Moderator: Are you talking about "re-amping"? Or do you mean the guitarist's signal?

Jack Endino: I do re-amping too, often. If I have any doubt about the amp sound, I'll just sneakily record a DI also, if I can spare a track. Then, if I'm mixing and find myself hating the sound, I can re-amp. Sometimes I even sneak the DI into the mix, at a very very low level.

What I split out to the amps is the guitarists raw signal. If you have two different amps, with two very different distortion characteristics, it can be really great sounding.

ShelTalmy: If Wellwater Conspiracy were to go back out on the road, would you be joining them again as a bassist, or is it just too soon to tell?

Jack Endino: Too soon. I would have gone out last summer for their west coast tour, but I got a job offer from Brazil that was too good to pass up. They opted to have their keyboardist play my parts and it worked OK cuz he's no slouch. That's the problem being a studio guy, I can't really be in a fulltime band anymore, cuz the phone might ring with an offer I can't refuse. I do miss playing live though.

linkmd: Jack, you rocked the house withWellwater in NYC and Hoboken;-) Especially in Hoboken!! Any chance that you will work with Nebula (again) or Queens of the StoneAge in the future?

Jack Endino: Hey, izzat you Mark? Minidisc guy? Thanks, you shoulda introduced yourself there. Who knows. I'd kill to work with QOTSA.

Another Dave: Do you use any tricks like recording "dry runs" without the artist knowing it, to help with the fear people have of recording tape?

Jack Endino: Sometimes, but I'm not really into playing little mind games with people in the studio. Sometimes I'll record a "practice" but very, very rarely does it end up being a "take".

ShelTalmy: What's with those low-sodium crackers?

Jack Endino: Red Oval Farms low-salt Stoned Wheat Thins: an essential part of my arsenal. I had a weird stomach problem about ten years ago, giardia I think it was, got it at a studio on a sheep farm in Wales drinking the well water. Screwed me up for almost a year and so I started eating these starchy crackers to settle my stomach. Now I can't stop. There's worse addictions ya know ;-)

Another Dave: No, crackers is THE worst.

Moderator: Turkey jerky!

nowinvisibly: Hi Jack! The Skin Yard CD "Start at the Top" is fantastic! Any other rarities hiding in the ol’ archives ... or are they just too bad for public consumption?

Jack Endino: I'm hacking together a website-only LIVE Skin Yard CD which will be announced on endino.com in a few months. Some of the sound quality is pretty rough (board cassettes... I had a box full of 'em) but there's a few songs which were recorded eight track on New Year's Eve 1990. They are very, very ummm... "gnarly" is the only appropriate description. Thanx for the kind words on the new CD, by the way.

linkmd: I used a minidisc and some binaural mics to record the WWC Hoboken show. What did you think of the sound quality of that bootleg?

Jack Endino: It sounded great, but too bad you can't hear my bass at all! I was so paranoid about drowning everyone out... ;-)

ShelTalmy: Top 5 favourite concerts of all time?

Jack Endino: The Who in 1976, Tubes in 1977, Rory Gallagher in 1980, Blue Cheer in 1980... there's probably a bunch more. I haven't been to many "concerts" since 1984. After you see Soundgarden at a club with 5 other people, and Nirvana opens for your own band a few times, it kind of takes the mystique away... ;-)

Moderator: Jack, I know you worked with Babes in Toyland. I was not familiar with their music before I did monitors for them once. I thought Kat Bjelland was a very accomplished guitarist, in her idiom, what was it like working with her?

Jack Endino: Excellent, they were a great band. We did their first album in about 4 and a half days I think. Very cool time. I recorded them later for Painkiller and it wasn't as fun, they weren't getting along so well by then.

Audio Phrenzy: Do you rememer the first board you ever mixed on?

Jack Endino: Heh! It's sitting right here by my elbow... a Tapco 6201B, six channels! It's enormous! That's the company that Greg Mackie started in the 70s and then sold to E-V. After that, Reciprocal Recording started with this terrible Tascam board that was 12 channels. Then we got a Ramsa board, 20 channels, that was actually very, very good. Then I started going freelance and now I'll use pretty much anything from a NEVE VR or an SSL to a Mackie!

evergem: Jack, any idea what ever happened to Kerbdog? I think you did a record for them at one time, if I'm not mistaken.

Jack Endino: Did their frst album. They took several years to do their second record (eventually did it with GGGarth) but by then the momentum was lost and they got dropped. They started a new band called Wilt and put out one CD a couple years ago, I haven't heard anything from then since. They're probably still living in Kilkenny...

Another Dave: Is there any sort of console you have an affinity for?
You know, like Tridents or Spheres.

Jack Endino: I am fond of tracking on APIs and post-1980 Neves but I'll deal with whatever is available. I'm not in love with Tridents, but have been using an 80B lately, and it has worked pretty well, if I watch the headroom; it's easy to drive it into distortion. The distortion is pretty cool-sounding though. I'm am not that into vintage anything... vintage usually equates to more distortion. Never laid eyes on a Sphere though! Never even heard of it! But there too many different boards, too little time...

Ryan: Hi Jack, do you have a favorite brand of guitar tubes?

Jack Endino: Tubes? Hmm. Big subject. The Sovteks and Svetlanas are pretty reliable, the Chinese tubes are hit-and-miss.

loudist: Do you think the music wheel will turn again, and we will get some real bands like Seattle 12 years ago? What was the fertile ground that allowed the scene to happen up there?

Jack Endino: Hard to say what caused it. I have often said, dark, damp basements, crappy weather, and the mushrooms growing everywhere. Whether it will happen again I can't say.

Eric: Jack, I was wondering if you used bowed guitar on the tune “through nothing” on fist-sized chunks.

Jack Endino: Bowed guitar! A good guess. Never used it. But all over the Skin Yard records I used slide bass. With distortion, wah and an echo unit. It makes a very sinister sound. You can hear a track on the new record where I played no guitar at all, the whole thing is slide bass. It's evil sounding, very atmospheric.

Moderator: Who was first with the slide bass, you or Mark from Morphine? Or did it just emanate from the collective unconscious? :-)

Jack Endino: I think the latter... I was doing it in 1986 but I didn't make any big deal of it, it wasn't my main instrument. I just used it for noise overdubs in the studio, except for that one song ("This Lonely Place" which was the B-side of our second single. I'm sure others did it earlier... everything has been tried somewhere.

Jesus: Does Tad Doyle have a problem with the staff at Sub-Pop, or vice-versa, why is there hard feelings there?

Jack Endino: I personally don't know... but there were differences of opinion. I think he found their marketing of him as this hick from the backwoods kind of annoying after awhile.

Moderator: It was very effective. I was scared of Tad. Until I met him.

chat.boy: Tad's not a hick, he's a great guy.

Moderator: Very easy to work with.

Jack Endino: It worked for a while. He's actually a sweetheart. He's also a hell of a drummer. I might be jamming with him this weekend, just a one-off, we're helping some friends of ours who are writing some songs. After that I spend a month in the studio.