There is a theory about doing covers I have that if the original song is too good or too classic that it doesn’t warrant making your own version. For example, it wouldn’t make sense for anyone to cover “These Arms Of Mine” by Otis Redding, because you’d always compare their vocal performance to the original. Or doing a cover of “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin, because the drums are so incredible on the original album version.
I’ve always been scared to do a Radiohead cover, because they’re one of my favorite bands and because their records sound so amazing. Everyone in the band creates such nuanced parts that together their arrangements always seem full and right. On top of that, they work exhaustively in the recording studio to get great performances and sounds.
But with this weeks’ song “Videotape” the original version is very sparse: mostly piano, vocal, bass, and some percussion whirling around in effects. There’s a lot of room in the arrangement to mess around with other ideas. So I thought “what the hell” and took a crack at it. I feel like I could have spent a lot more time with it, but my friend Abraham said about his own blog that part of the process is to put it up when the times comes for another post. Whether it’s “done” or not, the time has come to post it.
I don’t have a piano so I sampled a rhodes using a casio and played the piano part that way. I also doubled it on guitar and came up with an extended variation on the original part for acoustic guitar. The bass is pretty much just like the original and the vocal too, with a couple of new background parts. I also used the casio for a new melody on the coda.
This post also marks the debut of my new MPC1000 sampler/drum programmer. I’ve been wanting one for a long, long time and now I have one. I know I’m not the first to own one, or to say anything about them, but…it is so sweet. I’m going to have lots of fun with it. Until my fingers bleed and my eyeballs fall out.
Best,
Peter – ACA
My man! The MPC sounds great — I am way excited to hear what you end up doing with it. Furthermore, not to sound like an old fogey, but I’m excited that I can finally understand the lyrics to this song… your rendition has a lot more consonants than that of ol’ Thom the Mush-Mouth. Nice one.
Dude! Good job on this one. I like how you used the MPC. It added a new layer to the song, perhaps moving it away from the bleeding heart/teary eyed reaction the more somber original always arouses in me. I think you should next try an acoustic version of Ideoteque.