Article Preview - Producing Belle & Sebastian, The Fratellis & The Kooks

A producer from the US who's doing very nicely in the UK, Tony Hoffer has been responsible for some of the most successful indie-rock albums of recent years.

Tom Doyle

Operating out of Los Angeles, Tony Hoffer is unusual for a US producer, in that he's built a reputation for working mostly with British bands. His extensive CV lists many of the key UK guitar groups of the past 10 years, including Supergrass, Belle & Sebastian, the Fratellis and the Kooks.

Ironically, then, Hoffer's initial break came not through a Britpop connection but through Beck, figurehead of the US alternative music scene in the '90s, who would regularly open for the future producer's college rock band This Great Religion in his early days. Some years after Beck had poached the group's bassist, Justin Meldel Johnsen, for his touring band, the connection was re-established, resulting in Hoffer becoming live guitarist for the Odelay tour.

"Justin told Beck 'Tony's coming down to LA a lot, he's got some skills, maybe you should hook up with him and see what happens,'" Hoffer recalls. "So I came down to do some recording with him but I ended up also getting the gig playing guitar. I loved touring but I definitely enjoy the studio a lot more."

Hoffer cut his teeth as an engineer in the early '90s at a studio in San Francisco called Earwax, a pioneering digital facility where he first got his hands on Sound Tools, the two-track editing precursor to Pro Tools. "Digital stereo editing was a really big deal," he remembers. "You could rearrange songs and it was like 'Wow.' At the time there were other analogue studios around in San Francisco, but Earwax were trying to be a little more cutting-edge. Eventually they ended up with the [Digidesign] 442 four-track stuff, which was even more pioneering, and things kind of moved over to that."

Coming up in the period where analogue gave way to affordable digital, Hoffer schooled himself in both. "I would compose various things using guitars, samplers, keyboards, outboard processing like really cool delays," he says. "But I think I was probably a bit more into programming and when I started there was a lot of that available, work-wise."

Beck & Call

Tony Hoffer is equally flexible in terms of the projects he takes on, a characteristic he credits to his studio work with Beck. "He's a solo artist, so you'll either be working with him or there might be some musicians. You might be tracking a full band live or you might be working with him building something up based on samples. It can be anything and everything. That's the great thing about working with him — you never know what to expect, and that definitely brings the best out in me."

His first Beck album was 1999's soul-funk set Midnite Vultures, primarily a sample collage album. "It was a lot of programming and sampling and then manipulating the samples. Little tiny bits. Extracting one little bass note of one sample and that'll be the first note of a two-bar thing and then you go find another note from another sample. And so on. And you get this crazy collage of, y'know, really cool textural aural delight. That's what Midnite Vultures was all about — crazy sonics and parts. The songs that I did with him on Guero [in 2005], he played all the instruments himself and that was a bit more organic."

So can Beck be something of a perfectionist?

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