Nice mellow groove, channelling some Floyd...  Well done!

Getaway

Falling Uphill

These Exiled Years

SA Rockstar Entry.  The challenge: "Pick a song that makes you feel intensely, whether it's joy or sadness or excitement or dread. Something that sparks emotion in you, a song that sticks with you after you hear it, even if you've heard it a hundred times."

The challenge was tricky for me. A song that makes you feel intensely is a treasure. More often than not, I consider such tracks to be perfect on their own. Trying to cover a song of emotional value feels like a dirty thing to do, so I combed through the songs that have made me feel intensely in one way or another in my life until I found one that felt okay to take a shot at. I chose 1979, a song I was first exposed to at a very young age and one of the first songs I ever attached myself to. I didn't quite understand the lyrics, but somehow listening to the song made me feel free in a way that nothing else did at that age. As everyone else grew sick of hearing it over and over again, it never got old to me. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was the first album I ever owned and it is one of many things that inspired me to start learning how to play guitar and eventually write music. 

The usual stuff: 1979 was written by Billy Corgan and was featured on The Smashing Pumpkins' 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The original track is in Eb major. The cover was moved down 1/2 step to D major to make it easier to play.  Those vocal jumps are going to sound creaky no matter what key I sing it in.

Not much in terms of composition notes: I decided to do this yesterday and started it today about two and a half hours ago. As I was recording this, it was supposed to be a demo/skeleton track with some piano and vocals to cement the structure. Nothing fancy. Just a straight forward comping track and vocals with some harmonies for color. Once I'd laid everything down, I listened back to it and liked it a lot the way it was. I felt that adding a bunch of strings and bass and percussion would bury the sincerity under layers of shallow superficialities, so I decided to keep it simple. 

Not much for production notes either: A bit of polish was applied to the vocals. The piano just has some slight dips so the vocals sit a little better. Everything is running through a send verb. Vox are running through an additional plate verb. The reverb is a bit heavy. I like a creamy verb. I have until the 10th to tweak this up. If I take time to go back to it, I'll probably do some slight edits to the vocal tracks to take out miscellaneous noise and I'll probably tweak up the verbs a little to see how much clarity I can get while still getting a big, sad, empty room sound.

This is what I did tonight instead of going to the gym. Enjoy.

1979 (Smashing Pumpkins Cover)

Ambient synth stuff. 7 measure cycle, melodies between melodies, thirds on halves, built off a C major using a CS-80 patch I programmed wrong.  Soothing sounds and unsteady rhythms, order and chaos, beauty and asymmetry, lobbing crippling globs of oxytocin into your pituitary.

Neurophysins

Plush - Stone Temple Pilots

A Vocals/Guitar/Bass cover of Alice In Chains' "Them Bones" by me! 
Recorded with Ableton, Guitar Rig 5 and lots of mic shit. Using the ripped drums from the actual song :)

I do not own the copyright to this song and I am not using this for any commercial profit. 
NOW GIVE ME MONEY.

Just kidding. 

Alice In Chains - Them Bones (Mitchel Emms Cover)

SummerRain 105BPM

Here's our version of Down in a hole by Alice in Chains 

SummerRain 105BPM

ClusterSnarf

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