MiMa's cover of Plok's soundtrack theme "Akrillic" (from Tim and Geoff Follin) скачать в хорошем качестве

MiMa's cover of Plok's soundtrack theme "Akrillic" (from Tim and Geoff Follin)

DEDICATED TO GEOFF FOLLIN. R.I.P. MAESTRO. I'm into Tim and Geoff's Follin music since about 20 years. They're in my top-3 favourite chiptune/video game sound track composers and their music always meant a lot to me. It's always in my mind, and often in my MP3 player when I go out for walks. I can say that I'm literally obsessed with their work :-) I'm also heavily into progressive rock and (of course) electronic music from the 70ies/80ies, no wonder why I'm so interested in Tim brothers' stuff as they're notoriously into progressive rock too, especially Tim. And that's quite evident in almost all of their music. It's been quite a lot of time since I wanted to do a video of at least one of their tunes. Knowing (quite late) that Tim's brother Geoff sadly passed away in may 2024 made me pull the trigger for this project, for which I chose to cover one of my two favourite songs from the soundtrack of the semi-obscure SNES video game Plok, that is "Akrillic" ("Beach/A line in the sand" is my other favourite one, that perhaps I'm goig to cover too in the future). Akrillic is one of the most, if not THE most progressive rock-like tune of the whole Plok's soundtrack. Even the track's title itself, named after the Plok's world, feels very progressive-y. As my usual I decided to stick to the original arrangement for my cover, while taking some inspiration from famous progressive rock and electronic music stuff from the 70ies/early 80ies for the design of certain sounds. You're going to hear a hint of Rush's Tom Sawyer resonance sweeps for which I put my Oberheim OB-8 to good use (sounds that by the way are not in the original), Emerson Lake and Palmer's style synth solo and Hammond parts and Jean Michel Jarre-like psychedelic synth string pads. For the drum track I decided to reuse the one from the original song because I didn't want to rewrite it from scratch, as I find laying down drum tracks downright boring and there are so many small details in Akrillic's one that I would've spent an entire week just for this task. So I exported the drum track from the original SNES song file in two versions, one with interpolation and one without, and I used the first for the sound's body and the aliasing that's in the second one to enhance the highs. With some EQ, compression and dedicated reverb for the highs-enhancing version to blur out a bit the loops in the cymbal, crash and hi-hat samples, I made it a bit more lively and realistic than how it sounds in the original Super Nintendo track. Like my last videos, for this one I too recorded all the parts playing them one by one by hand (no sequencing) to build the whole song, then I filmed myself playing the various parts over it as if I would be playing live. And I can tell you that this song is the one that most of all that are on my channel that really challenged my not-so-great keyboard skills, especially the Hammond part in the song's first half, for which I had to exercise for about two weeks and do dozens of takes before having something acceptable enough to be put in the video (I'm used to do bass lines with my left hand, not chords, and that can be definitely seen). All that work just for that part, then there were all the other ones some of which were easy, and some others not. So the final result it's not perfect, if you look and listen closely you can definitely spot some slight errors and differences between what you see and what you hear. I pushed myself the most I could, fighting against my attention disorder and anxiety (when the camera is on I always get anxious) to the extend of having headaches, and that's the maximum I can do. But I think that overall the result is there. As usual, comments and constructive criticism are welcome. I hope you like it :-) Here you can download the audio file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p94842v4ljf...