In the Studio: Thievery Corporation
When it comes to grooves, Thievery Corporation has no equal. The duo weaves satin soundscapes, reggae-infused jams, and jazzy joints that lure listeners into realms of sophisticated style, cool cats, and smooth vibes.
In the beginning, Eric Hilton and Rob Garza kept a menagerie of electronic samplers, sequencers, keyboards, and compressors. They recorded live instruments and vocalists on tape and mixed everything together the old-fashioned way — with mixing boards and multitrack recorders. As their setup evolved, they incorporated more electronic devices and a few computers. Now with the help of gadget guru and digital alchemist Chris Stone, they stitch all of their tracks together using Logic Pro and Power Macs in their Washington, D.C., studio. Their latest album, “The Cosmic Game,” was composed and produced entirely with Logic Pro.
“Our studio is basically our Mac and Logic. That’s the brain of everything. Now our music can have a lot more going on because we have the ability to edit every sound.”
“Our studio is basically our Mac and Logic,” says Hilton. “That’s the brain of everything. Now our music can have a lot more going on because we have the ability to edit every sound. We can do what classic music studios can do — we can tweak frequencies, change the velocity of any syllable of any word in a vocal performance. Logic and the Mac just make everything easier.”
Inside the Lounge
Garza and Hilton built their musical lounge in a Washington, D.C., row house. The two musicians have a dedicated studio space and an office for their record label, Eighteenth Street Lounge Music, a.k.a. ESL. The studio is still packed with electronic equipment — analog compressors, midi keyboards, synthesizers. Now nearly all of it is either connected to or gets recorded on a Power Mac G5 running Logic Pro. “The studio is centered on the G5 and a MOTU audio interface,” says Stone. “We also have several specialized pieces of peripheral equipment that we use to get certain sounds or a certain feel.”
All Thievery Corporation sounds or songs are stored on a set of Glyph external hard drives. The studio boasts more than 800GB of storage space, and it’s growing. “We’re close to getting another 400GB and I could see us needing an Xserve RAID in the very near future,” says Stone.
A studio that was once a complicated conglomeration of programmable samplers, sequencers, and midi boxes is now streamlined, fast, and flexible. “Those machines that are made specifically for music are much faster, but there are limitations in terms of editing,” says Hilton. “It’s the difference between an Xacto blade and a meat cleaver. We wanted to get into vocal recording and instrumentation and you have to edit that stuff painstakingly and really you can only do it on a computer.”
Making a Mix
Thievery Corporation is open for business five days a week, eight hours a day. “I have a five-day work week,” says Chris Stone. “Rob and Eric like to have access to the studio pretty much all the time and we’re making music all day every day and sometimes into the night.” A typical recording session begins with Hilton, Garza, and Stone huddled around a Logic Pro session. The three begin simply enough, charting out drum tracks, bass lines, and chords until a song emerges. From there, it’s simply a matter of adding tones, instruments, and parts until a masterpiece emerges.
Making music at the ESL studio is far from assembly-line work, however. The trio is often struck by inspiration and works late into the night until a song or remix is completed. “Logic is a great compliment to anyone who has a less-than-stereotypical workflow,” says Hilton. “That’s the case here. We don’t do things in a typical fashion.”
“Logic is like a living, breathing creature,” says Stone. “Other workstations are very simple and you really have to work with what you’ve got. You can change Logic any way you want, make it work for you and your workflow. It has an excellent audio engine that sounds better than any other software that’s out there.”
“Logic has shaped the way that we’ve done our music, in the sense that its plug-ins and its audio engine certainly shape the sound of the music,” says Hilton. “But we use Logic how we want to use it. We shape it to our sessions and our needs.”
