Chris von Sneidern has a place for the dreamers, the people who like wicker chairs, or sailboats — you know, the ones who tie knots and all that. This place, in a nondescript Tenderloin building, down a quiet hallway and through an incredibly narrow door, is the Tape Vault, an analog recording studio for the digital-averse and retro-perverse.
“To want to record on analog tape requires some kind of perversion,” said von Sneidern. We were sitting in his concrete room in the former 20th Century Fox film distribution building, a room that was once a fire-safe vault for the combustion-prone nitro-celluloid reels of the 1930s.
In 1969, the three-room studio space at 245 Hyde St. opened as Wally Heider Recording and served as the launch spot for classic albums by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and others. Current owner, Michael Ward, took over the facilities and renamed it Hyde Street Studios in 1980: His lease turned 45 this year. In the 1990s and early 2000s, hip-hop and alternative bands including Dead Kennedys, Green Day, and Tupac Shakur recorded there.
Von Sneidern has been renting his studio room from Ward since 2000. It’s where artists like Chuck Prophet, cartoon celebrity Spongebob Squarepants, and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Todd Rundgren have immortalized tracks. Sneidern himself is a musician and has self-recorded his albums here. In the era of off-the-shelf home recording equipment, artists from all over come to make tracks with Von Sneidern in his cozy studio in the reliable (well, mostly reliable), old school ways.
Tape recording is a tactile and finicky pursuit. When a musician gives the machine input, by belting into a mic or strumming the guitar, for example, the electric audio signal creates a varying magnetic field that magnetizes tiny particles on the tape as it passes under the record head. This is an act of physics as much as it is of music, a labor intensive way to capture sound, especially in the time of GarageBand and Pro Tools.
At the Tape Vault, von Sneidern records on a 2-inch, 24-track tape recorder at 30, 15 or 7.5 inches per second. Dolby SR can be used to improve the dynamic range of the recording. Clients can also record on a commanding Studer A820 24-track recorder, a machine about the size of a washer, that was considered the zenith of analog tape recording in its day. It cost as much as a single family home when it was sold to recording professionals in the ’80s.
Recording this way is more expensive and certainly more difficult, especially if there’s a simple problem to fix. But there was a time when every artist recorded their music this way, when media and gear weren’t as cheap, and Ableton plug-ins couldn’t save you from poor tuning or dissonance. “It reminds us that people used to be much better musicians than they are now,” von Sneidern said, gesturing to the computer screen, “because this is a crutch.”
“When you get into the computer, you have a one little flash of an idea and then you spend the next three hours moving it around on the screen,” he said.
“The people who record on tape have basically convinced themselves that it's better — and it's not. It's just not,” von Sneidern said. “But it does away with screens, which is great, because then you don't get, you know, five guys standing around a computer going ‘Move that blob a little to the right of that other blob.’
“You end up sanitizing your performance,” he continued. “The analog thing keeps you away from the temptation to sanitize.”
Many artists turn to the Tape Vault for precisely this “unsanitary” sound. Some even record digitally and turn to von Sneidern to “rinse” their album as a last step, passing the digital file through tape to give it some echo, delay, distortion, or warmth. “That's a whole sideline of my business, just fucking up people's music,” von Sneidern said.
Von Sneidern grew up in the sticks outside of Syracuse, New York. His childhood home was too rural for mail to be delivered. After making his way to California at 19 in search of palm trees, he set up the first of several home studios on Ord Street in 1991. After Dotcom-ers started flooding the real estate market, an Ellis Act eviction forced him out of a wonderfully cheap Castro basement studio and he moved his set up to Ward’s space on Hyde Street.
These days, the halls seem quieter, von Sneidern said. With virality superseding the record deal and digital tools getting smarter and cheaper, many musicians don’t have the budget or will to record in a studio with a pro like von Sneidern. But for some, nothing beats the knowledge and heart of those who dwell in recording studios like the Tape Vault.
“This whole studio is a bunch of true believers, and a handful of dilettantes,” said von Sneidern. “Comes with the territory.”
