GLOBAL MARAUDERS
Oct 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Kylee Swenson
Rob Garza and Eric Hilton of Thievery Corporation play a good game of musical dodge ball. While journalists chase after the two, attempting to tag them with genre labels, Garza and Hilton zigzag from jazz to dub, Latin to Persian, electronic to acoustic, hip-hop to pop and dancehall to bossa nova. The varied sounds are seamlessly mixed, and many more music genres — though not heard on their albums — have inspired the pair creatively. Few would think of Thievery Corporation as punk and industrial fans, for example, but somewhere in their psyche live The Misfits, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult and Meat Beat Manifesto, to name a few.
“You hear all of this music your entire life,” says Hilton. “It's going to have an effect on you.” The mellow vibe of Thievery's songs may not show it, but their love for the harder sounds of the late '80s and early '90s is evident in the path they've taken as musicians. “It all goes into your general knowledge of music and your general appreciation of what's good,” says Garza. “Meat Beat and Thrill Kill Kult got me into working with electronic instruments.”
Thievery's third full-length album of original music, The Richest Man in Babylon (2002), is a culmination of many years of influences. Released on Garza and Hilton's own label, Eighteenth Street Lounge Music (ESL), The Richest Man includes Portuguese, Farsi, French and English vocals, as well as instrumentation from the world over. Icelandic chanteuse Emiliana Torrini, Notch from Born Jamericans and a handful of other vocalists contribute to the album's diversity.
The duo's panache for creating warm electronic and acoustic sounds while forging multicultural styles is one reason many worldwide companies use the band's music to sell their products. Thievery Corporation's music has been featured in films such as Vanilla Sky and in TV commercials for Levi's, Miller beer, Martini and Rossi, Honda, Mercury and Acura. Ad agencies that want to endow a product with a classy image often turn to Thievery's music to accomplish that goal.
The Washington, D.C., duo met in 1995 and has since built up a miniature musical empire. They run their own D.C. club, Eighteenth Street Lounge (after which their label is named); they've sold hundreds of thousands of their own records and have put out albums by other acclaimed artists, such as Blue States, Nicola Conte and Desmond Williams; and they've amassed a large remix résumé, reconstructing tunes by Astrud Gilberto, David Byrne, Stereolab and Pizzicato Five. (Check out Thievery's 1999 collection of remixes on ESL, Abductions and Reconstructions.) After contributing to Studio K7's DJ Kicks series and releasing their 2000 album, The Mirror Conspiracy (ESL), Garza and Hilton were commissioned to select their favorite tracks from the Verve records catalog for a greatest-hits release called Sounds From the Verve Hi-Fi (Verve, 2001), a sly reference to their 1996 debut Sounds From the Thievery Hi-Fi.
THE RICHEST SOUNDS
Despite being purely a computer-recorded album, Thievery's The Richest Man in Babylon has a warm air that comes from mixing organic and electronic sounds. Like many bands, Garza and Hilton have moved away from using 2-inch tape in favor of the convenience of hard-disk recording. But by miking warm-sounding instruments such as Wurlitzer and Rhodes electric pianos, as well as live bass and guitar, and by looking for “round” sounds in digital keyboards, the duo avoids creating sterile-sounding tracks. “There's quite a bit of mixture of live playing, samples and electronic keyboard sounds,” says Hilton. “That definitely makes it sound more organic, because it is. We use a lot of live musicians. Percussion is generally played live, and guitar and basses are generally played live. So it's not really electronic music per se anyway. But it's very possible to make purely electronic music that sounds very warm, like Derrick May's ‘Strings of Life,’ for example. It's an early Detroit techno record that's really synthy, but the chords and sounds that he used made it warm. You can make nice, warm, human-sounding music from pretty much anything.”
Thievery Corporation put a lot of effort into their bass sounds, which are recorded both from bass guitar and synthesizers. “We have a fantastic bass,” says Hilton. “It's an old hollow-body rock bass, made by Framus, that rock bands in the '60s like the Rolling Stones used. It just has a cool pluckiness to it. You can play really groovy rock bass lines on it. And then we have other basses that we play dub-reggae bass lines on.”
A case in point is the dubby “The State of the Union,” featuring reggae vocalists Sleepy Wonder and Shinehead. “That one was played on a standard Epiphone bass with flat-wound strings,” says Garza. According to Hilton, the flat-wound strings, often used by jazz bassists, are key: “Flat-wound strings give you a more subby type of bass. If your bass strings are smooth, you will have more sub. If they have a texture [round-wound], you'll get more of a twang.”
EQ is another key to good bass sounds. “I take the high frequencies down to about 50 percent and do a pretty sharp dip at 250 Hz, which is a frequency that generally eats up space,” says Hilton. “We learned that from our engineer Desmond [Williams], and he learned it from scientists. It's one of those things that gets passed around.” The EQ dips create pockets of room for other instruments to be heard. “One of the difficult things about recording bass is, you want the bass to be there, but you don't want it to override all of the music that's happening,” says Garza.
“It's easy for bass to cancel out other frequencies,” Hilton continues. “Bass is hard. And when in doubt, just use the standard sub-bass sound from the Roland JP-8000. That's pretty good.” For example, both the sub-bass and bell-like arpeggiated synth underneath French-Iranian singer LouLou's Farsi-sung vocals on “Omid (Hope)” are from the JP.
“We'll ask people to find cool bass sounds on keyboards because we're always looking for some,” says Garza. “And they always give us these really crappy sounds. It's almost like they don't trust their own ears.”
“Or worse than that,” adds Hilton, “the bass sounds sound good in the music store, so you buy the whole keyboard, and when you get it back, you realize it's not even as good as something you already have. So you just dumped $1,000.”
But Garza and Hilton feel that a good bass sound will take you only so far. To them, the most important elements in a song are the melodic hooks that stick in your head and threaten to never leave your consciousness. And the more hooks in a song, the better. “Un Simple Histoire (A Simple Story),” with vocals sung in French by LouLou, is a good example of a song with multiple hooks. An Iranian instrument called a kamancheh, similar to a violin, plays a call-and-response-style line to a sitar melody that is featured higher in the mix. “I felt like the kamancheh was a good support instrument but not necessarily a lead,” says Hilton. “Therefore, we put it in the background a little bit. One thing that's nice is if you have a hook and then you also have a subhook. You're getting more rather than less. I'm a big fan of that.”
BREAKING THROUGH WRITER'S BLOCK
Unfortunately, Garza and Hilton sometimes find that hooks don't come to them as easily as they'd like. When they invited Sleepy Wonder and Shinehead to collaborate on “The State of the Union,” their first day of hanging out was disappointingly unproductive. “They didn't know where we were coming from, and we didn't know where they were coming from,” says Garza. “We didn't think that song would even make it on the record.”
“We started to get kind of despondent,” continues Hilton. “I think they started to feel the same way.”
“But the next day everything clicked,” interjects Garza.
But more daunting was “Meu Destino (My Destiny),” for which Garza and Hilton faced a serious case of writer's block. “We hit a dead end with that song,” says Garza. It was such a problem that it took a year for the two to make peace with the track.
“It was going to be this reggae-meets-trippy-modern-soul sound or something,” says Hilton. “But that just didn't happen. The combination of vocals and music and everything wasn't quite jelling, so we just left it for a while. But we always liked the bass line, so we rebuilt a new song along the bass line, and it went someplace else. We added track after track after track of instrumentation. And then we hit another dead end. It was this lush, really trippy piece, but it wasn't quite there. So we broke it back down again. We tried several vocalists, and then we added Latin-sounding acoustic guitar and started to like it. It got rootsier-sounding, so we had an ear for it again. But, again, we were at a standstill. Then, one day, we added a bossa nova beat from another song, and that actually sounded cool. So that opened our minds to a different direction. A few weeks later, we contacted this really great singer from Cape Verde, who lives in Washington, named Patrick De Santos. He came in and listened to the song. Two weeks after that, he came back and sang that song [in Portuguese] in one take.”
MAYORS OF SIMPLETON
As exotic as Thievery's sound is, their gear isn't. Their studio at ESL is rather modest. “A preamp? I don't really know what that is,” says Garza with a laugh. Although Garza and Hilton did recently buy a Mac G4, only “The State of the Union” was recorded with it.
“We recorded our first album without a computer at all and mixed everything straight to DAT,” says Hilton. “The album was recorded on about $7,000 worth of gear. We don't even know where the individual parts are. All we have is the master. It's like a blues record!”
“We couldn't do remixes of that stuff if we wanted to,” adds Garza. “We got all the sequences to the point where we wanted them on the MPC, and then we threw them down to DAT. Sometimes, it's hard to perform some songs live because we have to find the old sounds that we used. A lot of the floppy disks have errors, and we can't pull up the sounds. They're lost forever.”
Recording on a PC (and more recently to a Mac, as well) has made their production process a little easier and helped them archive parts. But Thievery Corporation still prefer to keep things simple, eschewing the use of compressors, preamps or external effects units. Their monitors are a pair of $200 Tannoys. “That could be the secret of our sound,” says Garza. “When I've been to other people's places and listened to music that they're doing on their monitors, they exaggerate the bass. When you hear the music on a car stereo, it sounds pretty rough.”
“The Tannoys are so true, they're almost harsh,” says Hilton. “It has to sound good on the Tannoys for me to get into a song. Once you can trust your monitors, you know what's going on.”
Garza and Hilton do the majority of their work in Cakewalk Pro Audio software using a handful of plug-ins, such as the software's delay and Voice Tweaker effects. They do all of their work in the ESL studio, which is tucked away in a back room of their club in a space shared by the label's offices. Their studio is simply a room filled with equipment — the walls are not sonically treated, and they didn't install any bass traps or soundproofing. “Our studio is just a little bit of carpet, drywall and wood,” says Hilton. “The underlying message is that you don't need all the bells and whistles. You just need a limited amount of recording gear these days, and you need to know how to get a lot out of it. Cakewalk is about the simplest, cheesiest computer program that you could use. We owe a lot to Cakewalk, but it doesn't have quite the panache of [Digidesign] Pro Tools or [Emagic] Logic. But, then again, that goes to show that you shouldn't be deceived by the flash and glitter of recording studios. We could have done the same thing using lesser programs, probably.”
“The one thing about all of this recording technology,” continues Garza, “is that people get hooked up on the gear, and they start making excuses like, ‘All I need is this computer or plug-in, and then I'll be able to make my masterpiece.’ You just have to get on with it.”
THIEVERY'S TREASURE CHEST
Akai MPC3000 sampler
Apple Mac G4 computer
Cakewalk Pro Audio desktop-recording software
Dell PC computer
Fender Rhodes Mark II electric piano
Korg MS2000 synth
Mackie D8B digital mixer Tannoy monitors
Wurlitzer electric piano
Yamaha Motif keyboard
“You just need a limited amount of recording gear these days, and you need to know how to get a lot out of it.”
— Eric Hilton
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