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If You Don't Know Jorma...
Read this great story on The Fur Peace Ranch in Delta Magazine this month
The John Mayer Interview
Home (Studio) Away From Homeby Heather Johnson
Photo by Mr. Bonzai
Comfortably glued to the phone on the 12th Floor of the W Hotel in Manhattan, pop-rock chart-topper John Mayer talks about his home studio, his "home away from home" studio, and his new album, Heavier Things, released September 9 on Aware/Columbia.
AppleProAudio: What equipment to you have in your home studio these days? We hear it's temporarily disassembled.
John Mayer: It's not disassembled; it's just a little messy. The reason my home studio looks so cool right now is because I stopped recording in my home studio right before Pro Tools went to [Mac] OS X. So I have two Power Macs with two monitors running at the same time. One runs OS 9, the other runs OS X. The one running OS X runs everything but Pro Tools; the one running nine only runs Pro Tools. The Power Mac that is running OS 9…is the loudest computer known to man. It will debunk a hostage situation.
The idea behind my home studio was to not buy anything or implement anything that wasn't going to be easy to use. There's not a ton of gear, there's no outboard reverb…actually, there's an Eventide that was a lemon right out of the box, which is basically just holding a place in the rack. But I don't think I would have used it much anyway. I like straight-up [DigiTech] Digiverb. Give me Digiverb any day.
I also have the Digi 002 hard disk system, and then a rack for the computer with a couple of API mic pres. My vocal mic is a Neumann M149. It's the one I like the most. For a production model microphone, this one is great. I'm also a pod guy, and I’m big on [Propellerhead] Reason. There are some Reason elements on my record. In fact, a lot of elements from the home recordings made it on to the new record.
APA: So which elements from Heavier Things were recorded at your home studio?
JM: A guitar line from the single "Bigger Than My Body" is from my studio. The guitar from "New Deep" is from my studio. All the guitars on "Only Heart" are from the studio. I like the fact that technology is so equalized now. As long as you're not a jack-ass, you can get something on tape—quote unquote—make it sound great and transpose it in any mix you want.
APA: What do you primarily use your home studio for?
JM: Demos. The way that I demo, I never demo with the intent to record anything that's actually listenable. I demo as a scratch pad. I used to record on the Roland hard drives, but they're so unintuitive. Pro Tools, as with the Mac, removes all the intellect from you, and only shows you a space bar and an Apple key and a little line moving across. It's very clean. You don't burn any energy when you record yourself. It used to be that I needed to have somebody record me, because I'd burn myself out on the keys, the jog wheel and the clips and things. For instance, last night I did a recording of my own vocals, and I just sat in a chair and sang into a [Shure] Beta 58 and ran the punches with my left hand. It was the fastest vocal punch I've ever done. Unfairly fast. For the demos I recorded, my friend and front-of-house engineer Chad Franscoviak would help me grid them out. I would work on tracks too, but I wouldn't grid them. I would take a piece, loop it, then copy-paste-copy-paste…so that basically I never really had the experience of recording a track, which is very important to me. When you go in to make your true record, you don't want to feel like you're tracing over what you just did. So I always felt that even though I had demos to play for people, I hadn't really recorded anything, because I actually recorded for less time than the song exists. So that's really my intent in demoing. It's a notepad. My methods in ProTools are so arcane, but they work for me. They keep it all up in my head, and not the tips of my fingers.
APA: How often do you work with an engineer at your home studio?
JM: Chad would come up every three weeks or so; the rest of the time I would sit alone. The actual coming up with brand new ideas has to be done alone. But then cementing them can be done with other people. I love working with other people once I have an idea, but if I had to pay somebody to sit in a room while I came up with stuff, I wouldn't come up with anything.
APA: Would you ever release product recorded entirely at the home studio?
JM: Sure. But I think I would change some of the equipment in the home studio. If I were going to do anything professionally in my place, I would go for a Pro Tools HD system. Maybe get a few more pieces of outboard gear. I'd probably do the 1176 thing, get some Pultec stuff. For the most part, right now I just try to come up with serviceable demos that don't expend the mental energy that I need to have as an artist.
APA: You've been spending a lot of time on the road this year. Do you have a recording rig that travels with you?
JM: We have a really good rackmount Digi 002. We've got a couple more APIs and Avalons. A Line 6 POD Pro rack mount and the Alesis Masterlink ML-9600, which is just fun. I discovered it at OceanWay. It's actually a gift from Jack Joseph Puig [who produced Heavier Things]. I'm using the same Neumann M149 mics, and the same Neumann KM184s. That works out really well. I guess there's no different equipment than what we have at home, but we're a lot more concise about the setup. It's actually a 16-space rack, so stays in the bay of the bus and we bring it out on off nights.
APA: Do you use your mobile recording rig for demos as well?
JM: Actually, no. We're doing real songs on it. We just did a song that went on the B-side of the "Bigger Than My Body" single in Australia called "Tracing." We did it at the Canterbury Hotel in Indianapolis. We used the door as isolation, and used an old shirt as a pop stopper to do vocals.
APA: What do you think about some of these "micro" music production systems?
JM: The day that the MBox can get its latency down to near zero, I'll be an MBox fanatic. I don't use the MBox because I need to monitor my performance with reverb. And the latency is just too much with the MBox for me to like it. It's like a constant 200-millisecond delay. But the day they figure that MBox thing out, I'll be MBox-ing day and night.
APA: Heavier Things is one of the few new albums to be released on SACD and CD almost simultaneously. What are your thoughts on the SACD format?
JM: I think that SACD as a proprietary technology is very limiting format—a very limited and limiting format. DVD-A, DTS or any of the 5.1 formats can be played with any 5.1 decoder. SACD seems to me like a vehicle to sell a piece of gear. I'm not a fan of that kind of monopoly. Plus there are not that many albums out on SACD. If you have an SACD player you can have a great time listening to Kind of Blue in 5.1, and everything else is just…higher quality stereo? OK. That's cool. But I think that the future is in 5.1. You put an SACD in a DVD player, and the DVD player doesn't know what to do. It's all a bit political, I think.