Here’s an unlikely live cover performance of Sunset (Bird of Prey), originally released by @FatboySlim in 2000 (!). Everything was played/triggered by hand using hardware - no sync, no MIDI, no sequencers. Expand for more details.
From left to right, gear list and musicians were:
Sequential Six-trak - França Guimaraes - Resonant pad
Roland Sp-404 - Guillermo Caceres - Drum loops, FX & voice samples
Korg Microkorg - João Marcos - Morphing hi-hat thing, Arp synth
Yamaha An1x - George Frederick - Bass synth
Roland Jx-10 - Raul Guimaraes - Chorus pad
This year 2020 marks the 20th anniversary of @FatboySlim's "Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars", and Bird of Prey has since become a fan-favourite among his catalogue. At some point, I thought: “How challenging would it be to perform it live, instead of DJ'ing it from a record?” This is what we once again sought out to investigate…
For the drums on the Roland Sp-404, we reconstructed the same breakbeat drumloop using the original source, James Brown's 1969 track "Soul Pride (Pts. 1 & 2)". However, breakbeat has got its own tricks. In order to get to the same "punch" of the recording, I had to recreate the loop using layered audio excerpts taken from different parts of the drum solo in Soul Pride, choosing the right combination among little fills, hits, swings and snare rolls and panning them left and right. Oh, and there’s also a thumping 909 kick strategically tuned for the low end.
The voice samples follow a similar approach, taken from Jim Morrison singing the poem Bird of Prey, originally recorded in 1970 but later available on CD in "An American Prayer". That recording has several repetitions of the same verses to choose from, and some tweaking was required to set the right speed, EQ and delay for each phrase, but nothing serious. Some of you will notice that we included the verse "Am I going to die?", which was not originally present in Fatboy Slim's single version.
The rest of the samples are little fills and effects, like the 909 drum roll and larger-than-life cymbals. That distorted voice loop during the break is the only thing we took from the Fatboy Slim recording - we tried to recreate that, but nothing came close.
The Sequential Sixtrak and the Roland Jx10 share synth pad duties: the Sixtrak makes the rising resonance pad, while the Jx10 makes a chorused pad. Unfortunately, their audio recording was heavily distorted, so I only had the audios from the cameras, which are also distorted, but at least bearable.
The Microkorg plays two patches, depending on the part. One is the hi-hat "thing" that adds a moving effect to the main drumloop, mimicking a similar effect found on the original, but which is hard to hear because of the live recording. The other is a repeating synth that is tweaked during the build-ups. They get slightly out of sync… but that’s life.
The Yamaha An1x has the bass playing in sixteenth notes uninterruptedly, which was a tour de force for Fred. The original recording featured a heavily sequenced 303-style bass which wasn’t working at all during rehearsals. We chose instead a harder, fatter, better & stronger timbre to get more definition for the low end when playing live.
Attentive viewers will right away notice that this is the exact same gig where we recorded our (now popular) Streets of Rage video. In fact, Bird of Prey was the track we played right after Streets of Rage. Initially, I didn't want to release this one in the hope that we would get a better recording later, but we’ve never performed this track again ever since, so it made more sense to edit a video as it was instead of leaving it to be forgotten in some HD vault. I hope you’ll all enjoy.
The laptop you see onstage is just mirroring the video projection for us to get the visual cues.
Please forgive the shaking cameras, uneven lighting, grainy video and saturated audio, we did this for fun.
#LiveSynthCover #BirdOfPrey #Synt5
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