Stayin’ Alive – It’s not just for disco anymore

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Stayin’ Alive – It’s not just for disco anymore

I’m a member of a group of musicians that are working to get better at mixing and mastering. And we’ve started doing some cover projects. I’m not big on doing covers – licensing is a mess and I’d rather spend time composing than dealing with legal stuff.

The latest project is Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees. And I heard in my head something more sinistar. I started by entering the lyrics into the Songman Vocaloid. And then I figured it needed bass, so I went looking. I tried my fav basses from ModoBass and Ample Sound and that didn’t do it. So I switched to a MiniMoog plugin and settled on a modified Taurus sound, which I eventually copied to two more tracks so I could put the deep bass up the middle and the upper frequencies panned hard left/right with a slight delay on one side – this causes a psychological effect of widening and fattening the sound. Next up was drums – an electronic kit from ToonTrack. Then came the organ stabs – a combo organ (my first keyboard, after the organ we built at home, was a Yamaha combo organ) to keep it simple and pure. And finally, vocoded CS-80 to create the very strange apparently shifted backing vocals to the chorus.

And it took 2 days. I’m pretty pleased with the results, every time I listen I smile, I got pretty much what I wanted.

Revisions:

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