I've wanted to do a Kanye/Mike Dean guitar cover for a while. These two dudes did a lot for my appreciation of music production, so it made sense to start here. It's kinda funny, I know basically nothing about the one guy and way too much about the other. 

This isn't my favorite Kanye track, but the guitar parts always stood out to me. I also truly did not realize how extra this song was until I attempted to duplicate it. There's strings, piano, a vocal sample, etc. all playing a role. I liked putting this together because I got to hear those extras stripped out. Listening to just the guitar/bass/drums gives it a new sound and that was a cool surprise. 

Here's a quick breakdown of the elements in this:

Bass: this is the bedrock of the whole thing. Every other piece is just falling in line. Such a cool and fun line, too. That build up part at the end! Listening to it on repeat made me notice a kinda spy movie vibe in it.  

Drums: I use a pretty rudimentary GarageBand drum track and it was hard to make this true to the original. I tried my best. It's actually two drum tracks layered over each other. One is only hi-hat and the other has the snare and a few fills. 

Rhythm Guitar: just a couple clean chords supporting the bass line, but my favorite is the short stabs that come in under the guitar solo. Any time you can use a wah pedal/effect, it's worth doing.  

Lead Guitar: there's a guitar line that follows the bass to a tee, and then you've got the solo that comes in later on. It's not especially complex, but it took me a long time to get to a place where I was happy with it. Nailing the timing on some of those bends was tricky for some reason. But once I found the groove, it was very fun to play something so grandiose. I added a little echo and reverb effect to make it pop a bit, too.  

That's it, that's the first one! I hope you enjoyed it. Gonna link to the original below, should you feel so inclined. Put your hands to the constellations.

https://open.spotify.com/track/1UGD3lW3tDmgZfAVDh6w7r

Devil In A New Dress (Kanye West cover)

Working on guitar covers for 2022. Doing some writing in the descriptions.

Devil In A New Dress (Kanye West cover)

Dan Jams