How I Recorded... Tubular Bells Cover

Hello and welcome to blog number three.

I thought I'd sit down and talk about the process of what went in to making my latest cover. If you have missed it, for Halloween I recorded a cover of Tubular Bells, or more commonly known as the theme song for The Exorcist. I covered the process slightly in my previous blog, so for a more general blog about the cover and Halloween, check there. It was interesting to cover this track for a number of reasons. The first of which is that the original is based off of one theme which repeats throughout. The second point being that the composition in 15/8. Meaning it leant itself quite well to some syncopated drum patterns.

The song took roughly 10 hours to record which was spread over three sessions. The guitars, bass and keyboard were tracked in real time and the drums were programmed. My signal chain for the guitars and basses were Instrument - Zoom G2.1u - Logic Pro X.

Like all of my recordings from the past couple of years. I used Logic's Amp simulators for my rhythm guitar tracks and for lead guitar parts I used a custom patch from the Zoom pedal. For the bass guitars I had two channels. One which was an amp simulator. Another which was a DI track which had been heavily compressed and distorted using Logic's pedalboard simulator.

For the keyboard presets, I used the tubular bells (surprisingly) and Steinway piano sound. I originally just wanted to use the tubular bells by themselves but on further listening I felt they lacked the clarity I wanted, so adding the piano brought it to the sound I was after.

When it came to recording, I had approximately 14 main 'base' tracks, which consisted of a drum kit (which was individually split up for mixing as well as the 2 bass tracks and keyboard tracks previously mentioned. For guitars I decided to add multiple layers to certain sections. The first two are a double tracked rhythm guitar sections panned hard left and hard right. I also had two tracks which I recorded 'octave' chords on, to bring out certain harmonies I put theses quite low in the mix as I wanted them to be more textual rather for them to stand out. There are also two 'extra tracks' which consisted of little single note lines which again were for texture. The other 3 tracks were for the lead sections, 1 centre track and 2 harmony tracks panned left and right. Again, I further split these tracks up for mixing. But in a very simple manner, they are the main tracks which my cover is built upon.

This is how I recorded my cover of Tubular Bells. If you want to listen to it, please click below:

Thanks for reading,

Dan.

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