Eric Hilton

Visible in this August 20, 2020 Instagram post.

Visible in this June 18, 2020 Instagram post.

Used for Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi and The Mirror Conspiracy, as stated in this May 15, 2017 Music Radar interview.

Why did you adopt electronic music rather than just using acoustic instruments?

“It’s the power of the sampler … You can sample sounds like kicks and snares, chop up beats and make your own beats. That’s what gave birth to our music from the very get go. We were using an Akai MPC3000 as our main brain when we made our first two records and a couple of other workstations back then, which were keyboards that had samplers built in. Our music was heavily sample based, and that was exciting, and it’s still exciting to use snippets of things and treat them in a certain way.”

What workstation were you using?

“The Ensoniq ASR-10, which was like our tape machine because it had 270 seconds of mono sampling time. When we recorded a vocal, we would record it onto DAT and bounce pieces of it onto the keys of the ASR-10 and then the Akai would trigger the different keys in a sequence. That’s how we taped, which is kind of incredible – we’d store the vocals on floppy discs. The saddest thing is that my ASR-10 start-up disk is broken.”

(...) Did you combine gear with Rob initially?

“We did. Both of us had limited gear, but together it was enough. I think I only had the ASR-10, a turntable and a bunch of records. Rob had the Akai and I can’t remember what we used for monitors at the beginning; it wasn’t anything special. Eventually we bought a pair of the cheapest Tannoys, which we still use today as our main reference monitors because we know and trust them so well. We set up a studio in a friend’s bedroom and used that for a few weeks and made two songs. We hit it off and really liked working together, so we moved into what was, basically, the liquor room of Eighteenth Street Lounge – a club I’d started with some friends. Then we found a studio space right next to the lounge and rented that out for about ten years.”

Used for The Temple of I & I, as stated in this May 15, 2017 Music Radar interview.

At that early stage in Jamaica, did you focus on EQing the recordings in any way, or did you save that for later?

“Not past the basic recording EQ. We didn’t really get into any production down there; we just made sure the drums sounded really good and that we were getting great bass or guitar signals. We didn’t do any fine-tuning, although the console we used down there was the Rupert Neve 5088, which is pretty special and a little better than what we have here.”

Visible in this June 18, 2020 Instagram post.

Used for Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi, as stated by engineer Christopher “Stone” Garrett in this July 28, 2011 Universal Audio interview.

Back to Eric and Rob, so you set up their studio, but how did you end up becoming their engineer?

They had another engineer at the time, and he was using Cakewalk. Their albums before that were recorded onto DAT tapes [laughs]. It was so archaic. For Sounds from the Thievery Hi-Fi (1997), which was their first effort, they had an Ensoniq ASR-10, Akai MPC3000, and a DAT machine, and that was it. And they had an Alesis MIDIVerb 4. They did the whole record with just the DAT. So I was coming into these guys, and I had worked at the music store, and I was really familiar with all this equipment that was out there, and it was a lot of emerging sort of digital technology at the time. So, I set up a Macintosh system, and sort of rewired their studio.

Featured in this May 19, 2022 Instagram post promoting Lost Dialect and throughout this behind-the-scenes video released on August 1, 2022, starting at 0:05.

#sp1200