John Congleton...

[Vum]

I've emailed John a couple of times and he's extremely magnanimous and prompt to respond to email. I used to rehearse a couple of groups next to his (pAperchAse) at a rehearsal spot under the freeway - great band. I think he was featured in TapeOp in the past couple of years too - big "mic nerd" like most of us!

[gonklives]

Tape Op Magazine > Videos > John Congleton interview part 1

He was in issue 81 of Tape op if you can back order it, great interview!

[malakie27]

hi there. thanks for the nice words. im on this board from time to time, so feel free to ask me any questions you like ever.

thanks!
john congleton

[cianthreetimes]

Originally Posted by malakie27

hi there. thanks for the nice words. im on this board from time to time, so feel free to ask me any questions you like ever.

thanks!
john congleton

Awesome! Thanks for chiming in John.

Any chance you could outline your typical production method with Annie? I get the sense that the two of you go through and build the song rather than just record everybody in a room.

Are you doing everything in the computer or using a hybrid of analog/digital?

The combination of the sparse drums and crazy guitars (??) that come in on Dilettante are absolutely insane! I love it.

[Winny Pooh]

Marrow is incredible, if they could make a whole album that kickass then Anne would be the new Radiohead.

[malakie27]

hi!

cianthreetimes, those records with annie are mainly just her and i sort of riffing off one another. half a year or so leading up the record she would send me little 10 second or so ideas, melodys, riffs, whathaveyou and i we would pick our favorite little kernels and just start jamming them. usually i would come up with a programmed beat and we would structure the song roughly take it as far as we could and then decide if we liked it at all. many songs had entirely different versions and arrangements.

we did actor on tape and protools, and strange mercy was all digital...there was sort of no other way to do it since we did so many versions. tape cost would have killed us.

annie is great, i love her...we just did a batch of new songs recently and they are great. i always have a blast with her.

[Winny Pooh]

Can you tell me how you made that spacey sound on the verses of "laughing with a mouth of blood"?. Cool drums (all over in fact) and guitar on actor out of work, kudos!

[arrowood101]

Originally Posted by malakie27

hi there. thanks for the nice words. im on this board from time to time, so feel free to ask me any questions you like ever.

thanks!
john congleton

Big fan awesome for you to chime in!!! The last Hospital ships record is stuck in my car right now . Also think your work on Minus Story - My Ion Truss was amazing. Can't say enough about that album, amazing production!

[greyskull]

John; I LOVE you work on TWDY Self titled; ANYTHING you can tell me about that'd be great!!
You Managed to captured such a fat drum sound and get it to work with everything else.
How to do you approach mixing that kind of thing? certainly in terms of panning and so on?

Huge fan.

[up and at them]

John - any insight into the production of the Baroness records? Totally love the sound. So natural for a heavy band.

[NKB]

Originally Posted by up and at them

John - any insight into the production of the Baroness records? Totally love the sound. So natural for a heavy band.

I'm going to pop my first-post cherry with a huge +1 on this please!

As a huge Baroness fan, and a bass player, I'm partiularly interested in the amazing punchy bass tones you achieved throughout Yellow & Green. I'm incredibly new to the world of recording/engineering (read: no practical experience whatsoever), so any advice you have would go a long way for me, as a home recordist and a bassist.

[malakie27]

hey guys. wow this is all so nice of you.

ill try to answer a little by little...

winny pooh: as far as the dreamy sound on the chorus of mouth of blood, i believe that would be coming from the string section manipulation. we had strings doing this ascending line and annie wasnt really into it but liked the movement of it... so i ran it through this shitty spring verb once and then took the verb single and ran it again through the same spring...there might have been three of four iterations of this, til it was unrecognizable.

thanks for the kind words about the drums and guitar.

arrowood101: you are a man/woman after my heart. jordan gieger (hospital ships/minus story) is one of my favorite people on the planet, artistically and personally. we have worked together many times, his work always thrills me, and i love those records so much. he and annie are similar in that we both have so much trust in each other that we really let each other thrive creatively.

ill respond back soon about twdy, and baroness. got to get back to work!

thank you so much everyone.

-john congleton

[wagz]

Hi, John! You did an amazing job on "Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle" by Bill Callahan. This album sounds beautiful.

If you have time, could you tell me what mic and gear you used to capture and mix Bill's vocals? They are "in your face" but they sound rich and smooth.
Listen to those esses!

Also, I am in love with this very dry, upfront, sweet, warm sound you have on this album. That's the exact what I am aiming for with my recordings. So far, I'm failing rather miserably. Do you have any production, tracking, or mixing tips you could offer to help me get closer to this sound?

Also, the drums on this album sound so fat and yet natural...this album is incredible. John, I know I'm just some random internet guy, but I just wanted to say that I commend you for your stellar work. I just discovered this album (and Bill) today, but I plan to reference it for all of my music from here on. For me, this is the album is the epitome of both beauty and quality. How did you do this?!!!

[malakie27]

hey again!

greatskull:TWDY are a bunch of awesome creative funny dudes. i like them a lot, i think we have done three records together now... self titled was our first and it was a fairly simple session if i recall except for the band fighting a lot. that was with their earlier bass player raymond who later went to med school i think. i think at that point their creative differences might have been coming to a head. there where differences of opinion that was for sure.

andrew (who is no longer in the band) was a real hard hitter and certainly gave me plenty to work within terms of dynamics. i dont recall anything particularly interesting or atypical about how i recorded the drums. it was cut on an old neve 80 series, in a small 70's style room. i remember the snare drum we used mainly was an old beater that had a hhhhhhhhuge gongy ring to it that i loved. i a few times i remember tuning it to make it more ridiculous!

thanks for asking about it. i like that record a lot.

ill respond more shortly. you guys are amazing thank you so much.

john congleton

[Winny Pooh]

Thanks John for all the great answers. You know what is real funny? I was thinking the last few days to check who engineered Apocalypse so I could try and find out how Bill's voice was mic'd and I find out right now that you did the album after coming back to this thread, hahaha. Please let me know with what you mic'd him when you have a moment. Much deeper and more detailed than "eagle" which sounds more midrangey, perhaps as you had more space to place his voice in the mix. Bill is one of the truly great current songwriters.

[wagz]

Apocalypse sounds great as well! I also would like to know more about this recording. Those vocals have so much weight and clarity. It's like Bill is right here in the room singing to me...with his lips pressed up against my ears. Incredible job, John! I'm guessing that this was tracked to tape.

[lakeshorephatty]

John,

Just wanted to say I love your stuff. I love your balance of modern and classic tones. Dare I say you're doing some very timeless work! Its a big influence on the music I create. Look forward to hearing more from you in the future.

Russell

[arrowood101]

Originally Posted by malakie27

arrowood101: you are a man/woman after my heart. jordan gieger (hospital ships/minus story) is one of my favorite people on the planet, artistically and personally. we have worked together many times, his work always thrills me, and i love those records so much. he and annie are similar in that we both have so much trust in each other that we really let each other thrive creatively.

ill respond back soon about twdy, and baroness. got to get back to work!

thank you so much everyone.

-john congleton

Ha awesome! Love his work and especially the albums he does with you. My Ion Truss knocks it out of the park!!

I have a question. From years of listening to your work, I'm guessing you have a few esoteric pieces of gear you like to use. I would be curious to hear about any off beat pieces of gear you regularly use, like a weird old lofi mic, or a beaten up no name amp, or like mentioned above some old spring verb.

You know basically that random piece of gear you tried and it does this one thing you like, sometimes even broken in a pleasing way. Thanks again for taking the time, amazing to have you on here!

[malakie27]

hey again!

upandatthem and NKB: baroness! its always funny when people ask you want you did for a certain record because for me i just always do whatever seems like a good idea at the time. on their new record those guys had demoed and prepared so much before going into the studio that they where really just ready for an outside opinion i think.

those guys first approached me to do the blue record because of my work with explosions in the sky and black mountain. i had no idea who they where but being a big fan of heavy music (but not of modern metal production) i was cautiously optimistic.

we did the blue record and it was a fun, blistering session...in a lot of ways very much like an old punk session i would have done ages ago. they really responded to any experimental stuff i would suggest and seeing the fruit that bore with yellow and green they really want to tap that side of me. so thats what we did. we just went for it with sounds...completely uninterested in what was "right" for heavy music or hard rock. being some one who really tightens his back up at cliche this was fertile ground for me.

that record was fun as hell.

regarding the bass... interestingly enuff they had no bass player on that record, so john (guitar/vocals) played bass and really played it aggressively. we used a lot of pedal coloration on the bass like sans amp and rusty box (a fav of mine). i would do a lot of radicalized eq as well to make sure it was always "there" and not ignorable. something i always lobby for in rock music is making sure the bass has personality and not an amorphous thing that supports the guitar.

john congleton

[wildwonderful]

John, the kick drum sound on Sarah Jaffe's "Before You Go" on Suburban Nature deserves some sort of an award. It sounds so huge and fantastic. I love the production on both of her albums. Great work!

[malakie27]

hello!

thanks for the all questions about the bill callhan records. before i recorded bill he was without a doubt one my musical idols. so getting to be apart of his nexus of work still thrills me to this day.

first things first...bills voice sounds awesome on those records because his voice is awesome. my signal chain for bill has literally been exactly the same on every record. once bill hears something he likes he wants you to keep it that way!

all the vocals on "eagle" are 100 percent live with his acoustic guitar and the band playing... it was an SM7 through whatever board i was working on to a LA2A with very minimal compression. bill hates compression on his voice.

"apocalypse" was exactly the same, but we did do some vocals after the fact. that record morphed a lot in the making.

"rough travel" i only mixed so im not sure.

every aspect of those records where tape. with the exception of the last song on eagle that was transferred to adat and mixed by someone else.

wagz: as far as the over all sound of "eagle". thank you so much for the kind words. all i can tell you was that everything i did was very VERY minimal. as few mics on everything as possible, did things as mono as i could, used up a few tracks as i possibly could... its very similar to how i did the walkmen "libson" record. i tried to pretend like i was making a record in sun studios in the 60s or something.

hope this helps shine a little light!

ill be back soon to talk about the other stuff! you guys are amazing.

john congleton

[wagz]

John, these Bill Callahan albums are pure inspiration for me. The performances, songwriting, engineering, and the mixing...just...wow. Thank you for taking the time to shed some light on the production of these gems. Especially "Eagle".
I want you to know that I really appreciate you coming here and answering my questions . Thanks!

[malakie27]

hey guys. wagz, lakeshorephatty: you are very welcome and thank you so much for your kind words and support.

wildwonderful: glad you like sarah jaffes stuff. she deserves more attention for sure. thanks for the compliment on the bass drum, ive always liked how that turned out too.

thanks everyone so much.

[lakeshorephatty]

Bought some Sarah Jaffe and Wye Oak as a result of this thread. Great stuff.

Russell

[NKB]

Thanks for the notes on Baroness, John! I really love hearing an album where the bass guitar is mixed as it's own instrument! The tone on Cocanium really stands out for me as something I'd love trying to reproduce live. Any hints towards doing this with a typical bass-amp-cab setup, or was there a lot of post-tracking "studio magic" that went in to sculpting that particular tone?

Going back and listening to Blue again after listening to Yellow/Green on repeat for the last month, it certainly seems that the bass was given a LOT more sonic space on the new album. It's a lot more up front in the mix and, like you said, impossible to ignore (in a great way!). Was this a concious decision between you and the band, or is it just sort of the way the songs came together at the end of the day?

Also, I don't mean to derail the thread and make it all about Baroness, so if you want to reply via PM that works for me too.
Thanks again!

[malakie27]

hey guys...

before i talk about baroness any more i would like to mention the boys in the band are all currently in the hospital after a pretty terrible bus crash in the UK two days ago. i spoke with allen on the phone and they are all pretty ****ed up, and the driver is in critical condition. lets hope for the best for them.

NKB: you are completely right in noticing more presence in the bass on the new record compared to the blue album. the blue album was all about the guitars and the riffs... we discussed making the new record more about the rhythm section as well as the guitars.

biggest difference is john was playing bass not summer. and it was almost all done with a pick.

but to answer your question more directly i do try to cultivate the sound as much as possible while recording. we used a lot of pedals as i mentioned. i seem to recall a lot of the eqing i did after the fact was with my gml.

heres a video the guys made about the process.
Baroness Premiere 'Yellow & Green' In-Studio + Tour Update 6

[malakie27]

arrowood101: you are very welcome! i dont think i could say i have "favorite" gear. i can find value in a lot of stuff... from super cheap to super hi fi.

i guess the best way to help answer your question would be to just show you my gear list?

equipment - Elmwood Recording

hope that helps.

[wagz]

that's some sick gear.

[fnninns]

Did you mix to that ATR-102 I straightened out for you guys?