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.
RH: It's a whole other skill set to me as an engineer. When John and I started with Will to Death he called me up and said, "Hey I want to make a record, and I want it to be like the '60s, but I only want to use a couple mics on the drums and no compression — let's set some limits to start with. Are you in?" And I'm like, "Fuck yeah I'm in." No one has ever wanted to do that before. Everyone wants twenty microphones on the drums and everything compressed and everything detailed and super isolated to the point where we'll spend half an hour moving the tom mic so that we don't have the cymbal in it. But then at the same time people will say, "I want it to sound like John Bonham," and I have to say, "Well alright. John Bonham could play his drums. His kit was tuned a certain way. It was surrounded by a bass and a guitar and a vocalist that sounded a certain way and had a certain technique, and it was mic'ed from 20 feet away. So, if you want to commit to that, I'm down." But there's so many times where people want that sound, but they don't really know what's involved.
JF: Sounds are so much in the human being, anyways. When people try to copy these sounds with only technical means — it's so much about the human being. It's like the difference when I hear other people play my guitars from when I play my guitars. It doesn't sound like it's the same guitar.
RH: Someone once asked me, "What kind of guitars does John play?" and I said, "It doesn't matter." He picks up his Les Paul, he picks up a Strat, he picks up a Jag and it sounds like John Frusciante and it sounds great, you know? You'll get a different timbre out of it, maybe, but you'll get the same intent and the same spirit.
JF: It's the same way with recording. It's not like I think, "Tape is great, no matter who's working on it." It's that whole way of thinking. Ryan's developed the ability to really listen with his ears. Another common problem today is people spend so much time looking at waveforms on screens that they've forgotten to listen with their ears. You talk to people who recorded The Beatles, and it was all about hearing what was going to be recorded, then thinking about how it was going to be recorded, and if you were going to use EQ or set up a tape echo and trying to imagine the way the sounds should fit into the big picture before it's recorded. Ryan is doing that. He shuts his eyes and uses his ears before things are being recorded, before the microphones are placed, to really imagine it in his mind and then make it come to pass.
RH: That's actually kind of a recent thing, when taken in a literal sense. I've always obviously listened closely, but working on tape with John requires a lot of forethought and answers to questions such as, "Are we going to process this later?" and "How many tracks do you need for this part?" John will say, "Maybe I want to process this later, I want to do this to it later or we're going to have 'x', 'y' and 'z' with this at the same time as a composite sound." There's all kinds of different sounds that we'll go for. Thinking in advance as much as possible about how these sounds are going to relate to one another, especially spatially with height and depth, will determine how the sources are recorded so that they can fit together in the mix without having to EQ the life out of them. John and I had a conversation before this record about certain things that we wanted to try, like putting more space and air into things, about using distance as a tool to create a sound that's different or that relates better to another sound. It's really interesting to listen with a different ear. I was just talking to a homeopathic doctor the other day about how a lot of people unconsciously listen with only one ear while the other wanders off into eavesdropping on other conversations or is distracted by something else. She was telling me, "Concentrate on listening with both ears so that one ear is not listening to one thing and the other ear is listening to something else. Listen with full intent with both ears so that the energy is in the middle of your head." It's like you're trying to hear a conversation in the other room or if the tea kettle's boiling while simultaneously having a discussion with the person in front of you or trying to get a guitar sound. After thinking about this idea, I'm able to focus so much more on sounds, words, music. We were getting a piano sound the other day, and I'm standing in front of the piano listening and I put the mics up with headphones on and move the mic an inch and it made, to me, a world of difference. John started playing and I was like, "Fuck. There's this one note that's out of phase or this one harmonic that's jumping out." I kept having to go and change the mic again and again before I was totally happy. But I was really focusing in on so many more details than I had been able to before.
Well, there are no decisions being made anymore. Decisions are put off until the mix. It's become ridiculous, with Pro Tools especially.
JF: Yeah, Pro Tools has enabled that. It's like, "We'll fix that later," or "Let's keep 15,000 tracks of whatever." We're putting the pieces together. Luckily I feel like that's something that on my records — you can hear gradually through those six records that we made and the one here, especially by the time of A Sphere in the Heart of Silence (that's a collaboration with Josh Klinghoffer). Everything fits together and creates one sound. We really got it in terms of being able to have all the separate sounds create one sound. Another thing that I'm not particularly crazy about in modern recordings is the way they use compression to make everything give the illusion of sticking together, but everything is still very separate. They're trying to create this definition to each thing. Things like the phenomena that used to happen on old records where you couldn't tell what notes were the piano and what notes were the guitar and things like that, because they were both creating one sound — you never get that nowadays. Treatments are also something that we do a lot of. Ryan and I are really in sync with each other when it comes to doing electronic treatments after things are already on tape, sending them through the synthesizer, putting them back on tape, and sometimes getting rid of the original signal and using both in stereo and doing fades between the two of them.
One of the questions I was going to ask was what you like about working with Ryan, but I think you've kind of answered that. What don't you like about working with Ryan? [laughing]
JF: Well for one thing, it's really important to have somebody who you're comfortable around. I think that as a performer in the studio, you're so naked. You're moving with the ebb and flow of human nature, going through emotional change. Sometimes you feel like you're on fire and everything flows really easily and then there's other times when you're struggling — and I think it pretty much happens with anybody. The stuff that we went through when Ryan was first working with me was really rough. Shadows [Collide with People] was a really difficult record to make for me and it was painstaking to get good vocal takes that were as perfect as what I was imagining in my head. It was rough — really ego shattering. You feel like the littlest ball of slime a lot of the time while you're trying to make a record, and you've got somebody who's putting you under a microscope, somebody who's seeing every detail of what you're doing. You're in there trying your best to sing your heart out and your friends in the other room are listening to every detail and telling you exactly when something's a little off. It can be really humiliating. A lot of people nowadays in the Pro Tools world will sing a bunch of vocal takes and then leave and let the engineers figure it out. As I've gradually gotten better at singing, Ryan's gotten super sharp at being able to tell when something's a little off. If I went in with a new producer right now, things might seem frustrating. But with what Ryan and I have been through already, it's gotten better and better and better — it seems like the worst is behind us and we have this foundation together. I feel totally trusting and comfortable with him and I feel like that counts for a lot, feeling comfortable with the person recording you. As an artist you want to get inside the song and get inside the music and forget about it being a performance. Even though I have really specific aesthetic ideas about how a record should sound, I don't have the technical knowledge to be able to execute it myself. Ryan and I listen to records, and when he listens to music he hears what the room was shaped like. For me, it's really easy to decipher what the guitar is playing, but with Ryan, he's able to hear what kind of microphones they're using. He's my ability to manifest what I'm hearing into reality, because that kind of knowledge is the connector between the music that I hear in my imagination and having it come out onto somebody's CD.
You guys seem like a good team. Two other people you've worked with are Rick Rubin and Ian MacKaye.
JF: Ian has had a big effect on me as a human being in lots of personal ways. If anybody I know is a good role model, it's him. He does everything with so much integrity and stays true to himself, and he isn't led around by his emotions or his ego and deals with the matter at hand. He seems to be one of those people who knows who he is, his place in the world and what he's here to do. A lot of my ideas about how to record — especially at the time of those six records — it was largely influenced by him. We were having a lot of conversations because I'd spent a lot of money on Shadows — I think it was $150,000 or something like that. I felt like it was way too much money and my managers were saying, "God, if you're going to spend this amount of money you should get your own recording studio." It was an expensive record and I felt really bad about it. Talking to Ian, I found out that every Fugazi record was made for $10,000 or less. Ian has this philosophy that the economics are equally as important as the artistic parts of making a record. By working within the limitations that awareness of the economic aspect makes you work within, the divine spirit of music actually responds to that in a certain way. When you're wasting a lot of money making a record, I think the actual music current isn't as responsive or as giving towards you. If you think about all the records in history — especially in the '60s where people would do records in a day or two days — people had to work within these intense time restraints, and the energy of their music was so on fire. They didn't get so lost in little details and picking stuff apart and over thinking things. They played everything as quickly as they could as a band, and everything has this extra fire attached to it because you're under pressure, you know? I realized that quality informs so much of the music that I love. As an example, on the [Frank Zappa &] The Mothers album Absolutely Free, I know the vocals were all done in an hour for the whole record. That's all the time they had to do the vocals, and it would never be what it is without that limitation. There are a million records you could say that about. In the '60s people did not spend months and months and months making a record. A record was made in a couple of weeks or a few days or whatever. With those ideas in my head, I started thinking, "I should attempt to make records as quickly as possible." I started to realize I was able to record vocals quicker than I was on Shadows, when I was kind of nervous and not in a very centered place. One time we recorded vocals for three songs in an hour or two and it started to feel like, "Okay, we can actually do this quickly." We did three songs in three days at that first session for Will to Death. We started to realize we could get a lot done in a really short period of time — keeping that fire in our hearts that's lit by that pressure of having to record in a specific amount of time. For me, an equally important part of it was doing more things for myself. In the Chili Peppers, by necessity we have so many people doing things for us all the time. One thing that I really respect about Ian is that he does a lot for himself — as much as he's capable of he does himself. I'd get that set in my mind — "Okay, this record's gonna take five days." That was as big a part of the whole artistic process of it as writing the songs or doing the tracking in the studio. I hear that when I hear the music. People who have an unlimited amount of time in the studio end up taking it for granted and not really using that freedom. Ian had been encouraging me to come out there and do some recording — I loved the Fugazi recordings. It was a real interesting experience 'cause Ryan and I naturally gravitated towards using the really good equipment — Neve consoles and Ampex machines and stuff like that. At Don [Zientara's Inner Ear] studio the equipment is real '80s, [comparatively] inexpensive equipment, and it still came out sounding great. It was the personalities and the vibe. As long as you have that spirit going into it, that's what gets captured on tape, and the actual, specific equipment doesn't really matter a whole lot. People who are already bringing a vibe to the table and people who already have a powerful energy as a band or as an artist — that studio totally reflects the goodness of whatever they're bringing to the table. It was a fun experience. I think my voice was out of place — it was freezing cold there. We did it in wintertime, but we did everything super quick. We actually did the vocals for that album in front of the speakers with no headphones. That was what Ian was into at the time — having the music coming through really soft in the speakers and standing there doing the vocals live. That ended up creating a real personal sound, especially when you're comfortable around the people and they're all standing right around you. It really is more like a performance. It's so much about the personal interaction. Like we were talking about how a guitar sounds like the person who's playing it — I think a recording is so much about the sound of the people who are present, their energy that goes into it.
So it sounds like Ian kind of helped you rethink your whole approach to recording more than saying "Oh, play a D chord here instead of..."
