Rob Garza

Visible in Instagram posts dated February 4, 2020, March 12, 2020, December 5, 2020 and April 2, 2021.

Visible in this February 4, 2020 Instagram post.

A MK2 is visible in Instagram posts dated March 12, 2020 and December 5, 2020.

Visible in Instagram posts dated February 4, 2020, March 19, 2020 and July 1, 2020.

Used for The Temple of I & I, as stated by bandmate Eric Hilton 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.”

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.