Dan Johnson: Preserving the Past

How does one end up as an archiving specialist?

That's a good question. I actually started in the United building when it was Ocean Way [Recording], back in '98. Right out of recording school, I did an internship there. Most of my time was spent in Sherman Oaks at Record One [part of the Ocean Way Recording Group at the time]. It was a good starting place, because I got to see all the best engineers, producers, and artists in the world. They all came there. Everything was top notch. At that point in time, we were still using tape. The Sony PCM-3348 [Multitrack Digital Recorder] was hot shit back then: Digital 48-track on 1/2-inch tape. I cut my teeth on analog and digital tapes, which, for what I'm doing now, was very fortunate. I worked there for several years, then I went to Capitol Studios [#114] and worked there for a bunch of years. We were still using tape, and then one day all the tape machines were in the hallway and every room had a Pro Tools rig! It was a switch where it was tapes out, Pro Tools in. I loved working at Capitol, but it was difficult to move up because it was a union shop. It was really hard to become a full-time assistant at Capitol, because the main assistants had been there for decades. They would not give up the seat, which I don't blame them. They had good benefits, and they were getting good pay. After Capitol, I decided to go freelance; but unfortunately it was 2008, when the economy collapsed.

You were hoping to be more of a freelance engineer?

Exactly. Tracking, mixing, and that kind of thing. I was looking for work and doing projects here and there. In 2011, a friend said, “Hey, I know somebody who's a vendor for Warner Bros., doing archives.” I asked, “What the hell are archives?” He said, “Remember when we used to do tape transfers over at Capitol for Guitar Hero?” I replied, “Oh, yeah. I can do that.” So, I got a part time job doing Warner Bros. archives work for a vendor. This guy was actually a mastering engineer for Warner Bros., but he had a side business doing transfers. Before then, Warner Bros. had various people doing archives, and there were no standards for it. They did about 2000 titles and then they started getting complaints from the end users who would get the archive and go, “This sounds like hell,” or, "Something's weird with this," after they were transferred. So, Warner Bros. said, “We have to redo everything.” They came up with standards and a way to do things. So, that's how I learned how to do archiving, by using the updated Warner Bros. standards. That was the best place to learn it. Looking back on it, and seeing other people's work right now, it was the highest standard out there and probably still is to this day.

In what ways?

How the machines should be calibrated. How to do noise reduction. It was very meticulous, which was great. I started part-time. Within a couple months I became chief engineer, and I did that for about five or six years. The first thing I did was The Ramones' catalog! After that job, I got a call from United. They were looking for more avenues to make money. They said, “We heard you're the guy for archiving. Do you want to come work for us?” It was a big pay bump. I had to build the room out and I had to buy all the machines.

Did they give you a budget to work with?

Yeah, but we ran into an issue. We bought a Studer A 827 Gold Edition [reel-to-reel deck] from a guy in Nashville, but the guy took our money and never gave us a tape machine. They said, “We're not using third parties. We're not going to eBay or Craigslist.” It had to be through Guitar Center, Vintage King, or some reputable dealer. You can't go to a Guitar Center and buy a Studer A 827! I ended up using my own money and buying most of the gear. They said, “We can reimburse you,” and I was like, “No. If I buy it, it's mine. I'd rather have the machines.” So, I kept all the machines from being there.

You took off before United Recording shut down?

Oh, yeah. I was doing a 50-50 split with them, and my contract came up for renewal. For some reason, they decided they didn't want to do the 50-50 split anymore, and that they wanted to hire me on and put me on salary. For what we were projecting for the next year, I would have lost about $70,000. I said, "That doesn't make any sense." They flew down the vice president of the real estate company that owned United. We had a partnership, everybody was making money, and I was told I shouldn't make that amount of money from a guy that probably flew down in a private jet. He said, “You can move up within the company.” I said, “Within the real estate company? No thanks.” I asked, “What happens if I say no, and I don't sign this?” He replied, “You're free to go off and do your own business. When you shut down in six months, we'll buy all your gear.” I'm still here, so I think I made the right choice!

Wow! Did you move into this building right away?

No, I had a place in Hollywood for a while. That was supposed to be a stopgap. The rent was incredibly high for a small amount of space. I stayed there two years, and then found this place in Burbank. For my clients, it's safe, there's parking, and it's easy to find.

How long have you been independent of United?

It was august of 2019 when I left.

Has work been steady?

Yeah. There are always ebbs and flows, especially with the pandemic. I left right before the pandemic hit. Luckily, everybody started going through their closets and through their storage units, because everybody had a lot of time. I had a ton of business during the pandemic, and then when the pandemic started to slow down and things started opening back up, it got a little slow. But then it started ramping back up. Usually, the end of the year is a slow point. People are wrapping up projects and getting ready to go on vacation for the holidays. Lately, I have been working six or seven days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, just trying to get through hundreds of tapes. It's a good problem to have.

What are some of the most difficult transfers you've dealt with?

I had some tapes that were in flooded basements in a swamp in Louisiana. One project I did was SS Decontrol, a punk band from Boston. The first album, The Kids Will Have Their Say. Al Barile, the guitar player, had these tapes, and they were kept in a basement in Massachusetts, which would flood all the time. It was bad. He showed the tapes to Ian MacKaye [Tape Op #138], and he was like, “Just throw them in trash.” They made a deal with Trust Records, and Joe Nelson from Trust mailed the tapes to me. I get the package, open it up, and I'm like, “Joe, what the fuck did you send me? I don't know if I can do this." It was caked in mold and the boxes were crumbling from water damage. There was a 1/4-inch of mud on some of the tapes. It was one of the worst ones I've ever seen. Joe said, "This is what you've been training for your entire life." [laughter] And I said, "Let's do it."

How do you clean that?

By hand, with Ronsonol lighter fluid, foam swabs, foam paint brushes, and lots of masks.

The lighter fluid won't damage the tape?

Lighter fluid is the best thing to use on tape! Do not use isopropyl alcohol; that will damage the tape. My wife is a chemist, and we did a study on using different solvents on tape stock. Isopropyl alcohol is horrible. It's polar, so it's attracting stuff from the tape. Ronsonol lighter fluid is nonpolar and has a high evaporative point. It goes on clean, comes off clean, and does not harm the tape at all.

Then do you go in with white gloves and a pad?

Inch by inch. Do the inside and the outside for 2,500 feet per reel of tape. It took me about 100 hours to clean seven or eight reels of tape.

How do you bill for that?

I charge by the hour, but with something like that we work up a project rate.

Can you have someone come in and do that part of the job?

Yeah, but I'd rather not. I can’t trust just anybody with something like that, where the work is that delicate and intense. I probably wouldn't sleep knowing that somebody else was trying to do it. It would drive me insane.

You don't want to hear, "Oops!" from the other room.

Exactly. If there are going to be any mistakes, they’re going to be made by me. But a hundred hours of cleaning, and the tapes played perfectly. I wasn't even sure I was going to be able to play half a tape. Every single reel played perfectly.

Do you clean them and then bake [dehydrate] them, or do you bake them and then clean them?

With these, I did a first pass cleaning to get all the gunk off the outside. I don't want to bake that into the tape. Then I'd check it and see if there's any sticking. If the tape comes out cleanly, then I can go ahead and start cleaning the inside of it. But if it's stuck to itself, then we need to bake this for a while to get it unstuck from itself.

Was that one of the worst things you've ever seen?

It's up there. It's definitely top three!

Another part of your job involves replacing all the splices.

Splices and leader tape. All the old paper leader is disintegrating; it just snaps in half. The leader joints dry out, and then I'm winding the tape and, "Pow!"

It comes apart.

Scares the hell out of me every time. There's a lot of care that I have to take with all these tapes. And that's the other thing: It's not like, "Oh, this is a band I like. I'm going to take care of this one better than this other one." I can't do that.

No, no, no.

Every tape is somebody's favorite song or album, and we have to treat them all equally.

I just assume that every single thing has some importance to the world.

Exactly. It could be to one person, or to 20 million.

I never know what I'm going to find. Tapes are frequently mislabeled.

All the time. They needed to teach documentation more in school back then! Track sheets get lost over time. I remember I was doing the Yes catalog.

Talk about tape splices.

Oh, it was crazy. On some of the albums they would tape the track sheet to the outside of the tape box with Scotch tape. But it's just loose-leaf paper.

And it tears off?

Yeah, when you're putting it on the shelf or whatever. There'll be a little piece on the corner of the tape box, and that's all we'll have. With Eddy [Offord, producer/engineer], if there was a blank space on a track, he'd fill it with something. It wasn't, "Oh, track one is always going to be kick drum" or whatever. I'd have to recreate the track sheets by ear. "Kick drum, sitar, harmonica, theremin." There's a lot of detective work in what we do.

Do some people just want you to do a transfer to digital with no sleuthing?

For my personal edification I like to give them a digital copy of the tape. There are scans of all the tape boxes, all the notes, and as close to a one-to-one copy of the tape as possible. There's a package that I give them with all the notes on how it was transferred, all the problems I had with the tape, and how I dealt with it. If it's a multitrack, I label every track. If there's time code printed, it gets locked to Pro Tools. I try and make every single archive as if they had the physical tape in their hands with all the information that they would have from that tape. It's a lot of work, and everybody tells me I need to charge more.

Do you get many cassette transfer jobs?

I get a lot of cassettes. I also have 4-track and 8-track cassette decks. I have to cover most, if not all, the formats I can.

Do you wait until a project comes along and then buy certain playback devices if you don't already have it?

It depends. There are some formats you really can't buy anymore. There was a 3M digital tape machine; a 1-inch 32-track. The first manufactured digital tape machine in '79 or '78. They didn't work well to begin with, and I only know of one or two working machines in existence at this point. If I did find one, there is nobody that can work on them to get it running again. When they were new, they usually came with a tech to keep them running!

Is there anyone you can farm out that work to?

There are one or two places I know that have it.

We were looking at the 24-track earlier, and you were telling me you've got different rollers for different sized tapes.

Different rollers, as well as custom-made heads from John French [JRF]. John's the best. I have a custom 1-inch 16-track head assembly, which Studer never made. John and I were talking about it for a while, and we came up with it while I was at United. He took an Otari MX-70 16-track 1-inch head and custom mounted it onto a Studer head stack and said, "Let's see if this will work."

Does it work with the electronics?

It works perfectly. The tape path on the Studer A 827 is gorgeous for old tapes. It's all rollers, and it's really smooth.

Even the lifter has a roller?

Yeah. It has a library wind [slow fast forward or rewind] on it where you can adjust how fast the slow wind goes. You can go into a menu and drop it down to a half a meter per second.

Did you disable the recording functions on it?

All the record heads or are either taken off or disabled. I don't want to be known as the guy that recorded over KISS' "Rock and Roll All Nite." That's the thing you do not want to be known for.

Do you have multiple people working here?

I have some part-time people that come in. Mainly it's just me. I have an assistant that comes in a couple of days a week, and she does all the scanning. That kind of frees me up.

How do you develop cataloging systems for all the scans and the reports?

Everything gets its own archive number. If somebody asks, "Can you send me that archive again?" I can ask for the archive number. I'll look it up and send it to them.

Do you put like a label or anything on the reels as they come in?

No, no. I treat the reels and the tape boxes like historical documents. Nothing goes on. Everything gets its own number; in the computer there's a folder with that number on it, and it says what it is. If I do a backup of it, it's got the scans, it's got the PDF that has all the notes in it, and then it has the audio.

Do you have set digital sample rates for audio transfers?

I do everything at 192/24 bit unless the client requests 96/24 or whatever sample rate they want. Digital stuff is done at its native sample rate. It's going to be a one-to-one digital transfer. The way I look at it is that I've had to transfer stuff that was previously transferred in the '80s or '90s, and it was done at 44.1 kHz, 16-bit, and it sounds like shit.

The converters have gotten so much better.

They have. You can always "dumb it down" to 96 kHz or 48 kHz.

And that downsampling math is safer these days than it used to be.

Absolutely. But you still have the super high resolution, just in case 20 years from now that becomes a standard. Who knows what's going to happen in the future?

It keeps getting easier to store large files.

Hard drives are cheap nowadays. I mean, 15 years ago this would have been a whole different conversation.

What kind of converters are you using for the analog to digital?

Digidesign 192s. When I was doing the archives at Warner Bros., they had a blind test. Almost everybody picked the 192. At 192/24, you're really splitting hairs between different converters.

At that high of a sample rate, you're not getting as much of a difference between the different converters. And also, it has TDIF, ADAT, and S/PDIF – all the old school connections. I externally clock it with Antelope clocks, which really improves the sound. I have not had a single complaint.

If someone wanted to hear what you've transferred, what should they listen to?

I did a lot of the KISS archives, so the newer box sets that came out. Jackson Browne's [Tape Op #105] Running on Empty's 2-track mixes. Ron McMaster cut the lacquers for it, and Gavin Lurssen [#112] did the mastering. It was a great team; I love all those guys. It's so hard to think. There have been so many albums.

And so much doesn't come out.

There are a lot that don’t come out. There are some projects I worked on that are amazing, but I can't talk about them. I'm hoping that they'll come out at some point in time.

Do you sign NDAs with clients?

Sometimes. Unless I get permission from the artist to talk about it, I really won't say anything. It's not my place. I don't own the masters. I'm not on the label side. If it's already come out and they've done a lot of press on it, then I'll say, "Oh yeah. I did that."

Will your name be in the credits?

Not really.

I always try to credit who did the transfers.

I appreciate that. I'm always the first step in the chain.

And who's writing that down?

Exactly. A lot of these things take years before they finally come out.

What's your least favorite transfer because of the technology?

I'm not a fan of the U-matic PCM-1630. It's a helical scan head, 3/4-inch deck. Those tapes haven't aged well. There are a lot of errors with them. There are some labels I work with that have stopped doing 1630s altogether; instead, they'll just rip the CD. It's the same sample rate, and there are less errors on the CD than there would be on the 1630.

A lot of people don’t realize that there are so many tape formats and thicknesses, and back coatings or not; and acetate, mylar…

And manufacturers. Some manufacturers did a better job. And you don't know until 20, 30, or 40 years later that Ampex 456 [tape stock] has the worst problem with sticky shed syndrome. There's something called adhesion syndrome that we're seeing now from 1980s Ampex 406 and 456, where the closer you get to the hub of the tape, the reel fuses to itself. There's no way to properly get it unstuck from itself, and the oxide just rips off the tape. We're starting to see that now. There are a bunch of us archivists that get together every month or two on Zoom, and we're all around the country: like Catherine Vericolli [Tape Op #131], Jessica Thompson, Mike Graves [#153], Steve Rosenthal [#66]…

I know all those people.

Yeah. We all get together on a Zoom, and we'll drink and commiserate. We're saying, "I'm seeing this with this format. Who else is seeing this kind of thing?" We have some people from Harvard. We have some people from NPR. There are maybe 13 or 14 of us. I've never seen it in another part of the music business. We're all competitors, but we have a good community. We openly share information between each other, and we're all really good friends. There are enough tapes for everybody. There's plenty of work!