MSTmusic

Click here to listen to my cover of Dark Tranquillity’s “Hours Passed in Exile”

This is a full cover of “Hours Passed in Exile” from Dark Tranquillity’s Damage Done album.  Damage Done came out in 2002, so this cover takes this blog into the ’00’s.  I think this is probably my favorite song from the album.

This song has been a journey for me.  When I started learning it 2 to 3 months ago, I couldn’t play it–it was just too fast.  After practicing a lot I gained enough speed that I was able to play it semi-comfortably, and I started the recording process about a month ago.  Recording took a while because, at the beginning at least, the song was still fast enough that it was hard for me to play through without mistakes.  Some parts are still a little sloppier than I would like, but I am declaring it done anyway.  This is it!  I’m pretty happy with the result.

Thanks for listening, and comments appreciated!

Details: The process for this recording was substantially more complicated than for my previous ones–probably because I’m getting more perfectionistic as I gain more experience.  Once again I used the Line 6 POD for the guitars and Logic as my recording software.  To replicate the sound of the original song, I tuned my guitar down 1.5 steps to C# for this recording.  This was my first use of EZdrummer, which is a nice piece of software for generating drum tracks.  The drums sound quite a bit better than those in my Opeth cover, if I do say so myself.  I could have tweaked the timings and velocities endlessly to get the drums to sound even more lifelike, but I decided I have more important things to do.

I spent a while adjusting the EQ for the various tracks to get everything to mix together well.  The drums are quite a bit thicker-sounding than when I started, and the guitars are more defined than they were originally.  The piano and the cheesy synths that play during the interlude were done using software instruments that come with Logic.  I used stereo delay to cool effect during the “interlude” to get the clean guitar to sound more interesting.

One more thing: this song has a solo near the end, but I didn’t bother to learn it.  Maybe I will do that at some point, but for now I really want to move on to something new!  I left out the noisy intro as well because I don’t know how to recreate that sort of thing at the moment.

Check out the original version of the song on last.fm here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.