The Year of the Ox
Oct 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By Kylee Swenson
Heads might say they're down with the old school, but they've got nothing on People Under the Stairs. Appreciating the hip-hop forefathers and digging the scene of turntables, b-boys, break-dancers and roller-skating in the park is one thing. But for Thes One and Double K, keeping it old-school is an experience on another level. Like their friends in Jurassic 5, PUTS are “holding onto what's golden” with summertime shout outs and rolling '80s snare-kick-loop combinations. But productionwise, the duo's hardcore devotion to the art of vinyl sampling and analog recording is often at the expense of ease and efficiency. That means no computer editing, no keyboards and no plug-ins to process their sound.
“We've gotten a little bit of flack for some statements I've made about keyboards, so I want to make a public apology: I'm soooorry,” Thes says with a sarcastic snicker. “There are a few upset keyboardists out there. Don't get me wrong, man: I love keyboard players. In fact, I almost fell in love with a keyboard player once. But for me, personally, it's not my thing. I never saw a whole lot of hip-hop jams in the park where people were setting up these big keyboard MIDI rigs. I just saw turntables and records.”
Nevertheless, some things have changed. For example, the group created its first three records without the help of a time-stretching or pitch-shifting processor. So even if the guys found the perfect sample that was just in the wrong key or tempo, they would still look for something else — a serious self-imposed limitation. Now, Thes uses a Roland VP-9000 to make some of those ripe samples fit in the puzzle better. But although Thes bought a couple of new units to make studio life easier, PUTS' fourth album, …Or Stay Tuned (Om, 2003), nearly caused a few broken backs.
THE NEW MEMBER
“It weighs about 1,200 pounds,” Thes says about his '70s Neve 5116 console. “It took seven guys, and we actually got it around a banister, up a landing, around the stairs and through a doorway, but we had to rip half the door frame and half the wall out. God, I hope my landladies don't read this.” Despite a crazy deal from a guy who “just needed to get rid of it,” he says, the custom console (24 tracks plus eight added stereo inputs) cost Thes all of this past year's touring money — but it was worth it. “It's a grouchy old console,” Thes says. “People come over when we're mixing, and, sometimes, I have to bang on things or whatever, but it's worth it in what it's taught me about the way things used to be done. It was a big leap of faith on my part because everyone is going digital nowadays. For a lot of people, it makes no sense to spend $20,000 on a console when you can spend $3,000 on a G4 and get all the Pro Tools stuff. And when I got it, I had to learn how to hard-solder wires to things. I had to learn how to interface an MPC with the old ELCO connectors. I got really good at soldering. On any given day, you can find me on my back underneath this console trying to make something work.”
But what he's learned about electronics doesn't quite explain why he would break the piggy bank for a dusty old board. “I guess I'm infinitely going to be chasing the sound of certain records, whether it's the sound of a '70s rock or funk record or a mid-'80s hip-hop record,” Thes says. “That's just the sound that I'm pursuing, and it comes from analog electronics and tape. I can tell you that when I ran mixes that I had done previously on it, I realized how much of the frequency range exists for human hearing and how much of it I wasn't taking advantage of. Before, I recorded stuff on ADATs, and when I would EQ it or look at it on a meter, I would see that I'm going from 40 or 50 Hz to 15 or 20 k; that's pretty much the range of all music. But when I listened to it on this analog console, I realized there was a lot missing. I think that I had key frequencies in between all those points, but I didn't have the smooth frequency range. It was just a choppy sampling of what the human ear can hear. I believe now that you can hear overtones and harmonics by using analog equipment — and not always from it working properly. When you're running a giant console that emits BTUs of freakin' heat, you start to realize that, as it heats up, it starts to sound differently, and you start to use all these different sort of errors to your advantage. It's like this ancient monster is moody, but, sometimes, it will be absolutely incredible, and you just won't know why.”
Although Thes is no bitter-producer type — rather a happy-go-lucky 25-year-old — analog modeling of the real thing just doesn't work for him. “I had a friend of mine, Chris [Smith] from Om, who uses a lot of Pro Tools stuff, and he was showing me a plug-in for the Moogerfooger,” Thes says. “I have the real one. In my opinion, it sounded the same, but it didn't sound the same. And I think that it would be a shame if the youngest generation of engineers were never exposed to the real deal. If you use the real deal, you realize just how much you can freak it. And there's not a whole lot of freaking you can do if you're confined to the limitations of software programming.”
But whether you're a believer of analog, digital or both, Thes suggests that to improve as a producer, you must dive in despite any fear of technology. “Before I owned the console, I would look at it, and I would go, ‘Oh, God. There are a lot of guts in there. I don't know what anything's doing, and I don't want to know,’” he says. “But when you own one, you have to know. You have to be resoldering plugs and dealing with the schematics of it.”
To help with that, Thes got some help from the geekiest of engineer nerds. “There's a book out there called The Handbook for Sound Engineers, Third Edition [Focal Press], and it pretty much explains everything that you should know about music gear, digital and analog. It's over 1,500 pages. It's like the Bible. I keep it right by my bed.”
FILTERS AND FADERS
Once Thes began to understand the guts of his equipment, it was like he had taken a bite of the “eat me” cake in Alice in Wonderland. Suddenly, a new door opened that allowed him to make his own gear. “The greatest producers design equipment that they don't have,” he says. “I know that [mastering engineer] Bernie Grundman has designed his own mastering compressors. So I started designing a filter that was based on the original Bob Moog filter from the old synths. But we wired it differently, and it's controlled by DJ faders. So you can actually play the sample because you can control the way it's filtered to the beat with a DJ fader. If it hadn't been for diving head-first into analog stuff, I would still be subjected to trying to make faders out of whatever software or hardware I had. And now I just build my own shit. I also should give credit to MOTM, which is a company I ran into at NAMM. It's a really nice guy who sells analog synth modules as kits. So you buy a kit, and you basically put it together yourself with really detailed instructions. It's a great learning tool. That's what got me really familiar with putting an actual filter circuit together.”
Building that filter has made things faster for Thes in the studio. During the recording of PUTS' 2002 album on Om, OST (Original Sound Track), Thes came up with a complicated trick of creating several copies of the same sample, crafting different EQ'd versions of it and mixing different layers in and out of the mix. “The next evolution of that was building that filter, because that is a way to do that on the fly — to just have one sample running through it — and with your hand on the crossfader, you can go through the whole frequency spectrum,” he says. “It adds a performance element to electronic production. Because a lot of people, myself included, are very dependent on quantizing. So when someone says, ‘Let me hear the beat,’ you hit Play and walk around the room; you don't have to do anything. This is a way for people to actually be a performer. They would actually have to have rhythm and really rock the beat in real time.”
RECORDS UNDER THE STAIRS
Finding rare records takes diligence. Earlier this year, Thes and Cut Chemist spent four solid days on the hunt in Los Angeles. At first, it was a bust. “Cut and I decided that we were going to spend a whole week driving around L.A., and we were going to find all of the best shit,” Thes says. “By the end of the week, we were going to be the masters. Everyone was going to have to bow down before us. Needless to say, by the time the end of the week came, we didn't have shit. On Friday, I called him, and he was like, ‘Ah, man, I'm cool. We've gone everywhere.’ So I went with a different friend of mine.”
Because his friend was new to crate digging, Thes took him to a record warehouse not expecting to find something for himself. “It's been there since 1970,” he says. “The guy who runs it is really old, and they don't get new records in. But we ended up going back for two days, and I was sliding underneath shelves and moving furniture to find records, and, finally, jammed into a photo album, I found two acetates. One was this record by Roy Porter called ‘Jessica.’ It was the original acetate that was given to Roy Porter to approve. In and of itself, it's a rare record, but the acetate is pretty tough. And next to it was a one-sided, four-song acetate by some funk group in L.A. I have no idea who it is or when it was recorded, but it's pretty damn dope. So I called up Cut to gloat, and he proceeded to call me every name in the book. The moral of that story is, there is stuff out there in the most obvious places underneath all the dust and furniture. Every time I start to get discouraged, I remind myself, ‘No, you gotta keep on going out.’”
Aside from persistence, Thes has a few other tips for record shopping: “The most important thing is to have your portable record player on hand at all times. Mine never leaves my car. Also, you have to be good with people. You have to talk to the record-store owners. I see a lot of people look around and not say anything to anyone. They don't see anything immediately, so they walk out. I walk into a record store, and I'm like, ‘Hey! How are you doing? Anything new come in?’ You just have to be willing to listen to people and, more importantly, to records. There are so many good records that you wouldn't expect. I've got a few crates of Christian rock that are some of my favorite records that people wouldn't expect I would be collecting. I'm picking them up and getting drum breaks and funky songs all day long. You just have to be willing to look outside of the genre. If I walk into a store and there's a soul section, I don't even go there. You're not going to find a rare James Brown record in an average soul section out in Lancaster [Calif.]. You gotta know the area that you're looking in and look for the very best of that demographic. If you're in South Central [L.A.] and you go into a store looking for psych rock, you're not going to find it. You need to be looking for rare funk 45s or rare soul. But if you're in Redondo Beach [Calif.], looking for private-press funk and soul, you're probably not going to find it. You're better off looking for Christian rock or surf rock. The key is to know where you are, know what you're looking for and talk to people.”
LEMONADE FROM LEMONS
Samples rarely fit a track-in-progress automatically, even if the pitch and tempo are right. But Thes usually finds a way to make it work. For the song “Plunken 'Em” — with its virtuosic jazz-guitar hook and a low, rolling bass — the original sample required some tinkering. The guitar and bass were part of the same sample, but the bass lacked depth. “What I did was split it into a few parts,” he says. “And then I ran the lowest part, the bass line and some of the guitar into a dbx 120XP subharmonic synth. Whatever you put into it, it regenerates it an octave below. I put it through there lightly and mixed it in with the original sample so that it had a really low bottom end, which didn't exist on the original sample.”
On “Fly Love Song,” Thes found a break from a record that gave him an unexpected surprise. “I found that record in a store, lying face down without its cover, and it happened to be that the two drum breaks I wanted were on the side that was lying face down,” he says. “But I sampled it into the MPC, and it turns out that the scuff-mark sound happened to be on beat. When you listen to it, you think you hear a hi-hat, but that's actually the crackling from the drum break. With the Neve [console], I was able to EQ it in a way that it actually sounded like it was part of the break. It added to the polyrhythm of the drum break because without it, it's just a real simple kick-snare pattern.”
A bizarre yet magnetizing song on … Or Stay Tuned is “Take the Fruit.” For that, Thes used a Pac-Man record that he'd had as a kid. On the sample, the Pac-Man ghosts repeatedly sing, “Take all the fruit from the Pacville stores.” “They sound tweaked out on crack or something,” Thes says with a laugh. “Hidden in the background of that record was a little bit of a drum break. And with the help of the Neve console and the subharmonic synth, I was able to get it to sound like it does on that song. If you could hear it on that record, you'd be amazed because it's almost nonexistent [because] it's so low in the background. I did that thing where I cut into pieces, where it's the kick and the snare. I replayed the drum break with all that shit in between, and I filtered the top end down because it had so much noise on it. Then, I added an 808-sounding drum-machine hi-hat to start rebuilding all of the stuff that I had filtered off of the top.”
Thes then ran the beat through two channels: one through the console to bring in more of the midrange and high end that he had originally scrapped and one through the subharmonic synth to generate more low end. Reuniting the two channels on the console, Thes compressed the beat through his Avalon preamp, did a last EQ, sent the top end through the Lexicon PCM 91 digital reverb for the snare and the hi-hat and made a good beat out of crap — a challenge, indeed. “If I were to try to do it again, it would never happen because it's all analog equipment, and it just happens that the humidity and the electricity in the air that day were just right for it all to work,” Thes says. “And I love that.”
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