Randy’s Musings on Nile Song and Coming Around

On the Nile Song, originally by Pink Floyd:

Long, long ago in my late adolescence, my first band covered The Nile Song (along with Karl Q. and Brian E.). Andrew C. put it on his playlist with the hope that I would do something with it. I had to, because I already knew the song (it’s easy), and to honor Andrew’s longstanding friendship. 

Considered to be the heaviest song in the Pink Floyd catalog, I kept it as a big guitar rock song.

I came across a set of walkie-talkies that were a wedding gift from my brother and was delighted to find that they had input and output jacks. Always up for a convoluted recording process -- I sang the vocals over the broadcasting walkie-talkies. Anyone who happened to be listening to FRS channel 9 that night had a nice little private performance treat. 

I used Reaper and Audacity for recording and editing, drums on the Elektron Digitakt, guitar and bass through the Zoom MS-70 CDR and the DSI Evolver, a single synth part from the Korg Poly-61 and the outro thing was made on the Digitakt. 

Regarding my version of Carly Simon’s Coming Around:

I was really unsure if I wanted to do this one or not, but I listened to it so much and internalized and obsessed over it so much that I passed a point of no return with it. So it goes with me. Brenda is a saint for putting up with weeks of me vocalizing random blurts from the song as I process the ear-worms.

I cheated and bought a commercially available midi file of the song ($5). I had sat down to learn it on keys and bass, but I just needed to get things moving. I edited and remapped the midi notes to synth voices of my choosing and changed the tempo. I have always wanted to use the sounds of the “Joust” arcade game into a song, so yeah there’s that too. The vocals went through many versions (such cringe) before I went with familiar territory of doing spoken word into a micro cassette dictaphone -- pitched down and heavily affected. I had a quarter of an idea of what I wanted to do for the end and ran with it. Ripping off my favorite Cars song didn’t hurt things any either.

I use Reaper for most tracking and such then take it over to Auacity for quick and easy manipulation and also to get things off the tempo-locked grid. All synth sounds are SQ-8L soft synth (an excellent freeware emulation of the Ensoniq SQ-80 and ESQ-1 synths). “Joust” samples played back on the Digitakt. Vocals recorded on micro cassette dictaphone. Outro journey is mostly samples coming from the Yamaha SU700. That thing rips. It sounds so alive as it makes sounds sweat, breathe, and throb. I run most things through it at some point in the process for its special qualities. 

-Randy Dever