Electric Lady, the Soulquarians' three rooms

The first thing they did, walking in, was clean.

“We were literally blowing dust off of the Fender Rhodes that was in there,” engineer Russell Elevado remembers. “I was wiping dust off of the microphones.”

The studio was Electric Lady, at 52 West 8th Street in the Village: the one Jimi Hendrix had built for himself, and which in 1996 was not busy.

How they ended up there

The idea did not start with a booking but with two records pulled out of a collection.

Elevado was listening to music with D’Angelo, working up the album that would become Voodoo, when he found Music of My Mind and Talking Book and showed him that Stevie Wonder had made them there.

D’Angelo did not even know Electric Lady was still operating. Then came the line that settled it, reported by both men who were present: “It has the blessings of the spirits. We have to go there. It’s only right.”

The first sessions are from the end of 1996. From the beginning of 1997 Studio A is booked for the whole year.

There was no mixing. It was just straight jamming and recording for a whole year. We went through 200 reels of tape that year.

A year of recording without mixing is an economic decision before it is an aesthetic one: it means nobody was closing anything.

What happened between seven in the evening and five in the morning

The method, as Questlove tells it, starts in front of a television.

The break room had a TV and a VCR. He would come back from trips to Europe and Asia with bags stuffed with forty or fifty VHS tapes: Prince concerts, Soul Train episodes, Michael Jackson, Al Green, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye.

From seven to nine in the evening they watched those tapes at concert volume, often the same performance over and over. Around half past nine they went into the room.

There they would redo the concert they had just watched, for two hours. When a good eight bars turned up inside the jam, there was only one question left: how do you halve this energy so it fits on a record.

An hour, on average, to bring something from a hundred and twenty beats a minute down to eighty.

Listen while you read

Dooinit came out of a beat-making contest, and Questlove tells the story: he had handed J Dilla Rick James’s Street Songs thinking he would stump him, because it is a commercial funk record from 1981 with no drum breaks in it.

Dilla took the intro, chopped the bass and slowed the whole thing down. Common heard it and decided that track would be the second on his album.

The machines were the old ones

Electric Lady was chosen for its vintage equipment, and that dictated a way of playing.

The Fender Rhodes and the clavinet were the same ones Stevie Wonder had used on Talking Book. Questlove played a 1968 Ludwig kit, Pino Palladino played Precision basses from the 1950s.

The technical lesson came from Elevado on the first take of Playa Playa, when Questlove was stamping on the kick pedal as if to put a hole through it: the lighter you play, the better it sounds.

Questlove had built himself a cage inside the big room, with boards and sheets thrown over them. Bilal describes it like this: you could hardly see him in there, all you could hear were the drums.

Forty-eight tracks, and the tricks to fit everything in

The real constraint was not taste: it was the number of tracks available.

Elevado explains it without nostalgia: two twenty-four-track machines, forty-eight in all, and that was that. When more tracks were needed, you had to find room inside the song.

The way it worked: the tambourine is not playing in the choruses, so the guitar goes on that same track in that spot. Then at the mix you patch the same track more than once and automate the mutes, so each part only comes out when it should.

Pro Tools arrived at the very end of the Voodoo sessions, and Elevado hated it. Three songs went through it anyway, because they were live takes that had to be cut down, and on a couple of others they spliced the multitrack tape for real.

On The Root, he says, there were around forty vocal tracks. At the time that was a quantity nobody was seeing.

D’Angelo, who had recorded his own vocals on Brown Sugar, asked to do the same there. They showed him how to punch in on the tape machine and how to work the console, and he did it himself.

Three rooms in parallel, and the songs that changed hands

From 1998 the scale changes. James Poyser: for a while they were working in all three rooms at once.

To finish Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun against a deadline they held three rooms at Electric Lady plus one uptown at Sony: mixing in one, finishing vocals in another, keyboards and overdubs in the third.

On that album Questlove says he fell asleep at the end of a track while she was scatting: you can hear the drumstick fall on the floor and him waking up with a start. We hunted for it for twenty minutes and could not find it.

Songs moved between albums like borrowed objects. Chicken Grease, which is on Voodoo, was made for Common. Geto Heaven, which is on Common’s record, was made for Voodoo.

Questlove says he brokered the trade himself: you take that one, he keeps this one.

The name came later, and it ended the whole thing

The Soulquarians did not start as a group: they started as a coincidence of birthdays.

Questlove noticed it when Dilla said he was born on 7 February, D’Angelo on the 11th, Poyser in January like him. Six or seven of them were Aquarians.

The name ended up on the cover of Vibe, and that is where it broke. The piece had started as a profile of Questlove, who had asked the magazine to make it about the family instead of one person.

When the cover came out with that title, the phone calls started: it looks like I work for you, I am not an Aquarian, I am my own person.

“Literally, that’s when it all fell apart,” he says.

The group is together one last time on the set of Dave Chappelle’s Block Party. Questlove says it plainly: he knew that was their funeral, and that the next movement would not run through him.

What remains is the method, and it cannot be ordered on demand: a room booked for a year, nobody asking when it will be ready, and three rooms running at once.