John Hill on producing with Santogold
Jul 22, 2008 6:54 PM, Kylee Swenson
Much like her album cover, where she can be seen puking gold flakes all over herself, Santogold (aka Santi White) isn’t afraid to let it all out in her own unique way. Every track on her self-titled solo album—released on Downtown records in April—is an awesomely fresh take on an old style, from dub to ska to punk to indie-rock. John Hill, from Santogold's former band Stiffed, co-produced the album with her and with help from Switch, XXXChange, M.I.A. and the late Disco D. Here, Hill talks about the process of writing and recording “Shove It” and “You’ll Find a Way.”
“SHOVE IT”
“‘Shove It’ started as a reggae song,” Hill says. “Santi had the idea of bringing in Disco D in to collaborate with us. She was like, ‘We should make this a snap beat.’ D came to Santi and my old friend Jeremy’s studio, Pitch Black in Bushwick [Brooklyn, N.Y.] one afternoon. I had never worked with him, and it was a truly inspiring experience. He chopped some of my original skanks and bass line. There was an old [Roland] Space Echo and ARP 2600 at the studio, and I started running some of the programmed pieces through the Space Echo into the ARP preamp and re-miking them with a Shure SM57. As passes were going down, we would tweak them and the ARP into Pro Tools. After that afternoon, we built the printed parts into the beat. Santi and D mixed the beat over at his place in Brooklyn and brought back the stems. Later when we cut the record, we sent all the skanks, effects and drums back to tape—2-inch 16-track Studer A80. I replayed the bass with engineer John Morrical, and we added horns, Melodica, piano, and Santi re-sang the vocals. Santi tracked Spank Rock in Bushwick at Pitch Black Studios—her first professional engineering job, by the way! Well done. We sent the a cappella to Switch for a remix. He delivered a smashing good product! When we were finally mixing, we decided to take a couple of elements from Switch’s remix and combine them with ours. Vaughn Merrick mixed it at Chung King in New York.”
Shove It - Santogold“YOU’LL FIND A WAY”
“The first song recorded for the record, ‘You’ll Find a Way,’ started as a bass line and beat,” Hill says. “We brought Chuck Treece [McRad, Bad Brains] in to play drums. When he was doing fills, he was hitting other random objects close to him. At the end of the fill at the top, he hit a kid’s tambourine that was lying on the top of a conga drum by the kit. The verse guitars were recorded with a contact mic in the back of a Fender Twin amp against the speaker. The heavier guitars were recorded using a guitar called the “plywood rocker,” a no-name Japanese guitar with four humbuckers used a lot on the album. The amp was an acoustic 2x12 amp that one of my friends found on the street in Hoboken. It has one of the best reverbs on any amp I’ve ever heard in its price range. ‘You’ll Find a Way’ guitars were also run through a Neve 33609 [compressor] for grit, and the bridge bass was miked using back of speaker cab for low end. We did the drum distortion effects with the ARP 2600 preamp remiked with an SM57. Organ was added during mixing by John Morrical. As the organ was recorded, we tweaked the feedback of an [Electro-Harmonix] Memory Man to Pro Tools. Also during mixing, Santi decided she didn’t like the verses and went in and re-sang them in one take with an SM57! Pretty gangster. The feedback and dub was added using a Space Echo. We also decided the snare was not big enough and demoed a sound-replacement software and mixed stock snare in there. Pretty ghetto. During these sessions, the AC was broken, and it was August, so the gear ran a bit hot, and we took turns holding an ice bag and sitting in front of the fan.”
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