John Vanderslice

“We enforce tape recording,” he says. “Pro Tools… [can make] the boldest, ‘fuck you’ punk band turn into the most paranoid weirdos. People get very timid very quickly. You need to encourage boldness and a certain kind of violence in recording.”

To capture the violence, he calls upon a curated array of vintage and modern equipment. Microphones by Josephson, AKG, and Coles feed preamps from Ampex and Neve on their way to a Studer 827 2” tape machine before being mixed on either a Neve 5316 or Neotek Elite console patched into an Ampex ATR-102 ½” tape machine. There is no digital conversion in the signal path and Vanderslice likes it that way.

In an interview on Reverb.com, John Vanderslice discusses acquiring and using a Neve 8068 Mixing Console for his studio, Tiny Telephone Oakland. He mentions that one of the consoles was sourced from Germany and another from Los Angeles, with both units eventually coming together at The Plant in LA. Despite being unused for a decade, the console's 31102 input modules were remarkably well-preserved, appearing nearly new despite their 1976 manufacture date.