I Think Of You
Posted: 12 Feb 2017, 11:45Recently Terry from South Yorks Shadows Club asked me if I thought this would work as an instrumental. I replied that I was doubtful, but would give it a go; I already had a backing track.
This was because in the late 80's I got really fed up with playing in bands and decided to have a try at gigging solo. So I disappeared into my home studio and recorded dozens of backing tracks. Unfortunately, this was the era of cassette tapes, with all their attendant problems - the worst being pitch. No two of the tracks seemed to be at the same pitch. For a karaoke singer this wouldn't have mattered, but I was using my guitar for every song, and a tape that was off-key would make the guitar sound out of tune.
I gave up eventually, but kept some of the backing tracks, of which this was one.
From the original 1986 recording I used only the bass, drums and rhythm guitars. Deciding that the song didn’t have much of a melody, I beefed it up by adding some harmony guitars (which copied my original vocal harmonies) and for a bit more variety, gave it a new introduction, so that I wouldn’t have to play it. I used the ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ flutes – well it wouldn’t be one of my recordings without a bit of Mellotron on it somewhere!
So does it work? Well you can make up your own minds on that. I’ll be playing it later at Shadows Club, so will probably get lots of opinions (mostly polite I hope!).
This was because in the late 80's I got really fed up with playing in bands and decided to have a try at gigging solo. So I disappeared into my home studio and recorded dozens of backing tracks. Unfortunately, this was the era of cassette tapes, with all their attendant problems - the worst being pitch. No two of the tracks seemed to be at the same pitch. For a karaoke singer this wouldn't have mattered, but I was using my guitar for every song, and a tape that was off-key would make the guitar sound out of tune.
I gave up eventually, but kept some of the backing tracks, of which this was one.
From the original 1986 recording I used only the bass, drums and rhythm guitars. Deciding that the song didn’t have much of a melody, I beefed it up by adding some harmony guitars (which copied my original vocal harmonies) and for a bit more variety, gave it a new introduction, so that I wouldn’t have to play it. I used the ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ flutes – well it wouldn’t be one of my recordings without a bit of Mellotron on it somewhere!
So does it work? Well you can make up your own minds on that. I’ll be playing it later at Shadows Club, so will probably get lots of opinions (mostly polite I hope!).