Matt Kelley: Hip-hop master keeps it in sync.

From Digital Underground and Tupac to George Clinton and Jello Biafra, Matt Kelley has engineered some fantastic sessions at San Francisco's famed Hyde Street studios. He's a total pro who knows his gear backward and forward, yet encourages artists to get their hands on the console. Kelley started as an assistant at Hyde Street almost fifteen years ago, and caught an early break when Digital Underground booked a late night session to record some tracks for their debut album. To everyone's surprise, "Sex Packets" blew up huge, critically and commercially, and, as Kelley says, "I've been riding that wave out ever since."

What kind of sessions do you generally do here at Hyde Street?

I've done a lot of different stuff over the years. I'm one of those cats who likes songs more than styles, so I've worked in a lot of different styles of music. I've been super lucky to work with some really great people: George Clinton, Jello Biafra, Augustus Pablo, Louis Johnson, Fishbone, Taylor Dayne, Depeche Mode. All sorts of cats. I like being an engineer more than a producer, actually, and I think that's helped me work in a wide variety of styles. I really enjoy doing hip- hop sessions, and I do a lot of work with Hieroglyphics and Del [tha Funkee Homosapien].

What sessions do you remember as being particularly good, or particularly awful?

Well, I don't really have awful sessions, I don't think. I've had sessions that tried my patience, with stuff not working, or feeling that you're fighting the equipment. One reason is that I don't just work with anybody who wants to work with me. Maybe back in the day I did a lot more of that, but after this amount of time I have the ability to be a bit more choosy about the folks I want to work with. So if I get a vibe that makes me feel uncomfortable, I'm likely to say, "No, I don't think this is going to work out." Rather than trying to do it and later regretting it. Now, that has very little to do with musical style. It has a lot more to do with personalities. You can be an Irish jug band and I will still have a good time recording you. If you have good songs, that's really what it's all about.

How do you get most of those clients?

Mostly it is word of mouth. People will either hear from a friend, or have picked up a record that I engineered, and will contact me that way. Also you meet people on sessions. Especially working with the P-Funk crew, I've met some very talented people and have maintained relationships with them. Clinton sessions, P-Funk sessions, are always super fun.

Yeah, tell me what that's like.

It's kind of crazy, because you never know what to expect. Often-times these sessions will happen after shows. They'll play a six-hour set and then load in and want to record the rest of the night into the next day. There isn't a formula that anybody follows, you have to be ready for anything, from basic tracks to mix. I learn so much working with George Clinton. He's probably the most even-keeled producer I've ever met. He's not one of those guys who says, "Okay, I need you to play this, this way." He surrounds himself with people he likes, people who have a style that he's looking for, and pretty much lets them develop the song.

So George is mostly directing traffic?

Kind of, but more just there, nodding his head and smiling. If he's not hearing something, or not liking what he hears, it's not a critical thing, but he says, "Well maybe try it more like this. More on top of it," or, "More behind it." He's never like, "No, no, this is how it has to be." Those sessions are among the funnest I've ever done — they're so freeform. Just keeping up with the musicians, making sure everybody's happy, which is really the main job of the recording engineer, I think. A lot of engineers fancy themselves producers, and a lot of artists complain to me about that. Like, "The engineer wouldn't let me do this, or try that," and I think that's crazy.

So you're pretty open-minded in sessions.

Yeah, my favorite thing is to involve the band as much as possible in the production process. Which, for me, means getting them behind the board, moving faders and playing with the EQ. Especially with regard to arranging a song in the mix. With a lot of hip-hop, for example, people just track all the grooves, with everything everywhere, then go through and do the mutes. I've found through the years that it's easier for me to show someone the rudiments of the console automation, and then have them do their mutes. I'm never very far away, so if they get into trouble, I can come in and help them out. But to me that is so much cooler than trying to translate what they're looking for. "You tell me where it needs to be muted and I'll mute it." As a result, I think the band gets a lot more comfortable with the process, and begin to understand the studio a lot more. As we build a relationship, and continue to do work, I can have them do more and more of my job. [laughs] That leaves me free to do other things, the not-so- monotonous things.

When you work with Pro Tools, do you do any mixing in the program?

Yeah, I do. What I try to do in Pro Tools is, prior to the mix session, get it mixed as close as I can, so it sounds pretty much done. Then when I bring it in here, I set all the faders at zero, and then assign each of the channels out individually. So I essentially have the same mix.

So the board is just doing the summing.

Essentially, although I'll use the board to do little tweaks at that point. I'm not a huge fan of digital EQ, which is one of the reasons I like to do it this way. Digital EQ doesn't have the phase shift and the distortions that a good analog equalizer has, so I prefer using the EQs on an analog console. But Pro Tools and digital does some great things. Compression, for instance, is great in the digital domain.

What do you like using for that?

I've been using the Focusrite D3. When I do use digital EQ, I use the Waves Renaissance, which I think sounds very natural. It sounds warmer than the Focusrite does, not quite as brittle. But if you use too much, you really start to notice it quickly. You've got to be pretty subtle with the digital EQ, comparatively.

Do you mostly cut frequencies in digital, or does it go either way [cut/boost]?

I'd go either way, probably more likely to cut something before I boost something. That's for digital and analog EQ.

What's your feeling about plug-ins versus outboard gear?

Well, the high quality plug-ins, the Lexicon and TC plug- ins, I really like. But one thing I've noticed, and maybe I'm just crazy, but it seems to me that when you're using the same I/O for everything, the plug-ins tend to have a similarity. For instance, the Lexicon 4ADL [outboard] has its own I/O, its own A/D and D/A which is unique to that system. And those kinds of differences, when you're dealing with stand-alone products, make a difference in the way things sound. As opposed to using, say, the TC MegaVerb and the LexiVerb plug-in through the same [Digidesign] 888. Using the standalone components you get that extra whatever it is on the A/D and D/A end.

That's a good point.

I think some plug-ins are really fantastic. I can't talk enough about the Line 6 Echo Farm. I think it really sounds good, damn it, especially Amp Farm. And distortion has always been really rough in the digital domain. It's always sounded bad. And the SansAmp too, that's a great plug-in. So with that in mind, in a perfect world I'll have both, a combination of plug- ins and outboard.

When you're doing a hip-hop session, and someone comes in with their own box, their own sampler, where do you start?

First thing I do is I establish sync. That's the most major thing that every engineer who does hip-hop has got to know about. Certainly flying parts around and stuff like that is real crucial too, but synchronizing devices is really where it's at. If you can't do that then you don't have a session.

Are you talking about just SMPTE or all the different flavors?

All the different kinds of sync, especially with Pro Tools, where you're not just synching to a positional reference. You have a clock reference to deal with too, and if that's not solid then you can run into problems with clicks and pops and weird tracking errors like that. Really, what it comes down to, especially if you're working on 2", is making sure that their sequencer, whatever it is, making sure everybody's on the same page. That's basically a positional reference issue, with regard to the 2". You stripe [SMPTE] code, I use my USD as a SMPTE to MIDI Time Code converter, or some people will bring in an [Akai] MPC with a SMPTE input. That's where you start. Especially someone who comes in with an MPC 2000, or a device with a limited number of outputs, you'll have to do multiple passes to keep everything separated. The only way you can do that is if you have a positional reference coming from the 2" machine that the sequencer can recognize as the beginning of the song. After a lot of practice, it becomes pretty easy to do. There really isn't that much to it. Back in the day, before I had the USD, I had an old Macintosh Classic II, which I called my SMPTE to MIDI Droid. That's all it did. I had [Opcode] Vision on it, and a Studio III as a MIDI interface, and that's all I'd ever use it for, SMPTE to MIDI translation.

So it was sending out MIDI Beat Clock to the artist's sequencer?

Yeah, that was ten years ago. Now almost every device has MIDI Time Code. So now you don't have to worry about sending tempo, it's just, this is where the song starts. The other thing that's really important is to be fairly familiar with a lot of different sound modules, and how to assign individual outs on them. A lot of times the artist doesn't know how to do that, or how to switch their device to MIDI Time Code, and establish a start time for the song. But once you're able to do that, you're home free, and it's like any other kind of recording session.

So then you're just getting each sound to its own track.

Yeah, and you need to be able to do that pretty quickly. Things happen really fast in the rap world, which is one reason I like doing rap sessions so much.

So say someone comes in with their tracks, and you bump it all onto the 2". You listen to the drum sound and decide the kick drum hits are too wimpy. What are some things that you might do at that point?

Well, the great thing about being in sync is you can always re-track. Or you can layer in a second kick sound that has a tonal quality missing from the original track. You can sit and try to tweak the EQs until you're blue in the face, but if it's not the right tone to start off with, you can doctor it, make it prettier and lovelier, but nine times out of ten, it's not going to solve the issue at hand. So additive sounds or replacing sounds. If it's a Pro Tools session, there are some cool plug-ins that make that really easy, like Sound Replacer. But if your sync is good, there's no problem coming up with another sequence or another sound and just dropping it in. Certainly that's quicker than spending an hour on the EQ and getting only four percent better than what you had already.

And then from there, do you just do vocals next?

Or DJ cuts, yeah. In the case of the Coup, Boots [Riley, see Tape Op issue #35] does things a little differently than a lot of other cats that I work with. He'll bring in a song with pretty much all the parts arranged. Let's say a song is gonna need strings. He'll dial up some strings on a sound module, and we'll track that as a reference. But he replaces a lot of stuff, as the record progresses. He brings in live musicians. Like he'll start off with an organ patch, but that will ultimately become a musician on our B3.

He was telling me how he recorded the first song on that album in like the last three hours of mix time.

Yeah, we were taking shifts on mixing. Usually the way it works with Boots is he'll give me a couple hours to get a balance and a mixture up that I like. Then he'll come in and make corrections and change things around until it's all cool. We'll print it, then I'll go sleep for a few hours while he's cutting vocals or whatever. That's how the entire album went. I don't think either of us left for like four days. That made us really punch drunk at the end. I remember the manager coming in and almost being worried about our sanity at that point. [laughs] Both of us had our eyes glazed over. It was a lot of fun though.

What are some other sessions that you've done that you really liked?

Another one of my favorite producers is Jello Biafra. Mostly because of his style of production. He produces the way a film director directs a movie. Everything is very visual in his descriptions of what he's looking for from each song. One producer might say, "Put a quarter note delay on this sound," or, "Roll off the bottom end," or whatever. Jello is never that specific about anything. What he'll say is, "This song needs to sound like the Mongrel hoard galloping across the desert to fight the last battle of the apocalypse." Interesting, okay, let's get 'Mongrel hoard' dialed up, alright. Or another one was, "I want the guitars to swirl above a vocal emerging from a murky pool." And when you're working with a producer who's that visual, it's kinda cool, it leaves a lot more up to the imagination. Hmm, who else? Well, I always like working with Hieroglyphics. They're a very talented bunch of guys. There are four major producers in the crew, four bands, and as producers go they all accent each other very well. And it's ongoing with them, like every day there's a session across the hall. Right now for the Full Circle album I think there's like fifty songs to choose from, and we're still working on more.

Anything else you want to hit on before you go?

Yeah, one thing. My advice to people who are just starting off doing this is don't get pigeonholed into doing just one thing. That means don't just learn how to run Pro Tools. Learn the whole gamut, learn how to work in the analog domain too. The people who I know who do the best at this know how to do a lot of different kinds of things on a lot of different kinds of gear, and accommodate a whole variety of musical styles and musical people. One of the things I see right now are youngsters coming up who may be total Pro Tools experts, but you show them an LA-2A, or an EAR 600, and they are totally lost on the elements of analog compression. No clue how to calibrate a tape machine, no clue about bias in analog recording. No clue about microphone placement, or the different types of microphones, the different polar patterns. It's not enough to be good with your computer. You need to develop a wide range of techniques. And that's a great thing about being as assistant for a while. You get to work with a lot of different engineers and pick up on a lot of stuff that they do. They might approach a sound totally differently than you would, and that information and experience is invaluable if you want to do this for the long haul.