S03 | E03 - JJ Golden - It's Just You and the Music

Show Notes

About Our Guest

JJ Golden is a mastering and vinyl cutting engineer at Golden Mastering in Ventura, California, the family run studio hisfather John Golden opened in 1992. JJ joined full time in 1998 after training at SAE Technology College in London and working as a technical supervisor there. He mastered the Grammy nominated Black Pumas self titled album, reissues for Sunny Day Real Estate and Band of Horses, and albums for American Music Club, Calexico, and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings.

Topics We Covered

• A childhood spent listening for the details. Growing up around Golden Mastering, riding in his dad's 1964 Ford Econoline van, and learning to hear things like a well placed reverb on a snare hit from the passenger seat

• The Tascam 388 years. Buying the eight track reel to reel Porta Studio in 1988 for junior high and high school experimentation, backwards guitar solos, blown channels, and a machine he still owns today

• London, SAE, and Pathway Studios. Getting married at 20 and moving to London for a nine month audio engineering course, grading student mixes as a signal flow supervisor, and the 24 hour solo session at the now defunct Pathway Studios that ended with a kick drum that had gone missing for half a song

• Coming home to mastering in 1998. Choosing the steadier rhythm of mastering over the unpredictable pace of tracking sessions, and starting full time at his father's studio right as digital was taking over

• The hidden zero track. DASH machines, 1630 videotape CD masters, SADiE and Sonic Solutions, and the enhanced CD era trick of hiding reversed audio before Track 1

• The global lacquer blank shortage. Test cuts, cutter head overheating, tariffs and supply chain squeezes on lacquer blanks, and how the entire global vinyl industry now depends on a single manufacturer in Japan since the Apollo plant fire in 2020

• Taking the limiter off for vinyl. Why a heavily peak limited digital master loses depth and impact on a lathe, and the client conversation that comes with asking a band to hear their record without the squash they fell in love with

• New Slang, Garden State, and a run of Grammy nominated records. Hearing The Shins' "New Slang" for the first time while working on the original Oh, Inverted World!, baking half inch tape to restore Band of Horses' "The Funeral" for its 20th anniversary reissue, and a mastering career that includes multiple Grammy nominations

• Phone calls, landlines, and life on two wheels. Why a five minute call beats a week of emails, the old school answering machine that keeps work off his personal line, and riding a Triumph through the orange groves near Camarillo

Links

• Golden Mastering: https://goldenmastering.com

• JJ Golden at Golden Mastering: https://goldenmastering.com/engineers/jj-golden/

• The Shins, Oh, Inverted World! (Sub Pop, 2001): https://www.subpop.com/artists/the_shins

• Band of Horses, Everything All the Time (20th Anniversary Edition, Sub Pop):

https://www.subpop.com/releases/band_of_horses/everything_all_the_time_20th_anniversary_edition

• Black Pumas: https://blackpumas.com

• Muttering, "Saturday Afternoon" from Love, Keep Me Afraid: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/muttering/1548588841