Éliézer Oubda: Work With Whatever You Have

When my colleague, professor Amandine Pras of The University of York, visited Mali to study the regional recording studio industry, she was shocked to hear the same person’s name come up again and again as the individual who’d helped many other engineers. That name was Éliézer Oubda. Born in 1981 in the country of Burkina Faso, Oubda went to visit neighboring Mali just after the turn of the century, and ended up staying there for over a decade after stumbling into music as a keyboardist for Amadou & Mariam’s band, and later becoming a recording engineer and studio owner. Oubda has also worked as the front of house live engineer for such African music stars as Toumani Diabaté, Oumou Sangaré, Vieux Farka Touré, and Salif Keïta. Today, Oubda is back in Burkina Faso, running his Hope Musiks Studio in the capital city of Ouagadougou, as well as continuing to mentor engineers throughout the continent of Africa.

You were a musician. What did you play?

I used to play keyboard for fun and to learn, but I ended up playing in Amadou & Mariam’s band for two years.

You were born in Burkina Faso, and then you went to Mali?

Yes, I went to school very young. At 17, I got my first university degree in medicine, but I was not comfortable with medicine because I couldn’t handle the sight of blood. Next, I studied geology. I went to Mali for a month to explore the country, and then one month became ten years. [laughter] I stayed and started a small studio with just an old [Creative Labs] Sound Blaster sound card, one keyboard, and a microphone. But it was hard for me in Bamako [the capital of Mali], because in Bamako most of musicians play the Mandingue scale.*

That is interesting since the tritone was called the Devil’s tone in European music, and it was thought that it suggested “evil,” yet it’s central to the Malian scale.

Yes, but because I'm not from Mali, I was not comfortable with that scale. There is still a lot I don’t understand, since they flatten a lot of the notes. That’s why I liked playing with Amadou & Mariam, since most of what they do is a pentatonic five-note scale. It was very fun to discover their music, because from outside sometimes it can seem like everything is the same groove. But they actually have small changes, and once you understand that, it alters your whole way of listening.

What was that one microphone that you had at your first studio in Mali?

It was a Behringer B-2 PRO. It was the least expensive one, but for me – when I started – the cost of it was still six months of income. After each session I would take the microphone home to where I slept because it was the most expensive thing I owned.

You took your monitor speakers off of a boombox.

Yes. I didn’t have the money for anything other than those, so I had to get creative.

In 2022, you and I were supposed to be on a panel together at the AES Conference in New York, but sadly both you and Tupaï N’Gouin-Claigh [Ivory Coast] were denied visas, so Professor Pras and I were left to conduct the panel on recording in Africa and how often local recording engineers and studios were invisibilized. Your forced absence at the conference spoke volumes about the systemic challenges faced.

Yes, it is very hard for musicians from Africa to travel outside of Africa due to visa restrictions. Because of this, Amadou & Mariam actually had two bands – one for touring Europe that was based there and another for local touring. The local musicians are better for playing around Africa, because we don't need visas to travel between many of the neighboring countries. So, I played in Amadou & Mariam’s local band.

How did you end up aiding so many other recording engineers locally?

I did one record with a local singer, and the producer said, “You will do all of the recording at your studio, but we will take it to Studio Bogolan for mixing.” Studio Bogolan was co-owned by Ali Farka Touré, and people like Damon Albarn [Blur], Björk, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Youssou N’Dour had recorded there. I went to Studio Bogolan to try to talk with the mix engineer. He was a white French guy who co-owned the studio, Yves Wernert. I told him that I was working on the recording, and how did he want me to export the files for him. Yves was very happy, because he said that he had been working in Mali for a long time, and that this was the first time a technician had ever come to ask how the work should be delivered and finished. He asked me if I wanted to come there and see how he mixed. I was excited, because since the beginning I’d only discovered ways of working by doing it myself. We became friends, and when he came...