Run the Jewels & Killer Mike & El-P – RTJ4

Used on Fantastic Damage and RTJ4, the former mentioned in the album's liner notes. It is also mentioned in this June 1, 2001 Remix article. this May 14, 2012 The Fader interview and this June 12, 2020 Mixdown Magazine interview.

Remix, June 1, 2001, "Bomb Tracks: A Hip-Hop How-To"

Regardless of the source, all of El-P's drums and other sounds go into his Ensoniq EPS-16+ sampling keyboard workstation. He really likes the EPS's variable sampling rate, which ranges from 11.2 to 44.1 kHz. Almost all of his samples go in at 22.3 kHz because, he says, “it just gives it that little edge.” In fact, edge, grit, and a certain stark quality are important elements of El-P's sound. Often he won't even use hi-hats in his beats. “As long as there is a sparse, hard kind of grit underneath it all,” he says, “I can go off and do however complicated a melody I want, regardless of whether or not it ends up sounding sparse.”

(...) In contrast to the two Akai MPC users, El-P loves his Ensoniq EPS-16+ sampling keyboard because he can play his own bass lines on it. He'll sequence a bass line on the keyboard's 8-track sequencer rather than resample it as a loop. And he tries to create distinctive bass sounds: “I'll sample this squelching noise from a guitar combined with a horn, pitch it crazy low, loop the end of it, and play a bass line from that.

Fantastic Damage liner notes (2002)

This album was produced using:

• 1 Ensoniq EPS 16+ Sampling Keyboard
• 2 Technics 1200 Turntables
• 1 Vestax 07 Mixer
• 1 Korg Chaoss Pad
• 2 Shure needles
• 1 Oberheim OB12
• 1 Magnus Electric Organ
• 1 Pro Tools Digi 001 System

The Fader, May 14, 2012, "Beat Construction: El-P"

What type of gear are you using now? Are you mostly inside of the computer at this point or are you using external stuff still?

I use a shit ton of external stuff. ​Pro Tools is the hub, for sure. I have a Pro Tools HD system. I was using Pro Tools LE for a long time but then I started getting offered these remixes for rock bands and shit. I remember I bought Pro Tools HD because I got a Mars Volta [song to] remix and that shit had like 96 tracks on it. I couldn't even open it! But yeah Pro Tools is the hub and I use a lot of external synths. I've had Moogs and Oberhiems and Tritons and a Jupiter 4, a lot of different stuff. It's a rotating cast. You get a synth, you use it, eventually you sell it and get a new one. It's a lot of external stuff and a lot of internal stuff. I have no problem using plugins and [virtual] synths, that's just another resource. If you know how to make something sound good or gritty or different then it comes out of the box and you're in a good place. I still use my EP 16+. [Another] thing that's evolved for me a lot over the years has been noise manipulation. I use a lot of outboard gear—pedals and filters and oscillators—to take a sample, change it and bring it back into the computer.

Mixdown Magazine, June 12, 2020, "El-P reveals how he produced Run The Jewels’ incendiary fourth record RTJ4"

“I knew that I wanted to bring it back a little bit into that realm for me, because I had really separated from that for a long time. When you hear Run The Jewels 3, it’s really the peak and culmination production-wise of me getting away from that to a degree – really shying away from that stuff. So it kind of added a breath of fresh air for me. I broke old the old sampler, the Ensoniq EPS 16 +. I’m always looking for new ways to keep things fresh for me, and sometimes, keeping it fresh is dipping back into your closest of goodies and thinking ‘this could be fun to play around with again.’”