Transcription of Jonathan Wyman for the show Making Music #269
Lisa: “Today I have with me in the studio Jonathan Wyman who has spent most of his adult life in recording studios, and now operates out of the Halo recording studio in Wyndham. Since returning to Maine to focus on independent records, he has collaborated with artists and labels from all over the country, and the world. From northern Maine, to Chennai India. Nice to have you in here.
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Jonathan: “Thank you for having me.
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Lisa: “Did I pronounce that correctly? Chennai?
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Jonathan: “Chennai?
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Lisa: “Chennai?
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Jonathan: “Yeah.
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Lisa: “I’ve never heard of it, but-
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Jonathan: “I think it’s on the east coast of India. It used to be referred to as Madras.
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Lisa: “Oh, that makes sense.
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Jonathan: “I got really super excited, it was a fun record to do, but I got really super excited to do an Indian traditional record, and it turned out to be totally Western pop, it had nothing to do with Indian music aside from the guy who was singing.
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Lisa: “It wasn’t like a Bollywood thing?
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Jonathan: “No, not at all, just a straight up pop record.
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Lisa: “I’m interested in what you do, because I think most of us have a sense of okay, if you are a singer you sing, if you are a guitar player you play guitar. Your instrument is multivariate. You are working with a lot of sounds, bringing them together. Creating something new out of them.
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Jonathan: “Yep, exactly. That’s one facet of it too, and the other facet of it is the organizational side of it, which can be just as time-consuming, and often more taxing. Coordinating multiple people, multiple opinions. Even just multiple schedules these days, a lot of the artists I work with are independent artists who are still holding down jobs, so getting people in the same room at the same time can be tricky, but as far as the technical side of it, yeah, the point of what I do is to take somebody else’s work, and bring it to its fullest potential, I think that’s the best description of it.
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Lisa: “How did you become interested in doing this?
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Jonathan: “When I was about 19, well, I guess even earlier, I would rent multitrack cassette recorders from daddy’s junkie music, or Wurlitzer in Boston. Like over a school vacation, I would go and the Monday of vacation I would go and pick it up, and drop it off the Friday, and spend the whole week sort of hold up with a little cassette four track in the attic, and working things out. That probably would have been when I was 14, or 15. There wasn’t an Internet, you didn’t know how to do it, you just had this somebody behind the counter shoves this equipment in your hands, and you go to it. In college, was in a band, we decided to make a record, and go into a real studio, and to offset the cost of it. I was a grunt, I was a runner.
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“That turned into being an assistant, and then that turned into having my own sessions, and I was still in college at the time, and then after college came down to a commercial studio just outside of Portland. It just clicked, it seemed like the way that I could be making music all the time. I wasn’t the best player, I don’t think I could make it as a player. I felt good, and I felt like I could participate. Sort of like being a little part in every band. I could participate in making music all the time in a studio situation.
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Lisa: “Do you remember when you first were impacted by sound?
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Jonathan: “Sound, or music?
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Lisa: “Sound, go with sound.
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Jonathan: “That probably would have been getting into teenage years, recording, there is a thing that happens when you start recording, and you focus more on the technical side of it, and the sounds than you do the actual emotional content, or song content at least for me. I know a lot of people have had a similar sort of thing. Yeah, I think that would have been when I started again, experimenting with those cassette 4 tracks, and learning that I would always be in headphones, because I couldn’t disturb anybody else in the house. You had this really really accurate representation of what you are hearing, you could hear everything, and I would move the microphone around a little bit, around a guitar, amplifier, and you could hear the differences in sound these tiny little movements made. I think that’s my first obsessive moment I think.
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Lisa: “What about music, it’s interesting that you divided it out?
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Jonathan: “Well, like I said, I think that people in my field can divide the two terms, and you can be really into things that sound good, but have no musical impact, or no emotional impact. I definitely got into recording sound because I’m a musician, because I love music, and as a way to I don’t know, broadcast is the wrong word, but just capture and translate. I think translate is the right word, translate music into the best form possible. I’ve been involved in music forever. Singing, playing instruments, I went through a whole slew of the gradeschool instruments, playing cello, that wasn’t right for me, and saxophone was a disaster, and it wasn’t until I was 12 or 13, and then picked up an electric guitar, I was like, “Okay, I get this. I understand this.” So.
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Lisa: “I have two questions, one is: is that your definition of music, is something that has an emotional impact?
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Jonathan: “I think so, yeah. Good music, music that I enjoy, people always ask what kind of music do you do, and that’s a hard question. My boiler plate answer is always just rock and roll because it’s so broad. It can be anything as long as it makes you wiggle, as long as it connects with you on some level. That’s what I consider good music. It can be hip-hop, it can be metal, it can be just regular old rock ‘n roll. As long as it makes you react, and makes you feel something, that’s good music to me.
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Lisa: “That leads me to my second question, which is if it wasn’t the cello, and you knew that, it wasn’t the saxophone and you knew that, why was it the electric guitar? Do you have any idea?
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Jonathan: “In middle school we had this thing called stage band, and it was almost like jazz band. It was terrible, but you had to audition for it, it was the better players, and I remember watching this guy play a guitar solo, and I was in the back of the auditorium, I was in the regular band, probably playing saxophone terribly. I watched him play a guitar solo, and my memory of it is he was the greatest, he was Jimi Hendrix, and Jimmy Page, and Andre Segovia all rolled into one, and in actuality, it was probably semi-teenager limping through a mediocre jazz arrangement solo. That was kind of the moment, that was when I said I want to do that.
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Lisa: “I always wonder what it is about a specific say sound, that so captures someone. I wonder how it is that someone’s brain is wired, they can hear that. Something wells up inside them.
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Jonathan: “Yeah, and the guitar is such a weird instrument too. It’s like where as a piano you have one location for each note, you can play the same note in the same octave in 4 or 5 different places in the guitar, and there is no one telling you where is the right place to do it. Each one has a slightly different sound, and physically the guitar is a really stupid instrument, it like mathematically can never actually be in tune. So many other physical aspects of it that can alter the intonation and the tuning of it. That’s what makes personality. You think of a guy like Bill Frizzell, who is one of my favorite guitar players. He always plays stuff a little bit sharp, and it creates this tension that you instantly know it. It’s like the sound of his voice.
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Lisa: “It’s like a thumbprint, or something?
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Jonathan: “Exactly, exactly. I think it’s really interesting not just on guitar, but on so many instruments that you can identify a player within a couple of notes. I think it’s the sign of a great player.
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Lisa: “Which is kind of funny, because we spend a lot of time in music, at least initially trying to get people to sound a certain way. To make sure that they’ve got the right notes, and they’ve got the right foundation. Ultimately, you do have to cross over. Like being an artist, like a visual artist, you have to cross over and have your own thing.
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Jonathan: “That happens too in terms of mixing. To bring it back to what I do now, musically where you spend a lot of time especially for me in formative years sort of 8 being the people who I really like and admire, and trying to make things sound like Chad Blake, and trying to make things sound like Rich Costey. I think it’s a natural thing as an artist, where you start off imitating, and then it becomes your own voice, and it becomes your own sound. I think a lot of people do that.
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Lisa: “Is it similar for you that you have your own fingerprint and somebody would say this has been done by Jonathan?
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Jonathan: “I don’t know about that yet, I can’t hear it. In some ways, that’s really good. There are the mixtures that you can tell instantly that is Chris Lordalgee, I know that snare drum. There is also like I mentioned Rich Costey before, and he might be the person who I look at and pay attention to the most of these days, because I’m never certain that it’s him, but I will always hear a record and say to myself, “That sounds great.” I will go on the Internet, because that’s how you find credits these days, and I will see who produced it, or who mixed it, and it’s nine times out of 10 it’s Rich Costey. It never screams this one identifiable sonic thumbprint, but it’s always great.
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Lisa: “That’s also kind of intriguing that you don’t know somebody by specifically what they are, but more globally by the sense of it.
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Jonathan: “Everything on his CD is just top-notch, awesome stuff. I think that’s a great example of doing this job right, like I said, it’s about taking somebody else’s work, and making it as good as it can possibly be. It’s like being a focusing lens. I think that’s a good sign, I think not being instantly identifiable means that it’s the artist that comes first, and the most important thing is finding the best things about what that artist is doing, and bringing them to the forefront, and maybe if there is something weak, or something’s not as successful, either edit it out, or downplay it.
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Lisa: “Because I’m assuming you are very sensitive to sound, just in general. As you are walking down the street, what’s that like for you?
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Jonathan: “Yeah, I mean I think the biggest thing, and this it goes around the Internet now, but misophonia, the thing that happens when people are chewing, and it drives you crazy. That actually happens to me, and if I’m working on something, and I don’t listen very loud anymore, because I want to preserve my hearing as much as I can, and I think you hear better at a moderate volume. If I am working on something, and they are somebody else in the room, and even if they are chewing gum, or eating potato chips, that instantly drives me crazy.
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“Especially if you are doing voice over stuff, or listening to just spoken content, you are actually trying to edit out all those little sounds, you’re trying to get rid of it. As far as the walking out in the real world, it’s interesting, I live downtown now, so it’s a lot louder. It’s traffic noise, not so much in the house, but just walking around, I notice it a lot more. I used to live in Brookland, and I guess the subway is really bad for hearing, it is something like 95 dB. There are people who will actually actively wear hearing protection when writing the subway, because it can cause actual hearing damage. It’s that loud.
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Lisa: “It’s interesting you would say that, because I think about riding on boats, and the motor to a boat, and how loud it can really be, but because it’s so overwhelming, that you don’t even think, “Oh, this is a loud motor.” There is a lot of things like that. Like in our everyday life, and because this is what you do, your ears are like other people’s hands for example, you would have to be even more careful.
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Jonathan: “Yep, I’m pretty careful about it, I try to wear your plugs when I go to shows, and if an ambulance is going by, plug your ears or something. Yeah, you have to be careful, because that’s it. It doesn’t grow back if you have hearing loss, and maybe even happens naturally even if you take perfect care of your ears, I’m 41 years old, the high-frequency perception starts to dissipate a little bit. Not scientifically, but just listening to tones, I think I hear the upper upper echelon of human hearing a little less than I did when I was 22 now.
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Lisa: “That’s a little discouraging.
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Jonathan: “It’s natural, it happens.
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Lisa: “Your wife, you and your wife both teach up at Bates-
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Jonathan: “Yep, she more than I. I do it once a year for five weeks at a time, and I don’t think I’m going to do it this year. I don’t think they are going to have me back, they’ve got to rotate the stock a little bit.
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Lisa: “You went to Bates yourself. What have you noticed about the availability of access to the type of work that you do at colleges like Bates, at Bates specifically, or colleges like Bates?
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Jonathan: “Yeah, it’s pretty amazing that it used to be on every laptop, but now it’s even on phones, and tablets, you have the technology to do the multitrack recording way way way beyond the level of the apparatus that I talked about earlier when I would go into Boston, rent equipment that I could only afford to have for a week at a time, like now that is on a phone. It’s pretty great, I think the ability to learn about recording, and the editorial process as an artist, and as a writer that recording can give you, that perspective, where you can hear yourself, you can hear the songs, you can hear how you are performing it. That is I think a huge advantage to people who are coming up as artists today. Just being able to … I don’t know, have access to the kind of technology that will give you that perspective on your own.
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Lisa: “Well, I’m thinking about the photographers who used to do film, and now are digital. There is a fair number of people who didn’t really like that transition, and resisted it. Actually, there is a fair number of younger people who now go back and they learn film. Is there any sort of equivalent in the work that you do?
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Jonathan: “Yeah, absolutely. Coming up we recorded everything to 2 inch analog tape, and you had 24 tracks, or 16 depending on the kind of tape deck, and tape was expensive, it’s even more expensive now. Because fewer people are making it. There is all the romanticism about the quality of sound, the actual auditory experience of magnetic tape. I think the bigger thing comes in workflow, and in the fact that maybe this is similar to film, where it’s like if you want to do that guitar solo again, we have to record over the guitar solo that’s there. That guitar solo is really good. We can never get it back if we record over it.
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“Because this is the last available track, this is the last thing we are doing on this song, so if you go in again, we’re going to lose that forever. Obviously in digital, you have nearly unlimited tracks, you have these different playlists that you can do, different versions of different performances, and even compile them together into one Frankenstein performance. That is definitely true in my field, and in some ways I sort of miss that level of commitment and that workflow that analog tape provided. Less so the maintenance, and I think analog tape sounds good, but that’s not the reason I get nostalgic for it. I get nostalgic for it, or I think nostalgia is the wrong word. Because I even this morning was thinking about, “Man, would it be great to have a room that was just tape in a console, and maybe a couple of pieces of outboard gear.
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“Not these hundreds of choices that the digital environment provides you with.” You can open a menu in ProTools, which is the recording software I use, and you have 25 different equalizers, and 25 different compressors, and I think that can slow down creativity. I think that you get way too wrapped up in all these different choices, and tape made you commit, and maybe that’s the same thing with film, where you can’t just shoot 1000 times, you only have I don’t know how many exposures you get per roll of film, but it’s limited. There is a physical piece of film in there, that you only can get so many exposures on. Then you have to develop them, and you have to as opposed to the instant gratification of the digital world.
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Lisa: “Well, as you’re talking, I’m thinking about the amount of prep time that used to be required before you would go in and record something. Because if you had a limited amount of tape, you would need to make sure you were pretty good by the time you got there. Now, not that this is a good or a bad, but now you can almost prep as you are going.
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Jonathan: “Oh, it’s definitely bad. It’s definitely bad.
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Lisa: “Okay, well I didn’t want to make that judgment.
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Jonathan: “No, I make that judgment, it’s you get that sort of, “Oh, you can fix it in ProTools. You can just get close enough, and you can move the notes around digitally, and make it right.” I don’t like that, I think that recording can be this really expensive time-consuming thing, but there is this guy cowboy Jack Clement, he was a record producer, and he had his rules of recording, and the last rule was my favorite, and it was it only takes three minutes to make a hit record. All you’ve got to do is be prepared, have a compelling performance, and that’s it. It’s not rocket surgery. You get people who know how to play on the floor, and make a recording. I think that the digital age has fostered this … Wow, I don’t want to sound negative about it, but this lack of preparedness, or this reliance on manipulating things. As opposed to preparedness, and performance.
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Lisa: “Yeah, I mean that makes sense. You think about even people who are learning music as they are coming up through, they can record themselves from the moment that they start doing music, and they can start thinking, “Oh, well I already sound good. I don’t really have to practice. I can just-“
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Jonathan: “There is a button that I can press that will make all the notes be in tune, and if I can press that button, why would I need to practice?
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Lisa: “Right. When we talked to photographer Trent Bell, he spends a lot of any photographs for Maine home design, he spends a lot of time setting up the scene. Everything is exactly right in the house that he is photographing, and he is training as an architect, so it kind of makes sense that his mind works that way. Once it is done, it’s done. He does very little editing afterwards.
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Jonathan: “I think that makes the best recordings. As far as preparation, and the analog in my world would be make sure you’ve got the room set up, you don’t want people sitting around, you don’t want people getting bored, if you can have everything ready to go so they can walk into the room, put on headphones, and start playing immediately when the inspiration is there, and everybody is still excited. It can be a really time-consuming, sometimes even boring process doing the same thing over and over again. Part of what makes rock ‘n roll great is the vitality, and the spontaneity of it. You don’t get that when you are doing 20 takes in a row trying to micromanage the snare drum sound, and get it just right. Yeah, that’s a really good analogy to what my level of preparedness has to be to get a great performance out of people.
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Lisa: “For those of us who don’t have as much musical background, what is the difference between engineering, and mastering, and …
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Jonathan: “Sure. The two big dichotomies from my world are engineering, and producing. Engineering is the translation of a performance into some sort of storage medium. It’s a technical, but artistic endeavor, because you can affect that capture using different microphones, using different microphone techniques, using the relationship of the room to the performer. Producing is more overseeing both the creative side of it, and the organizational and logistical side of it. As a producer, you are responsible for delivering the record, and saying, “Okay, on this day we are going to be done, and this record is going to come out.” It doesn’t always in my world it also involves being the engineer. A: because I like engineering, and it’s just one more tool to get the aesthetic I’m looking for.
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“Within that, you’ve got basically let’s call it three different stages, recording engineer, who is capturing performances from artists on the floor. Then the next, maybe not the next step, but the next big step is mixing. Where you take all of these multiple tracks, because when you are recording, you record let’s say a kick drum to one track, and a snare drum to another track, and a bass guitar to another track. The mix engineer’s job is to blend all those disparate tracks into a cohesive whole. Into the song. To do that, both in a technically pleasing manner, and an emotionally convincing you want to convey emotion, you want to bring the listener along for the ride over the course of the song.
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“Finally, the last step is mastering, that’s not something I do. Mastering, it’s almost like the final glossy finish, the last layer of lacquer on a piece of furniture, or at Gateway they describe it as, it’s the last creative step in making a record, and the first technical step in producing whatever is going to go to the consumer, whether that is a compact disc, or these days a download, or a streaming file. Mastering, you don’t have as much control, you can’t in mastering say, “Oh, I wish the vocal were louder, or I wish that the guitars were quieter.” You have a fair bit of control over the overall it’s big broad strokes. The thing that mastering engineer does usually it brings perspective.
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“I make records really fast, like rarely do I have more than two weeks to make a record. Two weeks is a long time to be listening to the same eight or 10 songs. All the time, 60, 70 hours a week in those two weeks. The mastering engineer has the ability to hear those songs for the first time, and maybe hear things that I as a mixer missed. Again, I work fast, so maybe one song is a little bass heavy, maybe one song is a little dull. Maybe one song the choruses don’t explode the way they could, and the mastering engineer’s perspective as more or less a first-time listener gets to modify that, gets to again, say what’s the very last thing that this needs to put over the top.
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Lisa: “Well, I have learned a lot during this conversation. It’s good stuff. Because I’m lucky I have Spencer Albee to do all of the stuff to bring the radio show out there, all I have to do is talk. My job is relatively easy. I’m going to refer people who have been listening and want more information about the work you are doing to our Love Maine Radio show notes page where we will put your website, so that they can find you here in the Portland Maine, not Portland Oregon.
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Jonathan: “But if you are from Portland Oregon, we can still do stuff.
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Lisa: “That’s okay too. I’ve been speaking with Jonathan Wyman who has spent most of his adult life in recording studios. Now operates out of the Halo recording Studio in Wyndham. Thanks so much for educating me, for coming in today, and for the work that you are doing.
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Jonathan: “Right on, thank you for having me.