Rabbit In Your Headlights - UNKLE (Piano Cover) скачать в хорошем качестве

Rabbit In Your Headlights - UNKLE (Piano Cover)

For those of you keeping up, since giving away the old piano, I’d assumed I would now be working my way through my already recorded videos to fill the gap between pianos (hoping I don’t have to wait too long for the next one), and that is still very much the plan. But it turns out the internet (and in particular one @deepfamiliar3416 - thank you!) threw me a little extra challenge as if having moved to Scotland over Christmas wasn’t enough. I just couldn’t resist rising to the challenge of this request. So here we are... Rabbit In Your Headlights by UNKLE featuring Thom Yorke…. (but performed by me instead). Background. Psyence Fiction was an incredibly formative album for me at a time when I was just starting to venture beyond a fairly pop centred comfort zone. It was my introduction to DJ Shadow (I went back and listened to Endtroducing and Pre-Emptive Strike from here), and to hip-hop generally. Rabbit In Your Headlights was (among one or two others) a standout track for me for a number of reasons. Thom Yorke’s writing at its bleakest and best along with his stunning vocal performance, some interesting rhythmic shifts and juicy polymeter, great drum part, atmosphere in spades and of course that dark, Satie-esque piano motif which I am a total sucker for. It’s pretty much perfect as far as I’m concerned. If you know the track (and you really should) you’ll know I omitted the ‘if you’re frightened of dying’ bit, where the piano layers get a bit too funky to keep a track of with only the two hands available. I did try it, but might still be here next year trying to nail that). I love singing this, and the piano part (which I hope I got largely correct) is a fun one to play for its ominous broken chord intro and latter block-chord bashing). For the first time I have my keyboard right in front of my iMac so I thought I might as well grab a video stream from there as well as the side. So you can see my face contort as I strain to reach that epic but rather exhausting climax! From the main video you’ll deduce that I am a) putting on weight, b) yet to improve my posture and c) reading the lyrics off t’internet! I decided fairly late on to try adding the bass and then the cymbals / beats. It can be a rabbit-hole (pardon the pun) when you start adding instruments as it then feels like an exercise in trying to get it to sound exactly like the original, which I hadn’t intended. Despite having listened to this track probably thousand of times over the years, I didn’t listen during the production of this whatsoever, to avoid the temptation to constantly A-B compare my efforts with the original. Also, adding the drums last to a track that was not already recorded to a click-track is generally a fools errand in my experience, and it shows here in a couple of places. Ah well. Technical details… in the absence of a real acoustic piano, I’m using a Novation 88 note synth action MIDI controller to trigger Native Instruments’ Upright Piano. I admit to removing one or two stray MIDI notes which I put down to being forced onto a different keybed than my old trusty (and perhaps slightly more forgiving) joanna. But nothing’s been quantised or ‘tightened’ in terms of timing. The vocal is recorded with a Shure SM58 through my brilliant Focusrite Clarett interface (which did I mention I won in a competition?!) Again, the vocal is processed with standard things like EQ, compression and distortion, plus some reverb and delay which I automated a little after the event, but there is no autotune or other such pitch-based smoke and mirrors. Neither is there any wider editing going on… this was the take 2 of 3 and a bit attempts. What can I say?! I peaked early! Bass is my cheap Aria, bought from a long gone shop in Cambridge that appeared to sell musical instruments and guns. The drum part is an MPC mini keys triggering NI Drum Lab. Also in the mix to various extents is the audio captured from the various cameras, which add back in some of the room sound lost when not using an acoustic instrument. Anyway… enjoy!