Band:
Hometown:
Curated By:
Grant$
Brooklyn, NY
Pow Pow (Chris Powell)
Song: Punch Drunk
Length: 4:16
After an incredible year of Shaking Through, we think it is only fitting to finish 2012 with an episode that celebrates ingenuity, creativity, and laughter.
Episode Nine’s curator is our great friend and Weathervane supporter, Christopher Powell. He is plays the drums for Philadelphia’s Man Man, writes and performs in his own project under the name Spaceship Aloha, and you may remember him as a special guest musician alongside Sufjan Stevens in Cat Martino’s session earlier this year. He’s a genius artist and a downright delight to be around.
Chris suggested a great songwriter and visual artist / performer named Tim Fite. Tim, whose music has run the gamut of genres, shares one simple goal with Powell: to make art and to have fun doing it.
The two came together at Miner Street Recordings in Philadelphia to record "Punch Drunk" - a thumping hip-hop track, true to its own name. What none of us could have expected, however, was that by the time the day was finished, this Shaking Through recording session would give birth to a new project, a collaboration with a life of its own. That’s right - this final episode of 2012 captures not only the birth of a song... here we have the birth of whole new musical project called Grant$.
“The recording of Punch Drunk was about about curiosity, taking risks, while not taking oneself too seriously. It sounds like an easy task, but the stakes were high and both musicians were eager to achieve something immediately satisfying.”
“We want to make sure what we're doing is smart. What we're doing is art. What we're doing is hard... but at the same time, you know you get a laugh out of it.”
“Songs like Punch Drunk are often recorded in a bedroom. But that’s a cop-out for Shaking Through--we wanted something deeper and richer. Armed with Chris’ MPC-1000, our 2-inch tape machine, and a slew of wacky objects, we set about making the sounds that populate Punch Drunk as wild, creative and hi-fi as we could.”
Digital recording is digital recording, right? Well.... not exactly. One of the great epiphanies of the Grant$ recording session came from the fact that 90% of Punch Drunk was performed by Chris Powell via his Akai MPC1000. Almost every sound began the day as a 16 bit / 44.1 kHz audio file, which by today’s standards is very low quality, but despite that, Punch Drunk sounds huge. On a track by track basis, most audio found its way through an assortment of classy analog gear,
from tube and transformer loaded mic pres and compressors, to Miner Street’s Ampex MM1200 16 track 2 inch tape machine.
"What really makes this otherwise unceremonious digital recording so exceptional," says Weathervane founder Brian McTear, "is the live performance on two MP3 1000s, their combined 32 pads, and one of the coolest drummers in indie rock. Chris’s swing is captured from numerous angles, as he’d playfully trigger elements with his fingers,
with drum sticks .. he and Tim even rigged a pair of sparring gloves to trigger samples.” Long story short: in the song Punch Drunk, rarely were sounds cut and pasted into the timeline of the song on a computer screen. They were performed by Chris Powell and Tim Fite - two stellar musicians having a ton of fun!
Chris and Tim, along with Shaking Through producers Peter English and Brian McTear put a great deal of forethought into the list of items that could be punched, popped or squashed in front of a high quality microphone for maximum impact within the song. Bones breaking? … that’s celery, silly! But it could also be a mouthfull of potato chips or an unopened bag of tortilla chips being punched by a giant red boxing glove. No option was left unpulverized, and for the most part all were captured with a Telefunken Ela M260 small diaphragm tube condenser, a Neumann KM 184, or a Shure KSM 32 (in a plastic baggy).
Another fun discovery came when we realized how much a snare really “pops” when a balloon is popped against the head, mic’d as it would be in a full kit: a large diaphragm mic on top, and a phase-flipped small diaphragm mic positioned 90 degrees to the top mic.
“The two days it took to record Punch Drunk were full of laughter, which might suggest that neither Tim, nor Chris were all that serious about the outcome of session. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. The two are total professionals. Perhaps a part of their secret is "fun".”
Director
J. DeVirgilis
Executive Producer
Andy Williams
Producers
Brian McTear
Peter English
Christopher Powell
Engineers
Jonathan Low
Band
Tim Fite
Christopher Powell
Director of Photography
Phil Bradshaw
Camera Operators
Larry DeMark
Peter English
Editors
Nicole Vergala
David Millstein
Audio
Joe Bisirri
Still Photography
Peter English
Larry DeMark
