Under the Hood
Meticulous, hardworking, obsessive/compulsive: The Hilltop Hoods’ success hasn’t happened by accident. AT tours through the past, present and future sound of Australia’s premier hip hop crew.
By Mark Davie
21 June 2013
Hilltop Hoods lyrics typically focus more on the hard life, or at least real life, not swilling flutes of Cristal, new watch alerts, or likening drug trade flirtations to The Great Escape. It’s the kind of identifiable, ground up, grounded work common of skip hop. But sheesh, does it look different from the Hoods’ hilltop pads: jacuzzis, MTV Cribs-style nudes on the wall, imported Shelby Mustangs, and two sets of 10-grand-a-pair Barefoot Micromain MM27 studio monitors, that’s enough to have any gear slut salivating.
Success has its perks. It’s just one of many toys that DJ Debris has kitted out his latest home studio with. He’s had a number of different home setups in the past, but decided to do things the right way this time, with studio designer Chris Morton putting in a dedicated control room, and recording space that’s capable of fitting an eight-voice choir or just a solo MC.
Not many Australian artists or groups have been at the right place at the right time, and managed to convert an opportunity into a growing audience. But behind the combination of hard touring and a dedication to improving their recorded output, is: a DJ/engineer who meticulously logs every setting, every precise mic placement, and every recording session detail so that he can replicate it or know what to build on next time; and an MC/producer who will sit for hours on end listening to the same beat, and converts a week of ‘downtime’ into a remix album. So obsessed, they even run their own record label, Golden Era Records.
AudioTechnology spent the day with MCs Suffa and Pressure, and DJ Debris, at Debris’ home studio, and talked about how they went from work-a-day life to Australian hip hop superstars.
Suffa: Not trying to sound modest, but a lot of it was good luck and good timing. Hip hop was exploding at the time we came out with The Calling, so we were lucky in that respect. If we’d come out with a record like The Calling five years earlier it would have gone underneath the radar and five years after, it would have been too late.
Pressure: There was a compilation in 2001 or 2002 that was called Culture Of Kings. That brought a lot of attention to Australian hip hop and a few major radio networks really started playing it. The Calling blew up for us a year after that in 2003, so there was already a positive buzz around Australian hip hop at the time we dropped the right album. Right place. But I think we’ve continued to do well since then. There’s no formula to it.
DRINKING FROM THE SUN
The Hoods’ latest album Drinking From The Sun went platinum within its debut week. Over the years, the Hoods have thrown themselves curveballs to swing each album’s trajectory away from the predictable. Like rerecording The Hard Road album with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, simply calling it The Hard Road Restrung. For the latest album, the Hoods invited more external producers than usual, with One Above, Jaytee, Trials, and Pokerbeats supplying tracks as well as Suffa. Debris also re-tracked some of the programmed string sounds with a real quartet in his own studio, as well as an eight-voice choir. It’s part of keeping not only their own, but the zeitgeist of Australia’s hip hop community on the move. Even for an act that admittedly prefers to reference the genre’s roots, this record’s arrangements vastly expand on traditional hip hop.
Pressure: We went in with a pretty open mind about a few different things we wanted to try. We worked with an eight-voice choir on one of the tracks, which we’d never done before. We started thinking a bit more sideways after we did The Hard Road Restrung project where we remixed the entire project with a symphony orchestra and it just opened our minds a little — that there were no limitations or rules to what we could or couldn’t do with our music.
Suffa: Basically we said, “Well we can use as many session musicians as we want!” And we did. Though we were careful not to do that Dewey Cox thing: “This doesn’t sound like a song, it sounds like five songs on top of another song!”
Hip hop can be The Roots, it can be an eight-piece band or it could be Guru from Gang Starr standing in front of DJ Premier on two turntables, or even with an eight-track and 16-piece string orchestra. There are no rules, but I do like going back to the roots of it and making a simple beat, with a sample. I like the monotony of hip hop. I like the drone of a one-bar or two-bar sample. I can listen to the beat in Speak Ya Clout for eight hours straight, and enjoy it.
I was so excited when I found the Mad Lads piano and chorus on Chase that Feeling, that I walked out of the room. I put on the break and stepped away from it. Then this weight comes down on your shoulders that you’ve got to make it work. So then it becomes all about making the sample work and trying to make everything fit.
Mark Davie: What do you usually have to do to get a sample to fit or sit in a song?
Suffa: It depends on the sample and what we’re trying to do with it. Say for a track like Speaking In Tongues, that’s a chop through the verses to give it some character and give it some swing, but the horn loop is just so sweet that we let the whole two bars ride.
I know a lot of producers like Premier, who like E-mu SP-1200s because it limits them to how much they can sample, which in turn makes them be creative with what they’ve sampled. I like to get creative with samples, but like straight out loops as well.
Pressure: Speaking of tones though, you also added a bass line and an extra horn section to that track to make it work and all fit in around that original two-bar horn loop that made up the chorus.
MD: You also often pitch shift the samples.
Pressure: Usually when you hear something pitch-shifted in our music it’s to get the sample to the sweet spot, a tempo that’s good to rap to.
Suffa: Our sweet spot’s around 96bpm. It’s good for live and it’s good for the way we deliver lyrics. If you look at I Love It, Chase That Feeling, Nosebleed Section, they’re all 96bpm.
MD: What do you sample with?
Suffa: 99% of the time I make my beats in Logic — it’s a lot quicker for me to work in.
MD: When would you go to the Akai MPC?
Suffa: If I’m using an MPC I’m making a beat to have fun. I still enjoy production, even though I’ve been doing it for a long time. Whenever I’m on holidays, that’s what I like to do. We came home from a tour, and I did a remix E.P. of our album in the last week and a half.
RECORDING THE SUN
MD: Did you approach the engineering differently for this album?
Debris: With this album I had the mantra to try to get it more right at the recording stage, and I’d say there was less work in post. I’ve made the error in the past when mic placement might not have been ideal and I should have piped up in the first few takes. This time once I got it right, it was a good template for vocals on the album.
I used a lot more UAD plug-in instances this time, but less extreme settings — just a little bit of EQ here and a little bit of compression there, which adds up to a nice, non-obvious amount.
My recording and mixing approach evolves over time. It’s a bit to do with having a new studio that sounds better and captures sound a bit better, and also, you never stop learning. No matter how much you think you’ve got the best sound, there’s always room for improvement or to try something different.
You can hear a progressive improvement in every album, from the mixing and recording side. That’s more about execution; technology can sometimes hit a peak. It gets to the point of: can you really hear the difference between 20-grand converters and thousand dollar converters?
MD: How do you treat the beats and low end in your albums?
Debris: Every track’s different. We use our own sounds so we mould things to that. The tracks Suffa produces already sound good, so there’s nothing to be done. It’s only when we get guest producers in and we love the beat and pull it in and listen to it with the rest of the album you might notice that their beat is a lot boomier, or bright, or crispy at the top end, and that’s where we try to massage it to fit the rest of our stuff.
MD: So can you describe the sound that you go for?
Debris: Crisp but still thick bottom end. We try to have as much dynamics as we can. There’s always a bit of space in our beats, even if it gets crushed by the time it’s finished mixing and being mastered and played on the radio, we try to leave everything with its own space and spectrum.
The first E.P. we released was recorded on 16-track in an analogue studio, and that’s really f**king hard to record on. You’ve got to physically rewind that shit
PICK A PART
The last time AudioTechnology talked to Debris was for Home Grown following their breakout record The Calling. At the time, he used a Roland MMP digital preamp to file away presets that worked with specific MCs. It spoke of Debris’ deep obsession with collecting. In his garage he keeps an ordered collection of obsolete pieces of gear. None of it’s really worth much; maybe a couple of bucks for an old Amiga on eBay, but the Pentium 100 ain’t going to fetch a dollar. It’s a pickers paradise of early digital home studio gear that’s not worth anything. For Debris, it’s a physical history of the development of their sound — even down to the old studio’s acoustic panels that literally absorbed the sound of previous albums.
To be fair, it’s organised. Other than the odd PC or monitor, most of it is logged and labelled in plastic tubs stacked down the centre of his garage. He employs the same OCD methodology when recording. The Roland preamp was just the beginning. Debris takes session notes to another level, and for good reason.
Debris: Yeah, for every recording session, once we get underway and I’ve found the sound that is best working for their voices, I take photos of every single setting: The angle of the mic, the height of the mic, the angle of the pop shield to the mic, every knob on the preamp and the compressor. It’s all recallable, so if they want to come back and change a little vocal bit here and there, they can resume exactly where they were, and acoustically, you can’t tell that they’ve come back and done it in a separate session.
Obviously I tweak it if the track is a lot more aggressive than the last — I’ll change the compression ratios and the preamp gain, etc. — but I definitely work from templates after we’ve recorded them for so long.
MD: How does that approach affect your progression from record to record?
Debris: Say in a year I come back and listen to Drinking From The Sun and it becomes immediately apparent to me that there’s a 200Hz boom in their vocals, then I can look back at the notes of how I recorded this album and make those changes — move the MC, whatever it takes. I think it’s good to have notes of what you did in the past and reflect on that.
MD: Can you run us through the recording chains for each MC?
Debris: We record pressure through a Sony C800G microphone which is a pretty rare mic, in Australia anyway. It’s around the 10 grand mark plus GST when it lands in customs. They run off an American power supply so I’ve got to use a step-down transformer to power it — one that doesn’t hum. I’ve bought a few and realised they make a hum, but I managed to find one that would power it with silence. That runs into an Avalon 737SP that I mainly use as a preamp, and compress about 1dB RMS with a real slow attack and release just to massage it. Then that splits into an Empirical Labs Distressor, which I usually run with a 4:1 or 6:1 ratio. We usually smash into the Distressor, because you can hit hard and quick and you can’t hear it pump like most compressors.
I focus that with the sidechain detection so it’s not including the bottom end, just using the high-pass detection circuit on it. From there I go into an SPL De-esser, which is a new edition for this album. I normally steer away from hardware de-essers but this one in particular uses phase. So whatever essing there is at the top of sibilance, it phase-inverts it and uses that to mix it out so you don’t get that typical de-essing sound.
From there, we go into the Metric Halo ULN8, which is also a new addition for this album. It’s got amazing pre’s on it but I only use the line in because we’ve got the Avalon pre. From there it goes into an SPL monitor and talkback controller so it’s clean, then out to the Barefoot monitors.
Suffa’s chain is exactly the same except with slightly different compression settings. The main difference with his chain is a Neumann U89 mic. It just seems to suit his voice a bit better. The Sony is a bit cold on his voice, a bit sibilance-y.
MD: The Barefoot speakers have been pretty hyped around the world, how have you found them in use?
Debris: The Barefoots, I guess you’d say are honest. And they don’t lack power. I can’t get the limit light to go on… I’ve tried and my teeth are gritting so hard my ears are about to bleed. Not that I monitor that loud but I just wanted to see how much headroom they’ve got. I think that’s a great thing. They’re sealed boxes, which I like. I used to like ported monitors until I realised they gave me a false impression of what was going on. They’re just a solid monitor made out of solid steel. They’ve got a great sound and everyone I know that’s come in here and listened to them is very impressed and all of my friends, even if they’ve got their own studios, come here to mix.
I’ve got guys coming in every third and fourth day at the moment wanting to mix their album or projects, and everyone seems to be able to make quicker decisions on how to mix. Basically, that’s what defines a good set of monitors — how quick you can decide what sounds right and move on.
DOUBLE BAREFOOT
Suffa also has a production studio, which is essentially a facsimile of whatever Debris has elected to put in his own rig. Between them they have two sets of Barefoot Micromain MM27s, two suites of UAD-powered plug-ins, and at its core, Logic.
Suffa: I’ve got an MPC 2500, but I mainly use Logic to produce, record, mix, everything, it’s just perfect and easy to use. We’ve been using it since Logic 3, so it’s second nature. I don’t like change. My studio is very similar to Debris’ setup. We try to keep our setups consistent so, No. 1, we can transfer projects between each other and not be missing a plug-in or pull up a session and find it isn’t working. And, No. 2, so we’re hearing the same thing because I also do a lot of the mixing.
Most of our audio purchases come down to Debris and his research. So when he goes, “These are the duck’s nuts.” I’m like, “Show me the duck!”
Pressure: Debris spends a lot of time researching audio gear. That’s his hobby; researching it, buying it and making it gel in the studio.
Suffa: If we’re going to be 100% honest, he definitely researches audio equipment more than he uses it.
Pressure: It’s true. He’s a hoarder and a tinkerer. You should see his garage. There’s room for three cars, but there aren’t any. Just old audio equipment and computers that he’s used once or twice and replaced with something new.
Suffa: You could sell footage of it to Fox Hoarders.
Pressure: It’s borderline disturbing/OCD, can’t-get-rid-of-it style.
MD: What kind of gear did you start out using?
Pressure: We had two Amiga 500s synced via a MIDI cable and eight tracks of mono audio at 8-bit. And he’s still got that shit. It was even more primitive than an Atari/Cubase kind of setup, far more primitive.
Suffa: Octamed. That was the program on the Amiga that we used to make beats. Baz still has it!
Debris: Back in ’95 when we started gathering our own ‘proper’ equipment, we had no money. It started off with a Pentium 100 and an Emagic Audiowerk card. I don’t know if you’d call it a studio but it was the basis of where we were heading — being self-sufficient and not having to pay studios money. It’s evolved a lot since then.
When we started, reel-to-reels were one of the only ways to record. You had to have a bit of money to get a decent sound from your home.
Then a couple of years later Rode started making the NT1, things became cheaper and Behringer provided an affordable option for the bedroom engineer. That’s where we started, with the cheapest, shittiest Behringer desk you could get. I had to get a heat sink from Jaycar just to stop it overheating.
We were all working full-time jobs, so music was a hobby that you sustained with your job, which only permitted so much. It wasn’t till we started making more money off touring and The Hoods became more recognised that we started putting it back into more equipment. We’ve upgraded a lot since back then and every album cycle we upgrade. There’s still more to go but we’re pretty happy where we are and the sound we got with the last few albums.
MD: So technology has improved your life?
Pressure: The first E.P. we released was recorded on 16-track in an analogue studio. And that’s really f**king hard to record on. You’ve got to physically rewind that shit. It takes you two minutes between takes to get it to the right cue point to start recording.
Suffa: We recorded it on two-inch tape, and we used to have all of us around the mixing desk when we’d mix down a track because you couldn’t have anything preset. You’d have your job at 1:52 to turn up the fader two notches.
Pressure: There was a 24-track desk as well, so we had 16 tracks of audio and eight tracks full of old-school manual patchbay plugged into effects units. There were four of us with six tracks each, controlling them throughout the mix.
Suffa: And we did a horrible job! It’s gotta be said. At the time we thought it was great, but when we listened back to that E.P. it’s awful.
Pressure: Even after 20 takes of getting the master mix right. Terrible. And for that album we bounced the masters to minidisc. Where did minidisc go
MD: So you’re not itching to record on analogue tape then?
Pressure: F**k no. Thank god analogue has gone. That shit was hard to use.
MD: And you had to do full takes of your vocals back then too?
Pressure: Yeah maybe a punch track or two in one take.
Suffa: But we break up our vocals now. I don’t see it as cheating. In the studio you should be trying to get the best sound that you can. When you do it live you should be doing it as live as you possibly can.
MD: What components do you break it down into now?
Suffa: Well it depends on the verse. Some verses are easy to get out and some aren’t. Sometimes you break up a couple of bars, sometimes you’ll get out most of a verse without having to do that.
Pressure: It depends on the breath control of the verse. Obviously the choruses we’ll record separately and then we’ll layer vocals of both of us in choruses and mix them in different ways depending on the track.
MD: Even with good breath control, is it inevitable that you cut in and out for breaths?
Suffa: I am somewhat of a human breath editor! I go throughout tracks and edit out our breathes if I think they’re too loud. And it’s all because of one record: Blackalicious Melodica. Gift of Gab is one of my favourite rappers but one day I noticed this big breath in between lines and it’s all I can notice. I couldn’t listen to the record without hearing the breath every bar — da-dada-da-dada-da-inhale-dada-da! Then I listened back to some of our stuff and it’s similar. So now I go through and take everything out, it just sounds so clean to me and I like that. But sometimes it fits, as an example, it worked for Big Pun, it was a big part of his charisma.
A NEW GOLDEN ERA
MD: There’s talk of you trying to make it over in the US. How do you think your sound would translate to that market?
Suffa: Our sound is definitely different to what’s going on in The States at the moment because we make a more traditional style of hip hop. I describe our sound as ‘sample-heavy, boom-bap, hip hop’. A lot of the samples I’m personally drawn to are white soul, and white funk. Some people might call it country funk — things like Leon Russell for Hard Road and Melanie Safka for Nosebleed. Even to a degree The Mad Lads, which is a soul band I’d describe as country funk.
Melodically, I’m drawn to those samples because I developed an eclectic range of tastes from my parents. I didn’t grow up in just a straight jazz and blues environment; my mum was also playing Janis Ian and Janis Joplin — all the Janis’s. She was Janis-heavy!
Beat-wise, I’ve always said we make or choose beats for a festival rather than a club. Our music is made to be played to a larger audience than to a dance audience inside a nightclub.
Pressure: The three of us all like a larger, liver sound to our music than that kind of synth club ambience that a lot of producers in hip hop are going for now. There are not many people making this style of hip hop anymore, particularly in North America. It sets us apart and gives us an edge.
Suffa: At the end of the day, Hilltop Hoods is a party band, and that’s hopefully what comes across.
RESPONSES