THE ODD COUPLE
Aug 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Kylee Swenson
About the only thing the two members of Fingathing had in common when they first met was that they were both from Manchester, England. Peter Parker was a hip-hop head, battle DJ and former DMC World Champion runner-up (taking second place in 1997 to DJ Noize). Meanwhile, Sneaky was a classically trained stand-up bassist with a bachelor's in music and a love for jazz. “Opposites attract, don't they?” asks Parker. “The best thing I've gotten out of life so far is meeting people who are completely different from me.”
The two were thrown together when they were hired to play in Rae & Christian's live crew. That first day, while the rest of the Rae & Christian band was on a coffee break, Sneaky and Parker started messing around with bass lines and beats. Sneaky's bass playing inspired Parker to take a different approach to scratching. “Instead of just wanting to scratch over it or drop a beat over it, I wanted to cut the beat and actually do something on one turntable,” Parker says. “I'd scratch a kick drum, a snare and a hi-hat all at the same time, leaving space and then tracking back in different sort of patterns to make different drum rhythms.”
The duo recently released their second album, Superhero Music (Grand Central, 2002). With its tight scratching and corny vocal snippets from superhero flicks, it at times bears a striking resemblance to three-time DMC champion DJ QBert's Wave Twisters (Galactic Butt Hair, 1999) album.
Sneaky and Parker recorded their demos for Superhero Music in adjacent studios with PC recording setups using M-Audio Delta 44 sound cards. Sneaky also uses Cakewalk Professional sequencing software, a turntable for sampling and an Audio-Technica mic. “I mainly use that for miking the cello,” says Sneaky. “I record the bass straight through the sound card.”
Meanwhile, Parker records with Steinberg Cubase software, a Behringer desk, an Akai MPC60 sampler, two Technics SL-1210s and a Vestax PMC-06Pro mixer. “We'll link up the computers on a network so we can swap files,” says Sneaky. “I think we work quite well apart, and then we get together at some point in the middle and make something from the individual parts. I'll work on arranging, creating bass lines, strings and melodic parts. And Peter concentrates more on the beats. While we're working out things structurally, I can send Peter whole WAVs of a tune that he can open in Cubase.”
For one of the duo's more live-sounding songs, “Scrap,” Fingathing used a Manchester club's P.A. system as a recording element. “We recorded the drum parts that Peter scratched, played that through a P.A. system and miked up the room in stereo with a pair of Shure SM58 mics,” Sneaky recalls. “It gives it a bigger feel — you get the sound of the air moving in the room.”
But one of Fingathing's main recording sources is Canadian folk music. “My girlfriend's stepdad was a massive folk fan,” Parker says. “For some reason, he bought all of his folk in Canada, and those records got passed on to me when he died.”
The influence can be heard on “Ogre” from Superhero Music. Parker sampled a harpsichord loop from one of the records, sped it up to 156 bpm, layered some drum samples from the records and added hip-hop vocal samples and horror B-movie speech. Sneaky and Parker then played bass and scratched live over the top. The result is miles from the original hand-me-down inspirations: “I was putting on this crazy Canadian folk stuff that I just liked. People were like, ‘Ehhh, what are you listening to?’ But I was really digging it!”
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