A Conversation with J.J. Cale (continued)

PM: So it was at Teagarden's studio in Tulsa, right?

JJC: He has a farm outside of Tulsa about 30 miles, and he put a studio in there, and that's where we cut it. It was all Protools. And what I did with it, I have some of that--in my engineering thing I finally went to digital, I had all analog stuff. And so we transferred a lot of the hard disc stuff from Protools over to a system I use. And I mixed most of it. I think David mixed one or two.

PM: What system do you use?

JJC: I've been using the Alesis HD24 and Yamaha 0296.

PM: Right. Do you like the virtual effects, or do you stick with the pieces in the rack? [Basically the question is: software vs. hardware, when it comes to things like reverb and delay, compression, etc.?]

JJC: No, I don't use any computer-oriented stuff at all. If it's in the board--like in the Yamaha 0296, there's compressors and EQ, and some reverbs, or whatever--I'll use some of those. And I also have some outboard gear. No, I don't use any plug-ins at all, nor do I use a computer.

PM: Right.

JJC: Now, the original stuff was cut on Protools, and they used a computer to do that, I just never have went over to Protools. And what we did is, we transferred it over to my system. I brought it back home and mixed most of it and put my voice on, or whatever.

PM: Oh, so you didn't put your voice on it until you brought it all home.

JJC: You got to remember, we recorded live with everybody playing at the same time. And they'd never heard the songs I'd written, right? Of course I played them the demo. And what I did is, as we--[laughs] we didn't rehearse and then record or any of that kind of stuff. We just recorded. We sat and I'd go, "Okay, here's the way this tune goes." And I would kind of fake sing the thing. But what I mainly did over the microphone, instead of sing, was holler out the chord changes to 'em, and holler out, "Okay, you take the solo." So what that left me with was no vocal. I couldn't just sing the song, and they just immediately follow it. We'd had to rehearse a couple of times.

PM: And who wanted to do that?

JJC: Yeah, I didn't do that. I've done that before: "Here's the way the tune goes, boys," and sat down and played it for 'em, especially there in Nashville when we used charts. But on this particular occasion, I knew how the tune goes, so instead of singing the song, I'd holler out the chord changes and where it was going to break or whatever. So when I ended up, I had the track I'd made with this yelling at the band.

PM: [laughs]

JJC: And so I had to put the vocal on again.

PM: Ah, that's excellent. And when you went home and then tracked the vocal, what is your signal chain? What do you like to use like for a mic, and what are you going into?

JJC: I have an old [Neumann] 67 tube mic. I have an 87, so I've got a bunch of old stuff--I've given a lot of stuff away. And I've had many studios. I had 16 tracks in the 16 track analog days but, like I said, now I'm on hard disc. For vocals, a 67, sometimes I use a 57 Shure. The chain generally--I have an old Sony portable EMG mixer. I've run things through that. And this time I run some of the vocals through a Millennia that I just bought.

PM: Oh, they're nice.

JJC: Yeah, they're really nice. I've got the--oh, I don't know what it's called, their latest thing. It's got a bunch of tubes in it. And we had a Telefunken tube put in it. You can get them without the Telefunken tube, or if you wait a little while, they'll put an old Telefunken tube in it.

PM: For another 150 bucks or something?

JJC: Yeah, it was a very expensive little piece of gear.

[laughter]

JJC: And, you know, I've still retained some of the old compressors that I used to have, some of the UREIs--

PM: Yikes.

JJC: --and Lexicon reverbs. But it was mainly just the Yamaha. I had an 03 Yamaha. When the 02 come out, I didn't want that big of a unit because I'm just by myself when I do my home things. And so I looked around and I was going to get a Sony, or get some of the better ones, or Yamaha makes a bigger board, but I didn't really need all that. Basically, the reason I went with Yamaha again and got the 02--I still got the 03, I really liked it--I got the 0296 was because I already knew how they work, I wouldn't have to spend days reading the manual. And if I'd have bought a Sony I'd had to start from scratch and figure out what their nomenclature is.

PM: Right. I hate manuals, yeah.

JJC: So I went ahead and got the Yamaha 0296. It's not a great--I've got some old portable Neves, and that kind of stuff. But the thing about the digital thing, it all works. It don't really sound as good as the analog stuff. I still like all the analog stuff. I've still got a couple Ampexes. But I have to work on them, and by the time I tune them up and do maintenance on the old analog stuff, I don't feel like singing and playing. So the nice thing about the digital stuff, it's all ready to go. And when it breaks you just throw it away and get a new one.

PM: Yeah, right. So is the reason that you've gone all the way to hard disc but not gotten involved with the computer deal, that are you just not into computers or...?

JJC: Well, I have a little Protools, the small Protools thing, just to keep up with what everybody--that's mainly what everybody is using now, possibly not in Nashville, but everywhere else. I don't know what you all use there.

PM: Well, we're getting into Nuendo a lot, all over town now.

JJC: Yeah, right. But Protools is pretty much the standard for everybody. But my thing with the computer is, I find if I'm watching the screen, it's splitting my brain.

PM: It's true.

JJC: Whereas the old style was, of course you still had to look at the board and look at the meters, and I can still do that, but that way I can only focus on the--it's really just a hearing thing anyway.

PM: An engineer friend of mine has rigged up this switch so that whenever he's listening back, he switches the monitors off. He says, "Don't look at the pictures, Frank. Listen to the speakers."

JJC: Right. And I've noticed--I've messed with a couple of studios that had Protools and watched the engineers when I wasn't the engineer and was just the guitar player and singer/songwriter. And I've watched the guys, and they spend an awful inordinate amount of time screwing with the computer. [laughs]

PM: Isn't it true?

JJC: And at least this HD24 works pretty much exactly like a tape recorder, but the deal is that it's got two hard discs in it. Hard discs, you can put so much information on it. And the Yamaha is just a middle-of-the-road mixing board. It doesn't sound like a Neve, and it doesn't sound like an SSL, but it gets the job done. Like I said, I still like the old analog thing, but if I hook up my analog stuff, I spend lots of time trying to keep it all running, and with the digital you don't have to do the maintenance thing.

PM: And tape, of course, is going to continue to get worse and more expensive every year because they're going to use less and less of it.

JJC: Oh, yeah, it's gone, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, you can still get it in high end studios, you go, "I want the Studer brought in." But for general purposes, I don't think anybody is using analog anymore.

PM: Yeah, hardly anybody.    continue

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