John Frusciante’s Creative Explosion
Lo-Fi Junk
Very little preproduction occurred for the 12 songs on The Will to Death. Frusciante demoed them in his living room in guitar-vocal fashion, which allowed Klinghoffer to prepare some drum parts and Frusciante to improve his singing. “Hearing yourself sing is a big part of going into a studio and nailing it,” said Frusciante. They also recorded some simple guitar-vocal-drum versions in their rehearsal studio. “That was the closest we got to making demos,” he commented. “I may put them on the Internet. They sound like we were in outer space on a spaceship or something. We’d listen to them, and we’d think of overdubs. But we usually made up overdubs in the studio.”
Frusciante wasn’t focused on overdubs anyway, because he wanted The Will to Death to sound spacious and raw, getting away from the high-production values of Shadows Collide with People. Together with Ryan Hewitt — an up-and-coming engineer who had taken over from Jim Scott halfway through the recording of Shadows Collide with People and who went on to engineer most of Frusciante’s subsequent material — Frusciante recorded and mixed 12 songs in 5 days at 2 top Los Angeles studios, Mad Dog and Larrabee. Given that he garners a lot of his inspiration from recordings of the early 1970s, it’s not surprising that Frusciante recorded “as if it were 1971” — that is, on 16-track 2-inch tape, mixed down to ¼-inch, and without using computers.
“Many of those records were recorded in a day,” explains Frusciante. “We were taking our inspiration from groups who recorded quickly because they had to. My reasons for working quickly weren’t monetary, but it is an artistic challenge to do a record for a certain amount of money. I now make records for $10,000, and by working so quickly I could record in the best studios. When people write about The Will to Death as being lo-fi, that’s bulls — t. It was recorded on the best equipment there is. It’s just not recorded on a f—–g computer. A computer is not better quality than a 16-track, and just so that people know it, a 16-track 2-inch sounds better than 24-track 2-inch because each track has more space.
“You get a fatter sound with 16-track, which is why I use it. I’m not trying to record lo-fi, I’m trying to record quickly, because that’s the best way to capture excitement. As long as people can stand up to the pressure, music comes alive when they are creating it fast. If you can’t handle the pressure, then you give up or are forced to take longer. And after the experience of making Shadows Collide with People, Josh and I got used to top studios to the point where we weren’t intimidated by them anymore.”
Museum Of Rock
So what is Frusciante’s problem with computers? Not wanting to be seen as a Luddite, the guitarist offers the following caveat: “I won’t sit here and go on like some anticomputer person, because a lot of the music I really like is recorded on or generated with computers. I think many people are doing adventurous and wonderful things with computers.”
Frusciante continues to say that he far prefers analog recording “for the vibe that I feel my music should have, in terms of sonic warmth. I want my recordings to fill the room and be comforting, even if it’s a really distorted, loud, f—-d-up sound. I’m probably one of the few people that go into a mastering place and insist that no computers are used. I want it to be analog all the way until it’s pressed into vinyl. For CD pressing, I ask for the music to be mastered to 1630 [U-Matic] tape, which sounds really good. The same EQ is applied for vinyl and CD mastering.”
Frusciante’s antipathy toward digital recording was in part fueled by his experience working with an 8-track digital recorder for To Record Only Water for Ten Days. “When we came to mix that record, I realized how bad it sounded. After that album, I vowed that I wasn’t going to record anything on digital anymore. Shadows Collide with People was recorded on a Neve desk and an analog 24-track, and we used an old Scully 8-track for the drums because it made them sound warmer. I wanted that album to sound as warm as possible.
“My friend Vincent Gallo opened my eyes to what you’re losing when you record things digitally and the degree to which the older equipment is better than the new stuff. My home stereo is the greatest thing in the world. For instance, I have Western Electric speakers from 1949, and they’re the best-sounding speakers I’ve ever heard, for any kind of music.”
Clearly Frusciante has joined the company of some of the world’s most eminent engineers and producers who believe that analog sounds better than digital, and that old equipment is often better than new gear. Like many of his fellow analog-lovers, Frusciante has taken to buying up the old studio gear that’s on the market as digital workstations become the norm and established studios close. As a result, the guitarist’s modest residence in the Hollywood Hills now looks a little like a museum of rock recording.
“I have an API desk from 1972 that’s from The Record Plant,” Frusciante reveals. “It’s the board that Television and Kiss recorded on, and I think even John Lennon worked with it. I also have a 1-inch Ampex 8-track recorder from 1970, on which King Crimson recorded In the Court of the Crimson King. And I have six old 1176 compressors, a Fair-child, three Lang equalizers [a PEQ4 and two PEQ2s], two Pultec [EQP-IA3] equalizers, an EMT plate reverb, and an EMT 250 digital reverb. I also have a Studer A800 24-track recorder, but it’s not here because my house isn’t big enough to hold it. I’m trying to find a place, separate from my house, for a studio.”
Frusciante suddenly stops in his tracks and exclaims worriedly, “I’m nervous talking about this stuff. I’ve never spoken about this to a magazine before.”
While more details about the contents of his new home studio aren’t forthcoming, he does explain the reasons for starting his own studio. “It’s really good to have the equipment that I love working on in my own place. Also, for the amount of money that I spent on Shadows Collide with People, I could have bought lots of studio equipment and had it forever. And I love the idea of being able to create music all the time without having to book studio time. A lot of the time the best studios in town are already booked, while in other cases, studios you like may close.”
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