The Coup is a hip-hop group from Oakland. They have an outwardly Marxist bent, which has earned them diehard fans as well as vituperous criticism from mainstream pundits. But that won't be our focus here. Their politics have been covered at length, with too little attention paid to what makes their albums truly great: the music and the production. On a sunny afternoon in late October I met up with rapper and producer Boots Riley. We drove to his studio space in Oakland to talk about their latest, self-recorded album, Party Music.

So is this where you recorded Party Music?

No, that was recorded in a garage. We're still getting this space going. It's my gear and this other guy's space. 

All of Party Music was done in a garage? 

Yeah, well we mixed it at Hyde Street I was going right into Pro Tools, through this Focusrite Red.

That was for the vocals?

Vocals, but pretty much I ran everything through this, just because I didn't have a mixer at the time. Vocals, bass, samples — anything live or line in that needs a signal boost I'll run it through here. The good thing about it is I can't tell that I've put a signal through there. That's bad to some extent, like, it doesn't give you any kind of feeling about it, but I do that in the mixdown. Especially since I'm new at tracking, I don't want to mess it up.

So this [10-space] rack was all the gear you were using?

That and the LA-4, but I'd only use a little on there, even on things that I thought needed more compression. I would always go pretty conservative with anything that I'd put on there. Sometimes we'd have a Neve strip in here, but I'd never use it since at Hyde Street we have all of that stuff there. So I pretty much went direct as much as possible and then re-amped it. And then I also had the choice of amps that I wanted. For the performance, while the musicians were playing, I'd throw the SansAmp plug-in on that. That sounded real good, actually. There are a couple places where we just kept the SansAmp. Before this, I'd done the three previous albums on analog. I was all against digital like, oh it's not going to sound as good, this and that. Originally I just decided to go ahead and do it like this, because I chose the creativity over the sound. But then, as I got into it, I realized I wasn't really making a compromise at all. Especially, because when we mixed it, we went through the board at Hyde Street

What board were you mixing on?

It's an Amek, but I'm not sure which one. [Ed. Amek APC 100]

I've been impressed with how the vocals sit on your last couple of albums. It's really clean — they sit right out front.

I did all the vocals for the last album on that mic right there — it's a Soundelux mic. It sounded cool. Performance wise, I did redo a couple when we were mixing down, and there were a couple songs I wrote while we were mixing down. Like I had all the music, but the lyrics weren't together. But you wouldn't be able to tell those tracks apart, the $2500 mic versus the $10,000 mic. When I'm recording, I'm just making sure the level's cool, not going into the red, and on Pro Tools I haven't found a reason to print real loud. I can stay soft if I need to, just to stay away from the possibility of distorting, and I don't hear any extra air or anything like that.

Well that Soundelux is a good match for your voice, it captures that really tactile, out-in-front feel.

Yeah, I really like it, and times that I've had singers up in here, they like it too. That was one thing that was hard, when we recorded our other albums at Hyde Street, one mic would sound cool to me one day and a few days later it wouldn't sound good. I don't know if that has to do with some of those old mics. They change depending on humidity, whatever, so we'd always have this whole long time of switching mics, trying mics. Which was cool, cause they had a lot of mics. Also, we don't have a lot of the things we had at the garage here, like these boxes I would hit. I was recording just hitting a box to throw under the kick. I just found out that that is a South American instrument...

What, a cardboard box?

No, like I saw Lauryn Hill on stage, she had a couple of these boxes, they're made for that, to be mic'ed. She'll be playing the guitar and hitting that, it makes a real boomy 808 type of sound. But I was just using a regular box, like that [a flight box for gear] but it was empty, it had some of the metallic stuff jangling on it. Some of that stuff nobody will hear but you, but you can get into recording it.

What tracks is that on?

I don't remember — I did it on a lot of things, and some of them made it on there. And that's kind of how this whole album was recorded. Like, we'll have a clavinet, and just try different clavinet parts on every song, and then it'll only stick for a few of them. I think that's what happens when you get Pro Tools and you get all these tracks. You build it up to a big mountain of sound, and then you carve out your song. And that's how I did this album.

What gear did you do your first albums with?

I was using the [Roland] R8, that's still where I get my 808 sounds from.

Does that do sampling?

No, the sounds just come on cards. For sampling I used the Akai. And then the Vintage Keys module. Genocide and Juice was just these three things, and I didn't like some of those keyboard sounds. They were too thin, just coming out of the Vintage Keys, though some of them we were able to thicken up.

So when you go into mix, is it just you and an engineer?

Yeah, it's just me and Matt Kelley [Tape Op #55]. I just take the hard drives in. If I wanted to save more money, I would take my whole system in. But after the mixing sessions, if there were parts I wanted to change, I'd come home and work on it. So I wanted to keep my setup here, and just bring the drive in and plug it into their Pro Tools.

Which Pro Tools are you using?

This is 5.1, on a Mix system. I usually use these monitors [Alesis Monitor Ones], but because we've been having people coming through a lot they've been blowing them out, we've been using these [JBL LSR28P]. Those are powered. [Opens up Pro Tools session for "Ghetto Manifesto", and solos the handclaps] You can hear the dogs barking under this track. There were actually open holes in the garage, I mean, no rain got in, but there were dogs right there.

So when it comes to a part like that guitar lick, are you doing looping in Pro Tools?

Yeah, I do the loops in Pro Tools. I have a sampler, but there's really no reason for me to use it anymore. Before this I was using Creator Notator on an Atari, so this is a big jump up for me. My computer was real old. Seriously, a lot of times I'd go a couple of months without doing anything, because I had to sit there and hope it would boot up. I'd be spending a couple hours getting it to start, and by then you're like, oh fuck it. So you'd go look at that computer, and just be like, oh, I'm not going to do anything today. [Solos the strings] The strings, that's just one girl on violin, I just had her going over and over. We did a lot of stuff with that one Sequential Circuits keyboard, the Split 8. Actually, the bass on this one is a Minimoog. On "Pork and Beef," and "5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO," the high parts, that's the Sequential. Everything is being tracked one at a time.

What about the song "Wear Clean Drawers," the chorus on that. Did you do that one person at a time?

That's just one dude, Martin Luther, doing all the parts one track at a time.

That's amazing.

Before, in the studio, usually we'd be just recording 24 tracks. Sometimes we'd do 48 tracks, and I'd really have to figure out economically how to do that, because they charge us to bring in the other machine. So usually, vocals would only go three layers, but that song, I think I layered him eight or nine times. [Closes "Ghetto Manifesto," opens "Wear Clean Drawers"] Yeah, I used a lot of Moogerfooger, you can probably tell. On the other albums I used a Mutron, but the one we had broke. [solos vocal tracks] I also have a group called Defiant that I'm producing, that I'm writing lyrics for, and Martin Luther is going to be one of the lead singers.

Those are super tight harmonies.

This is one where we started with a blank slate. I had the idea for the chorus — we laid that down first, after the bass line. And then just spend hours trying different things.

So when you come into the studio, do you generally come in with the sampler and the beat already, or are you putting that together in the studio?

Sometimes I might just have a simple bass line idea, and I don't play very well, but I'll just do that. And then I'll build a drum track around that. Even though a lot of people say you should start with the drum track first, a lot of times I don't. Or I'll have people come play around this one musical idea I have. Sometimes that might be a sample, or a few samples chopped up in a certain way, or sometimes just something real simple that I play that I'm like, okay, can you hook this up for me? Usually I'll sing the part to the musician. Like on "Ghetto Manifesto," I'd try to sing the guitar part to the musician. And because I don't sing very well, they're like, okay, did you mean this or did you mean that?

Once you sing the idea for the musicians, do they just go at it, and you track it and pick stuff out?

Yeah, and then because we're just going with a click instead of with drums, sometimes I have to do a lot of editing and moving around to fit it right on, because I'm going for a real syncopated sound. A click isn't always enough to keep it right on. Sometimes I'll go right in and edit the actual playing to move that note over, or that note over. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it just sounds too mechanical.

How does your experience with the Moogerfooger plug-in compare to the hands-on feel of the Mutron?

It ends up sounding good, but I end up feeling like, man, I've heard that already. As opposed to something that's physical you're able to adjust it a little more and things react a little differently. Do you mean just the actual adjustment of it, moving the knobs?

That, and then how that turns into getting the sound that you want. I mean, a mouse is a mouse, but...

Yeah, it's not as good as having actual knobs. Just simple things, like how little you can turn it or whatever. I've never played with a real Moogerfooger, but the plug-in is not as fat to me as a Mutron. It does get different things, and I like it a lot better on a keyboard. Like here's one, just the keyboard part. I like it on keyboards that are already wet. It just makes it even wetter, it's cool, it just has that edge, you're able to get that extra fart sound . I like the idea too, that I can automate the Moogerfooger plug-in.

Do you have the first track off Party Music on here, "Everythang?"

Yeah. Originally, that beat was going to be for the song I did with Dead Prez.

One of the things I really like about that beat, and a lot of your beats, is that the drum pattern takes four measures to loop around. A lot of people just throw up a one-measure loop, but you do a lot of patterns that vary over two and four measures.

A lot of that is a result of a layering way of doing stuff. You can do that with just a pattern, but what inspires me is having a whole bunch of sounds to work with. I don't want to just keep it doing the same thing, because I want to get this idea in, and that idea in. It's funny, this beat started as just a one-measure loop, a guitar riff from a Fela-type thing. I wanted to do an electronic version of a Fela-type tune. A lot of the sounds here were from a Sequential SixTrak. I wanted to get that marching feel, and when you've got a marching band you've got all these different sounds happening, and I wanted to have that happen with keyboards and everything else.

Is that keyboard sequenced, or is someone playing that?

That's all Mike Tiger, he played it. That part kinda almost sounds like A-Ha.

What is that timpani sound off of?

That was off the Roland XV38. But at the time we had an old [EMU] SP12, so I was triggering it off of there. A lot of the keyboards I'll try to get the sound right live. There are a few things that I will MIDI up and do, but usually I just play it live. But the funny thing about this song is that it started as the song with Dead Prez, "Get Up." All the music was just drums and that guitar bit. And then, since we switched up the beat for "Get Up," this was something that was forgotten. And the last song of the album, I was like, man, we need some more up-tempo songs for this. We were mixing, and I had to get an 11:30 AM flight, so I'd have to leave the studio at 10:30 at the very latest. So, I think at like, 7:30 that morning, we had another song to mix, and I had the lyrics partly done. At the last minute I called Mike up, and said, I've got an idea how to do this. Luckily he was in San Francisco — he got there like 20 minutes later and laid down the parts. Then Matt had an hour to start mixing it while I wrote the lyrics.

Damn, that was some divine inspiration.

I was like, man, this has to go on the album. Toni Isabella, who was running 75 Ark at the time, she showed up because she heard I was still in the studio. The way things were, if we didn't get our mastering time that next day, then we were going to have to wait a couple months and it was going to throw things off. So she came there while I was cutting vocals that morning. It was the quickest vocals I ever did, in one take, then went and layered the chorus.

That's all you on the chorus?

Yeah. The way I usually do my vocals is I do them all right at the front of the song. So it's first verse on this track, second verse on that track, just to make it easier for me getting around. I can just hit something and go back to the front and I'm ready to start again. I'm usually doing vocals myself, and it's a lot easier that way, especially if I'm on a roll. And then I move it around later. And on that last day, Matt was mixing, and he was like man, we're not gonna do it, it's not gonna work, all that type of stuff. He got mad when he saw me writing the lyrics [laughs] and was like, "Okay, you want to do it, you do the vocals by yourself." So I had to do the thing where I hit it and run and do the vocals.

So that whole song came together in, what, three hours?

I left there at 10:40 and got there 20 minutes before the plane left, I ran and just had the DATs in my hand and CD references to listen to. So, yeah, it took about three hours.

And it's so good! Where did you go for mastering?

We went to Masterdisk, Tony Dawsey did it. It was kind of strange for me, because he sets it up for his ears only, which is cool, he did a good job. There's these $100,000 speakers or whatever, where the woofer is at the bottom and it's aimed up. You've got to stand right in this one place, and he's tall, so for me to listen I had to get up on my toes. So I was a little nervous. He did a real good job. I also like the mastering on our album Genocide and Juice, that was Brian "Big Bass" Gardner at Bernie Grundman Mastering. It's all analog, same as Masterdisk. He has this compressor that can put everything in the red with no distortion. We brought one DAT there, and it was cool, and then when we finished and played it back in a regular DAT player, it looked like, "Oh shit! It's distorting," but it sounds clear and it's loud. That's important for doing a record, because if a DJ puts on your stuff and it's lower than the last record they just played, the subconscious idea is that it's not as bumping. Mastering is important to get that compression and that signal boost. A lot of people are like, you can go anywhere to master. But I think, you can go anywhere to record and mix down, take your time, but mastering takes certain compression units and other things that cost a lot of money. I think it's not as important for every kind of music, but if you want something loud and you want it clear, the mastering is important. I've seen big differences in mastering places. You go to a small mastering place, and yeah it sounds better than what you brought in, so you're like, "This dude works just as well!" But that's not true in my experience. There are a few places that are really, really good for what they do. And if you're doing something with just guitar and vocals, you might not need all of that.

Where did you go for the mastering on Steal This Album?

I think that was called Masterworks, in San Francisco. And, dude is cool, but I wasn't as happy with that. Afterward, there were certain frequencies that I feel he wasn't paying attention to.

Stuff in the bass?

No, more in the mids. Like "Cars and Shoes," on the unmastered version, that flute just comes cutting through. And on the mastered version, it sounds cool if you haven't heard the other one, but there's this edge that's taken off of it that needs to be there. Also, the older the mastering person, the better, because they've made all those mistakes. And usually those places cost so much that you're probably not going back [to tweak something]. Masterdisk is around $300 something an hour I think. I mean, there's free food, but you don't want to have to go back. I think in certain cases they'll be like, okay, we'll fix it.

But only if they really botched it.

Yeah, only if you can really prove it. Something like that, that is negligible to most people, they'll be like hey, you should have caught it before. And that's, the dude in San Francisco, I don't think he was bad at all, but there are some things like that that a musician or a producer is not going to automatically pick up right then and there, and the mastering engineer should be aware of that.

Yeah. So Matt Kelley is your engineer when you go to mix?

Yeah.

Does he come in for tracking too?

No, not on this one. I called him a couple times when I was recording congas or whatever. For the first three albums, he tracked all of it, at Hyde Street, Usually with the mixing what will happen is, I'm tired because I'm always working at the last minute, up for two days, so I'm like, okay, I'm going to go to sleep for an hour, you get a mix up. And he'll get all the sounds in there, what he thought would be a cool mix. And I'll say, no, we should turn the bass down or up, or we need more mids on that snare, or I might say, I had an idea for the kick to have this kind of effect on it. That's how we'll mix it together. Then I'll take the reference, and I have a couple friends with different car stereo systems, and we'll listen to it there, I'll listen to it out in the hallway of the studio on a little boombox, I'll go to somebody's house and listen to it on their stereo, and then I'll come back with my notes and we'll tweak it.

Does it take a week of that, or a couple weeks, for mixing?

This last one took about two weeks. Our first album, we'd mix two songs in an eight hour session. So it went from that to one song in a fourteen hour session. Really, you could do it faster, but it's the luxury of having the ability to try different shit. It's not so much that it makes it better, but the choices, it allows you time to think about stuff, tweak effects if you want to. I heard about this one guy, Bob Powers, in New York, he's mixed Erykah Badu and Meshell Ndegeocello and D'Angelo. They were saying, he spends a month on an album, usually he'll take three days on the kick, and I'm like oh my god, what the hell. For me, that's too much. For him, I'm guessing he's trying every effect on the kick, instead of just saying, this one will work, I'm cool with that. And for some people that's their process that they want to go through.

So you take breaks while you mix, take a couple days off in there?

Yeah. And usually we'll get in arguments, me and Matt, and somebody will end up storming out, saying all right, try it, whatever.

Do you guys go back a ways?

I first started recording stuff at Hyde Street in '91, so almost twelve years now, and that's been with Matt the whole time. I went to Hyde Street just from reading the backs of albums, I saw that Digital Underground had been doing stuff there, and a few other people, like Tupac.

When it came time to do Party Music, when did you first think that you'd want to just record it yourself?

Well, after Genocide and Juice I had stopped doing music and I was doing community organizing. I wanted to go back to doing music, but I wanted to do it in a way where I didn't have to worry about record labels or even having a deal. A way where I could put out other music and do other projects, so that necessitated having a studio. Earlier on, when we first got signed, people were like, you should spend this money on a studio. At that time, though, the technology of home studios was nowhere near what it is now. It was like ADATs or whatever. This was '91 or '92. And I still don't like the sound of ADATs.

You've got a lot of company there.

Yeah. But then I started hearing more gear that I liked the sound of. And when I went back into doing Steal This Album, I was doing community organizing but because of that I had to get a job and the job was taking away from the organizing. As I got re-inspired about the need for music, I said, okay, I need to get my bills down, so I need to go back in, make some money, and have a house that I don't have to pay rent on. And a studio so I can make music without worrying about paying for it. So I went into Steal This Album with that idea, and it happened when I got the deal with 75 Ark, all of that came into place. Also, at that time, they were like, oh, just get a Digi 001 and spend less money, and Dan the Automator [a co-founder of 75 Ark] has this stuff, you can bring it over there and redo it. But I wanted to get something I could build onto, and be autonomous, and not even have to go somewhere else to mix. And we've done projects that we've mixed here, but I think when you do it digitally, you need different kinds of compressors, not just digital compressors. So that's what it's lacking now, plus I want to have a board for mixing. I want to get to the point where I don't have to worry about the big company in order to do it. Because it takes a lot of work just promoting the music, so if I want to do organizing, and music, and have a living at it, I have to have some of the tools myself.

For sure.

I still know people who won't touch the digital stuff. Maybe if I had millions of dollars to spend, I would go all analog, but I don't, and it's more important to me to be able to get that music out there.

So that's what started it — buy your own studio like buying your own house.

And Pro Tools seemed like the best thing to use. At first, because I had been using Creator, I had heard that Logic was the next step up with that. But I looked at it, and I really didn't like the way that Logic or Pro Tools looked. I didn't like those swiggly lines, it made me think of music going that way [points right], and I used to think of the music going that way [points forward]. But I figured, well, if the next thing up is Logic, but it looks like Pro Tools, I might as well get Pro Tools and get some better A to D things. I wanted to get the Apogee things, but I gotta listen to them more to be convinced if they're better.

So for now you're running the 888?

Yeah, the Apogee would be adding on to that, and I want to get an eight channel preamp, to track drums and track other things live.

Do you have a drummer you're working with now?

Yeah, usually I work with them a little different, because I'm usually just programming most of the drums. I might have them do hand drums or something. But with that group Defiant, the guy Taz who tours with us regularly now will be the drummer for that. I get a lot of musicians who are really technically skilled, they might play jazz clubs a lot, but it's a lot more fun for them to come to one of our shows. I've gone to some of those gigs with them, and it's not fun to be playing while people are talking and eating, and you're like, what the hell am I here for? I'm just not used to that. It ends up being more fun for them to play a concert. And then, compared with their pop gigs, it's still a lot more fun than those gigs. Like Taz has played on the road with *N'Sync.

Yeah, I can't imagine being on tour with *N'Sync. That's gotta suck. What's been your experience with clearing samples for your albums?

The only sample we ever tried to clear backfired on us. On the original version of "Takin' These" we had a sample of George Benson's "Give Me the Night." Rod Temperton [the copyright holder] is some sort of saved Christian or whatever, and he was like, "No way, it doesn't matter how much you guys pay me, you can't use it." Even though he let Heavy D use it.

He didn't like something in your song?

Yeah, that it was talking about revolution and stuff. Usually, what I try to do is try to use samples where the artist doesn't own it anymore anyway. You know, so I don't feel guilty about it.

On Steal This Album, there was at least one little sample between songs [that will go unnamed here]. Did you have to do any clearance for that?

I don't know what we had to do, I know what we didn't do. Really, the truth is, we don't sell enough units for anybody to come after us. On the last album I had something with George Clinton, and I know him, so I just told him, look, I'm going to do this. His position was, "I'm not gonna get paid off of it now anyway, so whatever." So that's one situation. In other situations, if I make some money off of it, I'm going to pay people. But so far, I've never got paid on the back end of an album yet. I should be getting paid, but it just hasn't happened. For a big company, like Warner Brothers, they're not going to sue you until you start selling enough records to make X amount of dollars off it. So I'm not worried about it on that level. On another level, a lot of the stuff that I use, just creatively I do something different to it. But we're not working with the kind of budgets that some people are, in order to clear everything. And I think if we were working with those budgets, it would be only fair for me to be like, hey we got this guitar part from your thing, here you go.

Where does Pam [The Coup's DJ] come in on production?

During the last album, she was working on a compilation of all female rappers that she's producing. Production-wise, she'll come in when the song is pretty much done, she'll come in and lay scratches over it. Sometimes, if I feel like to move forward I need this one rhythm element in the beat for her to do, she'll come in before the song is done. A lot of times I also use her as a bouncing board as I'm developing a beat, and just ask her as a DJ how it will play. On Steal This Album, she did co-produce a couple of the songs. On "The Shipment," I had the main part, and I wanted it to change up at this one point. So then she came in with the idea for the change up. But on this last album, she was more of a musician in the sense of going over the top of what was already laid down.

I've seen you play a couple times, and you've had a band with you. The last time I saw you, on some songs you were running backing tracks.

We had backing tracks on probably everything from the new album, because there are so many parts on it. Even if we had like a thirty-piece band on stage, I want to have that 808 on there, and handclaps. I want to bridge that gap. People who do go to hip- hop shows a lot get that big overwhelming bass, and it's hard to compete with, except for the energy that a band has. So if you're able to do both, then it's cool. With the drummers we've been playing with, they just lock in on that click.

Do you mix those off Pro Tools, and add a click?

Yeah, I just mute whatever I don't need. Maybe a click, there's usually other things in there for the drummer to follow.

Is the band that you were on the road with the same group that you'll work with in the studio?

A lot of them, individually, I work with. David James did all the guitar parts on the album. But I work with a whole bunch of different musicians, and a lot of them are way too big time for me to pay them on the road. Like the bass player, Elijah [Baker Hassan], who played on most of this stuff, he plays for Tony Toni Tone and Lucy Pearl. On our first few albums, the organ player was Carl Wheeler, who also played for Tony Toni Tone, and he's considered one of the best organ players in the world. Right now he's on tour with Eric Clapton getting 20 G's a week. So unless he just wants to mess around [laughs] he won't be on tour with us. Mike Tiger, the keyboard player on our last album, he usually tours with us. So there's like twelve to fifteen different musicians that I use, different people will come into the studio and play on something.