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Published on: 4/9/2009
Last Visited: 5/25/2009
The door to John Neff's Inverness laboratory opens to an imposing stack of Marshall amps.
Inside, Neff sits alone, hunched before an array of dials, knobs and buttons.
Upon all the windowsills stand lines of empty wine bottles.
Neff wears a salt-and-pepper goatee and reading glasses.
He's tinkering with a track by Nightsage, the Gothic band in which he plays guitar and keyboard.
He wants to demonstrate the powers of his Yamaha mixer.
"Stereo pan, dynamic range, sweep equalizer," he exclaims, pushing buttons and turning knobs.
"If this were chemistry, we'd be wearing oxygen suits."
Beyond the array-half concealed by Neff's $70,000 kitchen of computer banks-hangs a platinum plaque.
Neff recently won the platinum certification for engineering Journey's newest album, the double-disk "Revelations.
The album is half greatest hits, half original tracks, recorded in Sausalito's famous Plant Studio with the band's new Fillipino vocalist, Arnel Pineda.
In a surprise announcement, Plant Studio owner Arne Frager presented Neff the plaque at an unrelated gathering of music industry professionals in San Rafael on March 29.
...
Neff didn't expect to be high enough for this one, either.
"I got all emotional," he says, "nothing silly, but it meant a lot to me." Neff worked on a solo project at the Plant with Journey's lead guitarist Neal Schon three years ago.
When Journey decided to do another studio album, Schon picked Neff to be the engineer.
...
But then Neff wowed them with his "sound.
Upon hearing it, he says, they all wanted to begin recording immediately.
"I'm kind of known for my drum sound," he says as he leans back in his chair, "and everything is percussion nowadays.
As an apprentice sound engineer back in the 70s, Neff learned a few tricks for making drums sound like they were live.
For the Journey album, he had 16 mics on the drums alone.
"A few right on the kick drum," he says, "two more overheads, two more mid-rooms, and then a couple way back in the corners of the studio, so I could catch the whole room feel.
It was phenomenal.
Sounded like an old Led Zeppelin record."
Neff has nothing but accolades for the new vocalist, Pineda.
"He's got a little more hair on his voice than Steve Perry," he says, "but he's phenomenal.
He can do Robert Plant better than Robert Plant, today."
Journey was a pleasure to work with, he says, and Neal Schon can play mind-bending guitar solos.
Once Schon missed a note while wailing away, and Neff stopped him.
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I couldn't believe it," Neff says.
Neff is also a long-time film composer.
On the walls of his studio hang posters for some of the movies he's scored, most by his friend David Lynch: "Mulholland Drive," "Inland Empire," "Elephant Man."
When Neff moved from his home in the Tehachapi Mountains to Inverness three years ago, he initially commuted to Hollywood every week, often traveling by car, leaving home at 3 a.m. on Monday mornings.
"Driving!
he declares, pulling his cheeks down to reveal the undersides of his eyelids.
One of Neff's recent jobs was to create sound effects for the film "Dark Reel," which he describes as a horror comedy.
For a scene in which the monster hurdles a decapitated head at one of his victims, knocking her unconscious, Neff dropped various types of melons on a severed pig's head.
"It's the only type of head that sounds like a human head," he says.
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The Plant Studio recently closed, and Neff says he can't get a fifth of what he used to get to produce an album.
Even so, he's already "putting up walls" on the studio building.
"Small amounts of debt are overrated," he says of the project, "if you're going to go into debt, go big."
Though record companies are spending fewer and fewer dollars on albums these days, Neff says the Journey album was done with a proper budget, the "old way."
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