This is one of a series of songs recorded live (and low-tech!) during Thomas Dolby's Spring 2012 Time Capsule Tour.
Comments from Thomas Dolby (vocals, keyboards):
I start this with a loop I made years ago with a Roland JP8. It always reminds me of the Masai Mara in Kenya. I add a bass, which gets looped into Logic, and then a marimba pattern. The choruses are played on a Logic ES2 through a plugin called Camelspace, which 'gates' the chords-basically, it opens and closes them in time to the tempo of the song, so all I have to do is hold down the chord and they play a repeating rhythm.
In the bridge I trigger samples of Martin Luther King, somewhat slowed and truncated. You've heard this speech a thousand times before, but it's still pretty evocative.
Comments from Kevin Armstrong (guitar):
I love this tune. At 1:29 I have to play those little highlife African riffs that were really influenced by listening to Fela Kuti, The Bhundu Bays and Thomas Mapfumo. I have to sing a bass counter melody at the same time and this is extraordinarily hard to do. It's like splitting your brain in half. My hands are trying to dance over those figures in C# high up on the guitar and I'm trying to sing those low notes in tune slow and steady. I'm still working on it and I must have done it a thousand times.
Comments from Mat Hector (drums):
What a beautiful tune. I love this track. It's a joy to just sit on the groove and listen; as the drummer I have the best seat in the house. For drums this track is all about creating the drum machine vibe, specifically the 808 drum machine which was used on the original recording. As you can see from the video I'm triggering 808 samples from my 2box drum brain via the Roland spd-30 sample pad (that's the thing I'm hitting!) so it's the actual drum sounds from the original track that you're hearing. For me it's all about locking with the sequence bass and playing as consistently as possible, trying to replicate the machine like groove of the drum machine.
The two notable points for me on this tune is firstly the use of something that can be considered corny sometimes - the bell tree. At 3:48, as the Martin Luther king sample talks about the daybreak, I trigger a bell tree sample - on this occasion perfect and apt. The second point of interest is as the song nears the end you'll notice me starting to embellish the groove with the side stick sample - this is to give the groove and song a little more movement in line with the sequenced bass (being careful to do this in between the vocal rather than over it) - building to the gentle crescendo as the groove drops out and the song ends.
2 авг 2012
