So you're working on a new record right now. Do you want to start off by talking about that?
JF: Ummm... I don't know. I feel kinda funny doing that. I feel funny talking about something until it's done. I don't wanna exhaust the ideas by turning them into verbosity or something. For me, making music — it's something you just do. I could say the standard things like, "Flea's playing bass and my friend Josh [Klinghoffer] is playing keyboards and drums and synthesizers and I'm playing guitar and singing." But we're still in the middle of it, so I don't wanna talk about mixing it when it's not even mixed yet. I guess I could say we're concentrating on the mix being in a constant state of change and having things come up and down — not being in one static place — with things moving around a lot. I've been into that kind of sound for a while now. I would've done it on Stadium [Arcadium], but some of the personalities and differences of opinion made it where I couldn't take it to the extremes I would have liked to. The kind of sounds I hear in my head are instruments getting louder and softer and changing in tone and sound, and having the music be sonically always in a state of change.
You obviously have a huge commitment to both analog and home recording. I mean, your entire house is basically a studio. What got you into this? Most musicians don't take things this far...
JF: I guess I started noticing how much better I liked recordings that people did on tape more than I did recordings that people were making when they started doing them on computer. I started asking questions and reading books and magazines and noticing that the whole approach to recording in the '60s and the early '70s was far superior to the approach now — both in terms of fast execution, producing results, being able to make a record quickly and being able to come out with a good sounding record — at least in rock music. Electronic music is the only thing that's flourished in the digital age. It seems like you don't have people making rock records that sound as good as Master of Reality or Led Zeppelin II or things like that — there's a warmth there and an atmosphere there that you just don't get. Ryan and I read something by Joe Boyd [Tape Op #60] where he was saying that a big part of the reason that recordings had so much atmosphere and vibe in the '60s, was that they'd have the people all playing in one room — they wouldn't be playing in isolation booths. With the microphones placed right, the bleed in between the instruments was what was creating the atmosphere and what our ears register as being the vibe. That's something that's lacking when everybody's recording everything separately. Ryan was telling me about some people doing recordings where they'll do the toms separate from the snare and hi-hat [laughing], and things go to crazy extremes. But generally people do a lot of close mic'ing and they don't want any bleed, you know? So we're trying to incorporate more distant mic'ing and things like that — trying to incorporate the space and the air into the recording. Any room, no matter if it has a lot of bounce in it, or if it's a small room, that space is still gonna translate into some kind of vibe, you know? So, we started paying more attention to how people were doing it in the '60s. The '60s were coming out of the period of time when engineers really had to learn how to do it one hundred percent with the mic and no bullshit. We had gotten into a lot of weird habits in the Chili Peppers, like using a lot of compression and isolation booths and not having enough atmosphere. On the solo records, we started contradicting everything that the engineers who Ryan and I had been around were doing, and started doing everything the opposite of how they were doing it as much as we could. By starting out using no compression or as little compression as possible, we ended up coming at it from the other side. Even though we made a couple of albums that had kind of a bland sound as a result of it — I think once we got that exact, perfect little spot I feel like it's superior to when people are planning it all the time, you know? Am I talking too much? [Ryan and I assure John he's not talking too much, although we pretty much agree with him. John continues on...] It seems like this needs to be spoken of. Tape is really dying out. Ryan says I'm the only guy he works with on tape. To me it's so clear that if you want to make records that sound as good as all those records in the '60s and '70s, it's not going to happen on a computer. I've seen people's skills go a long way and people being able to get good vibes out of a machine that doesn't have a lot of vibe, but it's never as good as what that same person would do with tape.
