with stuff. There's just so much stuff that's mediocre and boring that's out and around.
WORKING WITH THE WU-TANG CLAN
Last year Goodmanson and Thompson got the call to mix Wu-Tang Clan's amazing Iron Flag CD. It still seems a phenomenal feat to me that John, who's "style" is synonymous with indie rock, can enter with apparent ease into the realm of hard, huge budget gangsta hip- hop. Although he claims "it was pretty weird, 'cause they never had outside mixers before, I was also totally shocked that it was just like a dozen hip-hop records that I did at the Music Source."
It just strikes me that an indie rock record is so different sonically from a Wu-Tang record, and you know, I don't think there's tons of people that can pull that off — travel in both worlds so easily.
I really try to make everything sound [different]. Like the records that I gave you. Sleater-Kinney doesn't sound like Harvey Danger definitely doesn't sound like Wu-Tang, doesn't sound like the Catheters. Even the indie rock side, I try to make everything have its own identity, which turns out in the major label world to be a really bad marketing ploy. I've gotten advice from a couple people [whose advice] I really value that said, "Dude you're all over the map, how is an A&R guy going to hire you?" In the major label world an A&R guy, with every baby band, is putting his job on the line. So for him to take a risk at any step in the chain is potentially [risky] — 'cause 90% of those records bomb. They hire the same five guys because they can say that guy made all these hits, so he's not the reason that it didn't work. [But] it's really good to have lots of different experience to draw from, too. Like, what if we did put a break beat in for the bridge? And how do we do that efficiently?
Who was in the Wu-Tang sessions with you?
It was RZA [Robert Diggs] and his posse. But it wasn't like the whole crew, 'cause they were so backed up to their deadline they were still finishing vocals across the street while we were mixing. So RZA would go while they were cuttin' vocals and then he'd come over and check out a mix and [give] thumbs up or thumbs down.
Did he like your work?
Seemed like it. I mean we would have been outta there if he wasn't psyched on it. But you know Steve's done a lot of dance records, so Steve was really comfortable with the dynamic of superstars and huge posses and all that crazy business, and I was definitely like the guy looking scared in the corner the whole time. [laughter] But Steve also hadn't dealt with serious ghetto-style rap stuff where it's like one loop and an extra kick and a snare, and I've done kind of a lot of that, surprisingly [at the Music Source].
What formats did they bring in?
The first one we mixed was the "Pinky Ring" song, and that was 48 tracks analog. That must have been one of the earlier ones because everything else started arriving as Pro Tools files, and Pro Tools is ideal for that kind of stuff. Oftentimes we wound up adding kicks and snares to stuff to have it be more defined, 'cause they really do everything super ghetto loop style. And then the other thing that was crazy was RZA would change around the order of the verses. We'd have gotten the whole mix together and then he comes in and says, "No put Ghostface here", you know, totally change it up. You could kind of see their process on the files. Here's the loop, then they cut verses — all different guys — over the same part of the [loop], and then move it around and re-sort it. RZA was amazing though, he's real quick and intuitive. The other thing he has to do is manage like nine superstar dudes in this group, which is fucking totally crazy.
THEORIES AND PRACTICES
Goodmanson's signature style, which I'm defining basically as the "three killers": killer drums, killer guitars, and killer (emotional) vocals, must of course originate with the musicians above all else. The guy or gal on the other side of the glass is doing their part by getting it all on tape, which is "why you need to be rolling when the vibe is happening." To be ready, aside from having everything mic'ed and dialed in, Goodmanson says you have to "know your shit, and it's a lot harder now. With tape machines and consoles, I got to where I felt like it was really fast. I was real quick at editing stuff if I wanted to do that. Now with computers it takes forever. I get so frustrated with, 'Oh, I have to restart, sorry.' So I work really hard at keeping the system super trim and efficient. My computer never touches the Internet." In addition to certain production techniques and "using basic, garden-variety gear", Goodmanson as producer prepares for his sessions with extensive pre-production, explaining "I try to get demos, go to rehearsals, talk at least about arrangements, 'cause usually that's someplace the band needs an objective opinion."
So if you're a producer and not engineering, [then] you're strictly working with arrangements, having a rapport with the band, making sure the songs are performed?
Right. And tempos. Tempos are a big one. But you know, all the way down to [hearing] the context of the whole record [and saying], "We could use another fast song for this to be a stronger album."
You've worked in the Hit Factory, at studios with old Quad-Eights, in studios with SSLs. What's the difference between SSLs and vintage boards, do you have a preference? Do you think vintage is important?
I do have a preference. The funny thing is: when you're working on a project is the only time you get to hear the difference. I mixed a record to a one-inch 2-track machine, which is this magnificent sounding deck, and you realize you're the only one whose going to hear how magnificent that is. It's gonna come out on a CD anyway. It's always best to have the best source quality that you can have, but really it sort of turns to diminishing returns at a certain point. A lot of that stuff is just to get yourself off, or the band off, or whatever. Number one, it has to do with the way you work, whether you run levels really hot and how hard you push things. Old gear tends to sound better when you push it harder, or when you break the rules it sounds better. When you shoot a major motion picture you shoot it on film, the whole vocabulary of film has to do with how a 35 mm print looks. So all your great-sounding records are 24-track analog through a Neve console. It's kind of the same thing — it's less obvious sound-wise. It's a reference more than it is an actual aesthetic difference. I never had any luck with the SSLs until the 9000, which sounds pretty good to me. But the 9000 is a three-quarter of a million dollars console. It doesn't sound $750,000 dollars good. That has to do sometimes with the practicality of major label stuff. It has total recall, it's got like a bazillion faders. It's pretty amazing to work in joints like [The Hit Factory], all the super glitzy glamour. But still even in that situation, the room that I love best at the Hit Factory was their old building up the block, completely ghetto style. It didn't have the crazy entryway with the marbles and the flags and that stuff. But it really comes down to the important thing: monitoring. If you have good monitoring you can work on anything.
What kind of monitors do you prefer?
I bought these KRK E8s that I really like, and then NS- 10s. People diss [NS-10s] but that's the only thing for under a grand that's worth carrying around with you, that's for sure. The next thing that's even worth putting on top of your consoles is gonna be 4 times as much bread. And they work great — they're really good for sorting out midrange. But from a practical Tape Op perspective, #1 is monitoring and #2 is always referencing stuff to something that you know sounds good. 'Cause you listen to anything for four hours and your ears adjust to it. What I've learned lately is that when you get something to where it's feeling really good, save it and print it and keep it. And if you think you got it better, double check that the earlier one wasn't better. It goes like that down to performances. You can wire up your whole studio with crappy guitar cables, and if it rocks and kicks ass, that's it. That's the whole Joe Meek [Tape Op #100] lesson. It doesn't even matter. Everything matters, but nothing matters more than whether or not the thing makes an impression, or does its job. And if something's supposed to be cathartic, it better make you cry.
Have you created any cool radical sounds lately?
Yeah, definitely. Radical stuff to me is super important [for my] audio geek side, and it's totally what I want to do, but you hear people these days going, "Oh, you're doing one of those Tape Op things, you're going totally Tape Op on this song." [laughter] I did a bunch of records with distorted vocals 'cause I got all obsessed with distorted vocals. And working with indie rock people, if they're not pumped up enough a lot of times I can really get 'em psyched by what they're hearing back in the headphones. The current Sleater- Kinney record has a lot of interesting vocal sounds that are all printed to tape like crazy, and they're responding to all the weirdness in the headphones. Oftentimes I'm doing stuff just to keep from being bored. But it also can be really hard to find the exact radical thing that works. Nowadays with everyone having the same plug-ins, they all use the same fake radical thing that's not radical at all, 'cause you just hit a button and there it is. But it takes a lot of work to [say], "Okay this needs to be fucked up, but how?" You never know what is going to work. Usually in a rock band the dynamics are there's one guy who's a total pain in the ass, with wacky ideas every ten seconds, and from a technical standpoint that can slow you down, you can wind up chasing your tails. But at the same time, the worst of those guys at least bats like 20%. And you try the crazy idea that you never thought in a million years would work and it works beautifully. So you can't shut 'em down 'cause you'll miss all those good ones, like putting a banjo on a song. You really have to pay attention to that.
What makes your stuff, from a technical standpoint, just seem to jump out of the speakers? You already mentioned you're using basic gear.
It's just trying to push it, I guess. Working with Thompson the big thing is always pushing the dynamics really hard, especially on the overproduced shit. To really try to make dynamics happen can be pretty difficult. When you stack too much shit on top of other shit, you really have to shove it around. It has a lot to do with foreground and background, and it has a lot to do with carving out room for all the individual [sounds]. You always wind up with at least one song on the record where they're trying to stuff five elements in space that should be for one element. And sometimes you can talk people into stripping it down and sometimes it's important that it sounds like chaos. The Harvey Danger single ["Flagpole Sitta"] is an example of where I've seen it go through the meat grinder. They kept trying to remix the single over and over again, three different guys. Guy A turned the chaos way down to make it more palatable. Guy B made another mix that was too boring or too stock. And I tried to beat it. And the mix we did really quick on the day that we tracked the song is the one that's on the album and the video and the radio. They tried like hell to make a better one but, you know, you catch that moment.
You can't fake the immediacy of it.
And that's the beauty of mixing manually. When we were mixing [Sleater-Kinney's] All Hands On the Bad One we wound up editing together one of the songs, the choruses from mix B and the verses from mix A, and they said, "What's the difference? This part of the song sounds so much better on [that part]." I don't know what the difference is, let's just cut 'em together. Why are we even asking the question, here's the solution. You just gotta go with it. If I have too much time to mix on an automated console, I'll squeeze all the life out of it, trying to make everything too perfect. A lot of times what I'll do when I'm mixing is I'll put [the faders] up for awhile and either it'll be cool or it won't, and I'll tear it back down and put it up really fast. It's [all about] maintaining the first perspective.
You specifically give yourself a time limit to do it.
Yeah. That's what's really good about working with another person. It's really easy to over think anything so [it helps with] somebody else waiting a couple hours and coming back in and saying, "Yeah that's good leave it alone now." 'Cause you can just crawl inside a snare sound for hours. [laughter] I don't understand how anyone could work on a drum sound for three days. From the school I came up in, it better be working in a half hour or I'm wasting somebody's money.
