ProgScape.Com: Good evening John!

John Cuniberti: Good evening!

PS: I'd like to thank you for agreeing to sit down with Shadowself and give a little information as to what goes on behind the scenes, especially dealing with a project such as "Shaming." For those who don't know anything about you, would you mind giving a little history of yourself?

JC: Well, how far back do we want to go?

PS: As far back as you'd like.

JC: Let's only go back to my professional career . . .

PS: Sounds good.

JC: . . . which, I guess at this point is getting long. I started as a musician, as most recording engineers do. I can't imagine being an engineer or producer without being able to play an instrument. But I really started professionally as a recording engineer once a band I was in broke up. We had done some recording and I was very curious about how records were made. I hung around the studio and asked questions. At some point the studio manager said, "well you seem like a pretty nice, reasonable guy, who works hard, so why don't you come and work in our studio?" I started as an intern and I worked my way up through the studio system. That was about 1973. Also, around the same time I began road managing and mixing live sound for a number of bands. In 1974 I was hired to mix onstage monitors for Stevie Wonder. This was to be the high point of my live sound experience. I wanted to return to the studio, a "project studio" if you will. I say this because in the late 70's a project studio was really not like they are now, where you can just go down with your Dad's credit card and come home with a studio. In those days you really had to know people and be able to acquire, cheaply, used professional recording equipment, most of which was really big, bulky, expensive, and would rarely work. It gave us all an opportunity to learn how to fix it, as well as use it. In fact, the old saying was "If you want to use that, you'll have to fix it first."

PS: Nice.

JC: You know, a lot of these guys ended up becoming quite good maintenance engineers, because they were really forced to. And my opinion is that good recording engineers can fix a lot of their own gear. Because they're in situations, late at night, there's nobody around . . . you want to use it, you've gotta fix it. I started working in commercial studios, doing records in 1981. Actually I was managing a studio in San Francisco called Hyde Street Studios. At night I was bringing bands in and recording them. When I say at night, I mean sessions starting at eleven p.m. and going until three, four o'clock in the morning, sessions for around $25 an hour. I was recording bands like the Dead Kennedys at the time. I started doing a lot of the local punk bands because that's what was going on at the time, and Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys was throwing me a lot of acts on his label called Alternative Tentacles. It was about that same time that I was also doing live sound for Greg Kihn, and that's where I met Joe [Satriani]. His band The Squares was opening up for Greg; they asked me to mix them; I obliged, and after the set I went backstage and said "I don't know who you are, but I want to know, because you are the best freakin' guitar player I've ever heard in my life." I offered him some free studio time; he took me up on it; I brought the band in, took them under my wing, and I recorded The Squares for almost two years. You know, they had these various people involved in their career-a manager, a guy looking for a record deal and all this stuff-nothing ever came of it, although we have some really wonderful recordings. They were very talented guys-kind of a punkish, pop version of the Police, kind of an American Police type of act.

PS: Although The Police were an British band.

JC: Yeah, I mean, it had a little harder edge. Although, the bass player looked like Paul McCartney, sang like a bird, and of course there was Joe, and they had a drummer -who is still with Joe, actually - Jeff Campetelli. It was quite a nice little three-piece band. Anyway, that band broke up. One day Joe called me wanting to start a solo record, so we began working at night at Hyde Street. That record, Not Of This Earth was his first record on Relativity that went on to start his career. In the meantime, I was bouncing around from studio to studio. When Joe's record started selling, and my name started getting around, I started getting a lot of calls from the heavy metal/thrash/punk bands, and so I did tons of those records-both in the United States, Japan and England. I was an engineer for about ten years straight, just doing heavy metal/rock stuff, both producing and engineering. As a producer there was no one I wanted to hire as an engineer but me. I was the only guy I knew that could do what I wanted done and I was free. I never saw myself as a "musical" producer, but more as an engineer/producer. In other words, if a band's really got it together musically, I can provide them with the technical part of it, and if it's their first record, which in most cases it was, I was able to facilitate getting the record done on time, budgeted properly and making the record company happy and all of that. So that went on for quite a while. During all that, of course, I was doing records for Joe. Maybe the first five, and after that I was participating on a song or so. I just finished recording Joe Satriani at the Fillmore in San Francisco for a live surround DVD. In the last four or five years I've been more interested in mastering, and it sort of seemed like the likely place I would end up-the end of the production chain. You know, I'm married and I have kids, and I wanted to spend more time at home and less on the road, and I got tired of sitting in control rooms punching in and out guitar solos all night. I thought it would be fun and very interesting to work with several different artists, maybe even a couple of different ones per day, and be more in the nine-to-five type of lifestyle, which was new for me. I've grown accustomed to it; I actually kind of like it. So that brings me to where we are today. You can find me at The Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito running the mastering room.

PS: Obviously how I know you is from Joe Satriani, so when I picked up the liner for The Shaming of the True and I see your name, and the thought comes to me, "how did he get in this project?" From what I know, Kevin died in '96, and Nick finished the disc in '97, and three years later here we are.

JC: Well, the connection was Joe. No, actually that's not true. The real connection was Jon Rubin, who I've known for twenty years or more. When I was in a band in the mid 70's, he was also in a band, in my neighborhood, Berkeley California. We got to know each other, and we were part of the same Bay Area music scene for many years. He later moved to LA, and worked for a very dear friend of mine, Dan Alexander, who is an audio dealer, that was selling equipment to Kevin. I met Kevin through Jon. I was asked to mix live sound for Kevin at the Troubadour-not the one that was recorded, but the first time Kevin played at the Troubadour with his band Thud. That was the first time I met Kevin and liked him right off, no ego, humble and just a nice guy all around. A few months later we did a couple of other shows, South by Southwest, a record store opening and then back to the Troubadour where I recorded the show on a pair of DA-88s. That show is the one that's available on CD. At some point Kevin was complaining about not getting good drum sounds to Jon Rubin. Jon mentioned me, and Kevin gave me a call and said, "Jon gave me some Satriani records, and I've been listening to them." That's the Joe connection I was referring too early. Kevin said he really loved the drum sounds on this, that, and the other, and I'd like to hire you to come down and help me do some recording. I went to Los Angeles, and we recorded at NRG studios. I had met Nick D'Virgilio earlier, during the live dates and we, with Kevin, recorded a lot of the basic tracks that later appeared on TSOTT, although I didn't know that at the time. That was the last time I saw Kevin.

PS: So, you record some of the drums, then you find out that Kevin has died. How did you get back involved with the project?

JC: I can't remember how much time went by-maybe six months before I got the call from Jon. The first job I had was to help Nick and Jon go through the catalog, and when I say catalog, what I mean is all of Kevin's tapes that were stored at his studio called Lawnmower [And Garden Supply]. There were virtually hundreds of two-inch, half-inch, quarter-inch and DAT recordings that spanned his entire career. The goal was to go in and really examine what was there for any forthcoming releases. There was some talk about the rock opera, but we didn't know at the time how much of it existed, and what condition it existed in. So we began making lists, and we computerized it all, and we were able to go through and systematically listen to the multi-tracks and make decisions about whether or not we felt they were finished/not finished. There was a few final mixes and some rough mixes for just about everything, so we did have some kind of idea for what Kevin wanted for Shaming. There was a handwritten list that we believe is the sequence of the record, and that helped direct us. That was sort of the beginning of finishing The Shaming of the True.

PS: How much of it was actually done, and how much of it did you, Nick, and Jon have to do?

PS: Well, aside from the mixing, it was probably eighty percent recorded. There were a few songs that needed additional instrumentation or a vocal part. You know, there would be a song, like Water Under the Bridge, for instance. Everything was finished with it, it sounded great, except for the fact that Kevin had only a scratch vocal. When Kevin would write a song, or begin recording a song, he would sit down at the piano and record the piano and vocal at the same time. He would then build up the instrument tracks, and eventually get back to recording a keeper vocal performance. Now Kevin was extremely talented, and a lot of his first efforts at singing a song were quite good. But we had a song that was eighty percent there, instrumentation-wise, and the singing was not as strong as it could have been. So I think that was the track where I had Nick double-track Kevin's vocal throughout it, to reinforce a bit of the shakiness of his voice-sort of the apprehension and the "I really don't know quite how I want to sing this yet" part of it. And then there was the section where nothing happened, where it was obvious to us that a guitar solo was supposed to go there, or some sort of instrumentation was supposed to go there, but it just wasn't there. So we asked Tommy Dunbar to come in and play guitar. Now Tommy was in a band called The Rubinoos with Jon Rubin that Kevin had just produced, and knew Kevin quite well. So we felt that was the ideal choice, and we asked him to play this very simple, George Harrison-like eight-bar melody, that just filled up the hole there, that's the kind of thing we did. Obvious omissions, or places that were just musically ["achy"] that we just helped reinforce. I mean, when you look at Shaming, the whole, it's really Kevin. I mean it really is. There have been some people on the Lawnmower list [Kevin Gilbert Mailing List] making accusations about how we went in and did all this or all that, but really, there's no truth to it at all. It's based on some demo they heard years earlier, possibly before Kevin himself made changes. We only did what was necessary to finish it, and we did the best we could to keep Kevin's vision alive.

PS: Actually, I was going to ask you about a couple of the other names on the album if you could give me a little idea as to who they are.

JC: Well, I don't know who they are, because I didn't work with any of them.

PS: Okay, was that all Jon?

JC: It was Nick most of the time. He came in and did a lot of the parts, and some of the other players on Shaming were there when Kevin was there. Kevin brought those people in--guitar players, and some of the other people. Again, I wasn't involved with the record except for recording some drum tracks, and then finishing the record after he had died. I really can't comment on any of the other players-I only really worked with Nick and Tommy.

PS: Okay. So, skipping ahead a little, you record a guitar solo; you have these rough mixes that Kevin did; what happened from there?

JC: Well, there were a number of things. We had surveyed all the songs and actually Nick did a beautiful job of doing rough mixes of everything that we believed was to be on the record. He sent those to me, and in fact, a lot of what people call "Kevin's rough mixes" of Shaming of the True are not. They are actually Nick's rough mixes. I don't know how they got out, but they were only for the purpose of he and I to decipher what was there, what was not there, what needed to be done, what did not need to be done. A lot of the stuff was songs like Best Laid Plans and Parade. Those were all intact, they didn't need any recording. It was just a handful of material that needed some additional parts added, and in fact, all the parts that were added, Nick knew about because he had been working with Kevin on most of the songs, and he was in conversation with Kevin about all of this stuff. He knew what Kevin's intentions were. He knew that Kevin wanted a guitar on this, and he knew that the keyboard part on the bridge needed to do this and that, and he wanted this on the drums. In fact, the drum tracks that I recorded at NRG with Kevin-we continued those recordings at Coast Recorders in San Francisco after Kevin's death. There was a list of things that needed to be done, and we just continued going down the list, finishing the record the best we could. Kevin's vision [was] there with us the whole time. We had mixed most of the record when we realized that the song Smash had to be included, but there was no lead vocal recorded on Smash in the studio. He hadn't gotten around to it. We had recorded the drums at NRG, and Kevin had recorded just about everything else. The song was pretty much done, with the exception of the lead vocal. After mixing the Troubadour CD, I realized that we could possibly pull the lead vocal from the live version of Smash, with some manipulation, actually apply it to the studio version, allowing it to then be on the record. It wasn't a song we decided to add later, it was a song that was on Kevin's list. But of course he didn't sing the lead vocal, so it wasn't going to appear, and, um . . . you know . . . we pulled it off. Interestingly enough, there was the . . . what we used to call the "rap section" of the song. This is where Johnny Virgil describes the video to the A & R guy and how the video is to be produced. That section I didn't want to pull from the live version, for a number of reasons. So we had a comedian, Bobby Slayton, who is a good friend of Jon Rubin's, come in and do that section, and it's actually very very funny. But ultimately we decided to go back and use Kevin's live version from the Troubadour recordings, and after many days of manipulation in the computer, we got it synched up properly. But talk about an outtake, or a variation of a song- Bobby Slayton's "rap" is something you may want to put on Shadowself some day.

PS: You give it to me, I'll put it on . . .

JC: I know you will! (Laughs)

PS: So you have the rough mixes, you redo some takes, you fill some stuff out . . . how long did it take to do the actual mixing?

JC: Well I worked on the mixing over the course of two months. I was spending maybe two to three days per song, mixing. You've gotta understand that at lot of these were not just 24-track tapes. Some of them were, but a lot of them were 48-track, in other words two 24-track analog machines locked together, or a 24-track analog machine locked up with a pair of digital DA-88 eight tracks.

PS: Right.

JC: There were no track sheets, so it required a tremendous amount of work just going through and sorting out . . . in fact, it took a whole day. The time it would normally take me to mix a song, I would spend going through track by track, all 48 tracks, listing exactly what was there. And it wasn't unusual for Kevin to put more than one thing on a track, either, so I would have to split it out onto other channels and write mutes for each channel. Very, very time consuming.

PS: But it obviously worked for him.

JC: Well, I don't know. I think some of his rough mixes are as rough as they are because his console wasn't automated. So for instance, on a pair of background vocal tracks that have now been balanced and EQed for the vocal performance in, say, the choruses, it suddenly would turn into rhythm guitar parts for the bridge. And without automation it suddenly became very difficult to be able to get over to those two faders on the console, make that fader adjustment, and then get back to other things that were going on the console simultaneously. It would have required maybe three or four people sitting at the console flipping switches and moving faders up and down in order to just do a rough mix, let alone anything that would be considered a final, and released to the public. There would be a guitar solo, but in between the guitar solo track there might be a tambourine. When I was mixing the record I would say, I don't want that tambourine panned or Eqed the same as the guitar. So I would have to split to another track, write a mute, and it took a long time. Mike Johnson, who is now the engineer at Lawnmower, was there with me the entire time and Nick for that matter, and all three of us put in twelve-hour days mixing that record. Sitting there at the console, writing mutes, making decisions about what we were going to use what we were not going to use, when we were going to use it. And all we had to go on were Kevin's rough mixes, which again, were very rough. No question about it.

PS: Now I know there were some things that, from the rough mix, were changed into the real mix. The only things that really caught my eye were the mix of Ghetto and the addition of a track.

JC: Yeah, I'd have to say that Ghetto was really the biggest stretch that I made on the record. I kind of went crazy; it was actually the last thing I did. We actually got the multi-track tape from Bill Bottrell, because nobody knew he had it. Shaming was virtually finished, it was all mixed and was ready for mastering. In fact, part of the mastering might have already been done. When Jon found it, I brought it in the studio and I mixed it. I was just in one of those states of mind. The song really begged to be manipulated. It was one of those songs that really required a lot of work on the mix part of it, rather than the recording part of it. You know, a lot of stuff Kevin did, you push the faders up, and it would be mixed because his intentions were so clear about the mixes. You know, the balance of the vocals, and what guitars were supposed to be in where or when; it was very easy to mix some of it. But there were other songs that just really wanted you to just sort of "here, go crazy with it." With a piece of music like Fun, for instance, even though I spent days and days mixing it, it was really a question of just getting all the faders in the right position and letting the song go. There wasn't a lot of manipulation going on. And all of the stuff you hear that's processed in that song, Kevin did. He processed everything. The sound of the voice, the guitar, the delays-a lot of the effects, those are all printed on the 2" tape with the performance. So you can blame him if you don't like it.

PS: The other main difference from the rough mix is the addition of a track.

JC: On what? On what song?

PS: "The Way Back Home."

JC: Where?

PS: Well, on the rough mix of Shaming, The Way Back Home isn't on the disc. At least from what I have.

JC: You know, this is the curious thing. And I know you and I have spoken about this. There is no rough mix of Shaming. People keep saying this, but Kevin never sat down and did a complete version of The Shaming of the True himself. And the reason is because some of the songs were never completed. So, I know people would like to think that there is this finished version that Kevin did, but that's not the case. It's a collection of songs. They're not even in particularly the right sequence. Right?

PS: Well . . . I think mostly it is.

JC: Okay, I know Kevin Gilbert fans will never accept that, but. . .

PS: Well, to quote Kevin, "Fuck 'em all, this is art."

JC: Fuck 'em all, its only art.

PS: Pretty much. So, you said it took basically a month and a half to two months to do the mixing. Did you also do the mastering?

JC: Yes and No. It started out where the mastering was to be done by a mastering engineer in Los Angeles whom Kevin had used previously, and we thought, again, trying to keep to Kevin's wishes, and to keep it in the family and work with a guy who really understands what maybe Kevin wanted . . . we went there, and we spent probably four or five thousand dollars, and it was a disaster. I won't go into details or mention names, but it was just a horrible experience. So I decided that I would master it myself. But of course at the time I didn't have a mastering studio, so that was going to be kind of hard to do. So I did the next best thing, which was rent some equipment that I wanted to use, and go to a mastering studio in San Francisco, and work with some people I knew and was familiar with, and together we would eventually get there. I worked with a mastering engineer here in town called Ken Lee, and the two of us, after maybe two or three attempts, got the record done. Now, you've got to understand that Shaming is a very unusual record as far as mastering is concerned, and that is . . . a lot of the elements that you hear on the record are actually applied during the mastering process. The crossfades from one song into another, obviously, have to be done in mastering. But there are a lot of other things too. A lot of added sound effects we also added during the mastering process.

PS: Any in particular?

JC: Um, yeah. Before City of the Sun, there is this long buildup of sound effects. Basically it's supposed to represent Los Angeles, I guess, you know, when Johnny leaves his home and comes to the big city, and you hear this collage of radio, TV cars, noises, busses and horns, and all that stuff going on. Well the version that I mixed, I decided I didn't like later. I needed to add some more elements to it. So those elements were added during the mastering process. There was another two tracks that were mixed in while we were mastering the record, to reinforce that section. Another place . . . you know the rain at the very end of the record? I never mixed that. I brought the rain in during mastering, and it was added then. One day I was listening to the final mastering, and I thought, "I don't like the way this record ends." Because in the original version, when the synthesizers end, everything ended, including the rain. I remembered while I was mixing it one night, I forgot to flip the mute on the rain, and the song ended, in other words Johnny's Last Song ended, with the big synth buildup, but the rain was still going, and everybody in the room just looked at each other like, "wow . . . that's scary." And then we kind of forgot about it. Later I looked and found this rough mix of that session from that night. I said "wow, I really love the fact that even though Johnny goes, the rain . . ." well, I really wanted to go back and revisit that, so I ran it by Nick and Jon, and they said "Go do it, we'll tell you what we think." So I went ahead and did that in the mastering process, and fortunately they liked it and left it in. So that was a liberty I took, but it was one of a very few.

PS: So pretty much, from what I'm gathering, you tried to stick as close to the vision that you thought Kevin would have, in releasing a record under his name.

JC: Absolutely, in fact I went out of my way, and I would even argue, to a fault. There were times when I was mixing, say, Best Laid Plans, for instance. I've been working on this song for two days, I really love the way it sounds, I mean I'm just thrilled with the EQ I've got on the acoustic guitars, and the effect-the very subtle but beautiful effect I have on his voice, and the sound of the kick drum-I'm just thrilled with the mix like it's my record or something, right? And at some point, I'm getting ready to move on to the next song, and I'll say, "you know what, let's just go back and listen to Kevin's rough mix of this." So we'd put the DAT on and the song would come on and I'd go, "holy shit! This is so different than what I'd been doing for two days. How did I stray away so far?" I would then slowly, methodically and eventually, make a compromise. In other words, I would rebalance the mix. That's a very simplistic statement, because when I say rebalance, I mean remix it in the way that Kevin did it. Going in and examining some of the balances he was using for the song, and making those changes in my mix, which would take easily another day or two. Because I just felt like, you know, this isn't my record, and I'm honored to work on it, and if it was my record I would do it this way, but it's not, and I've just got to keep to what Kevin's intentions were. Maybe he wouldn't like what I did with those background vocals, so I'm just going to go back and do it the way I think that he was trying to do it. And I did that for many of the songs. I would listen to his rough mix if there was one and start the mix; then about halfway through I would listen to his mix again; I would make some adjustments; I would continue on until I was done; once I was done I would go back and revisit his mix again. And a lot of times I thought, "wow-this is just a little bit cleaner version than his." Or I would say, "I've really gotten off track; I've really got to go back. This mix is better." You know, all sorts of variations, but I think, at the end of the day, he would have loved this record the way it is. I am really, absolutely sure of it.

PS: With that being said, one final question: Are you happy with it?

JC: Absolutely happy with it. To me, it's the most perfect piece of music I have ever worked on. There isn't anything about it I would change. Nothing. And I can't say that about any record I've ever made. To me it's perfect.