Home Grown Gavin Hammond Tastefully produced and hugely respected Aussie hip-hop made in a back shed in Adelaide? Yes, you heard it right – so let’s meet the Hilltop Hoods, a genuine homegrown success story.

ustralian hip-hop. Ten years ago and that would have been and decided to give scratching a go on my dad’s half-wooden an oxymoron. But the genre has come on in leaps and turntable. From there I became interested in mixing and the Abounds since then, and now has more mainstream credibil- technical side of sound and decided to enrol in a diploma course ity than many of its overblown US counterparts. in sound engineering when I was 15. And this is because it has matured into damn fine music. GH: How did the current project begin and why? One of the main pro- DJD: The project we are working on ponents of this new, well- currently will be Hilltop Hoods’ fourth LP. respected sound is Adelaide’s It’s been nearly a year since the last album Hilltop Hoods. UK magazine The Calling was released so we thought we Hip-Hop Connection had better pull our thumbs out and get stuck described them thus: “When into it. Australian hip-hop breaks Our touring schedule has been so hectic out, these chaps will be for the past 12 months that we haven’t spearheading the campaign. achieved much in the studio. We decided that No silly gimmicks, no wack before we start recording our next album we beats, no nonsense hip-hop.” should upgrade most of our gear. One of our The trio’s warm, jazzy, tight primary aims for the next release is to be beats and tight lyrical flows sonically superior to our previous releases are the real deal, so much so DJ Debris – musically we are still doing the same thing. that they’ve received nomina- GH: So what equipment are you now using? tions for Best Hip-Hop Act DJD: My studio [Cross in 2001 and 2002 at the 3D World Dance Bred Production Music Awards, won the APRA award for Studios] is located in best up-coming group, as well as received the southern suburbs number one positions in independent charts of Adelaide. It’s like a all around Australia. log cabin at the back of And their touring schedule is huge for all my house. Meanwhile, the right reasons – becuase they're exceed- Suffa [fellow Hilltop ingly good. Hoods producer] has In the 10 or so years the outfit has been a production-based together they’ve released four albums and studio a couple of appeared on numerous credible compila- blocks from me. tions, including Obesecity and Culture of Kings We recently Cross Bred Production Studios Vol. 1 & 2, and collaborated with most of the upgraded from PC- main players in the Australian hip-hop scene: based DAWs to Apple Koolism, Mass MC, Pegz, Muphin, Layla, Hyjak and Bonez. Mac G5s (dual 2GHz) with RME 9632 soundcards. The main The Hilltop Hoods’ 2003 album, The Calling, made ‘Album reason for us changing platforms is because we’ve used Logic of the Week’ on JJJ and Brisbane’s 4ZZZ and has since gone Audio since our first LP (1999), and, as we all know, Apple gold… yet it was created entirely in their own studios in unfortunately acquired Emagic and left us with no choice but to downtown Adelaide. change software or platforms. Here, producer DJ Debris talks us through its making. We decided that we were so comfortable using Logic that it would be like starting all over again if we changed software, so Gavin Hammond: How did you get started in music and what we decided to take the leap and go Mac. equipment did you begin with? We upgraded some of our other equipment just before we DJ Debris: I started listening to hip-hop religiously when I was started our first recording for the next release. We recently around 12 or 13 years old. I was intrigued by the DJ element obtained an Avalon 737SP, Empirical Labs Distressor and a

80 Neumann U89 for our vocal chain. We decided before the project got underway to use an For monitoring we use Genelec 1029As. All of our mixing is instrumental produced by Dazastah from Perth hip-hop crew done within Logic Pro 6 with the aid of a UAD-1 DSP card. Downsyde. The instrumental was originally supplied to us as I use a Mackie SR24 VLZ Pro for sampling through and one bounced eight-bar loop WAV file – enough for us to set general routing. the tempo and record to. We planned to obtain the individual A favourite old piece of gear that we used extensively on the components to the instrumental before the mixdown stage, but last album is the Roland MMP-2 preamp/converter. I am still before we knew it we were running out of time and settled for impressed with the vocal sound from the last album that we chopping and changing what we had to work with. This is the pulled with it. I still use it to record/convert scratches through. only song on the album where we didn’t have control over the GH: How do you go about getting inspiration for a track? Any mixing of the instrumental. However, with a bit of mild compres- unusual techniques? sion and EQ we got it to hold its own in the final mix. DJD: As I mentioned before, I got into hip-hop at an early age On the day of recording everything ran quite smoothly. from listening to acts like Run DMC and Public Enemy. Hip-hop Everybody rocked up on time and for a while it seemed like we is a very sample-based form of music and I think we draw a lot of should have put a turnstile on the vocal booth. Suffa was the inspiration from the vibe that the main sample in a track gives us. designated recording engineer for the day and dealt with the As far as techniques go, we like to chop samples up as much 300-plus takes. as we can. We use a lot of filters and gates to extract bass At the time we were using a Rode NTK mic and the Roland grooves and plug-ins like [IK Multimedia] Amplitube for making MMP-2 vocal channel. I decided to record with a mild 1.8:1 samples sound grimy. compression ratio with a low threshold and a fast (1ms) attack We use Logic Pro for everything, from sampling, arranging, so that it was constantly attenuating by 1dB to 4dB. I also set up recording and mixing. We just purchased the Vienna Symphonic a mild de-esser in the MMP to attenuate any excess sibilance. Library so that our next album’s production isn’t limited to just The settings were left the same for everyone – only the input samples. gain was adjusted. This gave a uniform recorded sound across GH: Do you just play with things or are you a trained, methodi- all of the vocalists. We set a limit of three audio tracks per MC so cal worker? that the Arrange and Mixer windows in Logic didn’t get too out DJD: I usually tweak of control. Each MC had eight equipment a lot when I first bars to rap so most of them did get to learn its boundaries, but the first four bars on one track, once I get the right sound I’m the second four bars on another looking for I usually stick to track and the punches/double a methodical approach and ups on the third track. In hip- only change settings minimally hop it’s common for MCs to – I like to evolve slowly from a split their verses into four- or good starting point. eight-bar segments and overdub For example, when we them on separate tracks – this recorded the last album we hides any obvious breaths and used the Roland MMP-2 as allows the MC to deliver their the main preamp/compres- verse with more precision. The sor/converter for vocals. One Hilltop Hoods live at tahe Metro scratches were recorded via the advantage of the MMP-2 is MMP with a –12dB low cut filter that the settings can be controlled and saved via a PC interface. from 80Hz. This prevents the bass-heavy platter-tapping sound During each vocal session I would tweak and save each from wasting headroom during recording. vocalist’s settings individually. By the end of the album I had a A few days after the recording session we decided to begin completely evolved sound for each MC. mixing. We started by sending all of the vocals to a single bus. We use a lot of plug-ins when it comes to making beats and Firstly we applied the Logic compressor with a 2.4:1 ratio and mixing vocals. Layering sounds is something that we try to do a –20dB threshold. Once again this meant that the compressor a lot. Sometimes our instrumentals are 30-odd tracks in Logic was constantly attenuating. We set an attack time of 50ms and a before we record vocals. It’s a hard balance though – if you do release of 98ms. The compressor was set to RMS mode because too much layering it can sound crowded and leave no room for we wanted a nice averaging compression over the 16 vocalists. the vocals. (During tracking the MMP was set with a very fast attack and GH: Is there one song you could talk us through, step by step, got rid of any nasty peaks before the mixing stage.) Secondly, that shows how you work? we applied the legendary PSP Vintage Warmer with a +4 drive DJD: There’s a track called The Certificate on our last LP (The and the top end rolled off slightly in multi-band mode – this gave Calling) where we decided to get our entire crew (Certified Wise the entire vocal mix a rich, warm tone and also added some – a collective of over 20 Adelaide hip-hop artists) on the one mild compression/limiting. Finally we applied reverb. We tried song. We knew from the onset that this would be a huge task several third-party reverb plug-ins but the Logic Platinumverb considering there would end up being 16 MCs, four DJs and a has always been a favourite and was what we ended up using. producer jammed into a six and a half minute song. From there we just listened and kept changing levels until all the

81 vocalists were at a similar level. We decided to set individu- al levels after compression was assigned because sometimes with a mix of this complexity you can get all the levels coherent relative to each other, then you add compression afterwards and it all goes out of whack. The scratches were sent to a second bus and assigned the same compression (with a slightly harder knee) and a dash of Platinumverb. Over the next week we scrutinised and calibrated levels until we were confident that they were all relatively even. As I mentioned earlier, we ran out of time to obtain the separated instrumental before mastering, so Suffa went to work and managed to arrange the instrumental by chopping it up and using high-pass filters. The beat was dropped out for half/whole bars in many places to add emphasis to an MC’s punch line. After the arrangement was completed we all sat down and gave opinions about the final mix before it was bounced to a 24-bit WAV file for mastering. GH: How do you approach mastering? DJD: For mastering we use the services of Neville Clark at Disk-Edits, an Adelaide-based mastering house. We are very happy with everything they have done so far. In terms of vinyl versus CD we use the same masters although the track order is usually different. It’s up to the vinyl mastering engineer to make any changes to frequency and amplitude – no one knows the dynamics of a cutting machine/press better than their own engineer. GH: How do you use your technology to get a live sound? DJD: We do a lot of live gigs. Our instrumentals are sequenced then bounced within Logic prior to a live gig. We then master the instrumentals and play them back via a Pioneer CDJ-800 live. Ideally our instrumentals would come from vinyl but we change our instrumentals so often that it would cost too much to press one-off vinyls every month or two. We use two Technics SL-1200 turntables and a Stanton SA-3 for live scratching and three Shure Beta 58 cordless mics running through our own dbx 1046 four-channel com- pressor for vocals. The advantage of preamp/compressing at our end is that the live engineer(s) are fed a nice clean +4 line level signal from the source with the main peaks already skimmed off. We get a lot of compliments from punters on the clarity of our sets after live shows. GH: Any technical advice for people hoping to record your style of music? DJD: My advice to anyone trying to record hip-hop is that it is a very do-it-yourself form of music. You don’t need to use million dollar studios and engineers. Your best bet is to buy a decent computer, soundcard, mic and some software and lay down some ideas yourself. Once you have something recorded, you will learn a lot from tweaking and listening. Also, do your research. There is a world full of books and an internet full of resources on methods to improve your sound. If you’re not happy with the sound you’re pulling there’s usually a reason for it.

Check out: www.hilltophoods.com