San Diegan Knows How to Mix Things Up in the Recording Studio

At times, John Archer lives a monkish existence, cloistered from sunlight for long stretches of time.

The San Diego musician, composer, producer and recording engineer has a dedication to music that’s almost religious, hiding out in studios where he works the kind of audio magic that brought his band, Checkfield, a Grammy nomination this year for the album “Through the Lens.”

When Archer isn’t working in his home studio, he’s probably at a larger professional studio such as Network Music in Rancho Bernardo, where he spent 12 hours on a recent Sunday working on Checkfield’s next album with his bandmate Ron Satterfield.

Two-inch recording tape rolled, stopped and rolled again through the heads of a 24-track recorder. Archer sat behind a giant mixing board, adjusting dials, directing a violinist on the other side of the soundproof glass.

Though his name is not well-recognized outside San Diego, Archer has become something of a player, in more ways than one, in the world of contemporary music.

Since 1982, when he and Satterfield recorded the first Checkfield album, they’ve built a national following for their richly textured studio sound, engineered by Archer. Mixing folk, rock, jazz and high-tech electronics, Checkfield has become popular enough that “Through the Lens” has sold 50,000 copies.

Archer also gets credit for discovering San Diego keyboard and synthesizer whiz Spencer Nilsen. He helped Nilsen get a recording contract with Checkfield’s label, American Gramaphone, then produced and engineered Nilsen’s debut album, “Architects of Change.”

And he has produced several albums for Network Music, a lucrative “music library” in Rancho Bernardo that records background tunes used in radio and television commercials and films. You can hear his work on commercials for several San Diego businesses, including automobile dealerships and car stereo stores.

Archer’s ability to combine talented musicians and engineer a seamless, upbeat sound has impressed his Omaha, Neb.-based label, which recently signed him to produce five albums by other groups.

“John’s greatest talent is his ability to put the artist and the project in an ambiance that’s creative,” Nilsen said. “Being a talented engineer, producer and writer/arranger, he’s able to see aspects of production a lot of engineers and producers can’t see. He’s a great buffer. He can kind of look ahead to the mixing and mastering process while you’re recording and take a lot of steps out.”

Archer is a stickler for details. Several times during the Sunday studio session he asked violinist Darol Anger to redo a small section of music that to most other ears would have sounded fine.

“That’s a little stylized,” he said after Anger played one part a little too much like Bulgarian folk music.

“We need longer phrases,” Satterfield told Anger during another break.

“More legato,” Archer explained, using musical terminology for smooth, drawn-out phrases, as opposed to the violinist’s sharper approach.

Archer said his years at Network, which he left recently to concentrate on Checkfield and producing and engineering for American Gramaphone, provided fantastic experience.

“Those albums are literally the entire range of Western music, from rock to 16th-Century minuets,” Archer said. “They’re the most wonderful training ground a producer could ever have.”

Some musicians come to their calling early in life, but Archer, 37, was in his late teens before he chose to pursue music.

At Wayne State University in Detroit, Archer thought he would become an engineer--the number-crunching kind.

But he became bored with engineering classes and, in 1970, loaded his Ford Mustang with his few possessions and traveled the country for a few months before he ran out of money in San Diego. Something clicked, and he decided to be a musician.

“I locked myself in a room for a couple of years and practiced,” he said. “I started as a guitarist. In late 1971 or ‘72, I began playing local clubs. My first love has always been finger-style acoustic guitar--Leo Kottke, John Renbourne, all of those characters.

“While I was working the clubs, I was taking community college classes, and I’d switch back and forth between music and electronics.”

In the late ‘70s, the University of California at San Diego was in the forefront of computerized electronic music, and Archer remembers the state of technology in the classes he took.

“We’d sit at a terminal and do punch cards, then take them to data processing. Three days later, at 2 in the morning, out of a little output port would come my 15-second composition.”

Archer and Satterfield met in a music class at Mesa College and soon began performing together. Satterfield’s background as a serious jazz player provides a good counterpoint to Archer’s folk, rock and synthesizer leanings.

“The first incarnation of Checkfield was myself and Ron on acoustic guitars and singing, with a female vocalist. We were a cross between Manhattan Transfer, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Peter, Paul and Mary. We left clubs, shifted to studio work and became an instrumental act right before we recorded ‘Spirit,’ our first national album, in 1982.”

Archer changed his last name from Slowiczek to Archer after that album, when disc jockeys had trouble with the Czechoslovakian name.

“Ron came up with that on an exceedingly drunken night as a combination of the fact that I like old English Renaissance music and I’m a Sagittarius, an archer,” he said.

The name Checkfield combines the last syllable of Archer’s former last name with the “field” from Satterfield.

Though at times Checkfield’s music has been compared to the new age music recorded by pianist George Winston and others on the Windham Hill label, Archer doesn’t like to label it new age, jazz or anything else.

“Our whole concept is one of writing the material and finding the right vehicle to express that material,” he said.

Archer’s good fortune allows him a bit of the good life. He’s an avid scuba diver and within the last year has been to the Grand Cayman Islands, Cabo San Lucas and the Great Barrier Reef off Australia. Also, being a boy from Detroit, he drives a late-model Corvette, “the ultimate dream.”

But those trappings aren’t his fulfillment.

“To be honest, I guess I’m so busy doing the work that I don’t pay much attention (to the money). If there’s anything that I would like about notoriety, it’s that more people would hear the music.”