Spring 2021 #maj7 Cover Ring Party

At the beginning of February, after the successful listening party organized by Chimeratio for the Maj7 discord server, Jneen started to organize a cover ring event! This was how it went:

• You will be randomly (and secretly) assigned another participant
• Choose 1 track from that participant, and spend 1 month making a cover
• Try to make your cover recognizable, but it's totally fun and cool if it completely departs from the original genre.
• We all have a listen party at the end.

The tune I was assigned was great! It's a tune called "Time" by the japanese composer Sadao Enoki aka Observer. You can listen to it here. As soon as I could, I started transcribing the piano: the chords in it are so good! I had to use the equalizer a little bit to get the right voicings, but really enjoyed the initial process.

As the melody and harmony were so powerful, I thought about writing lyrics and getting someone to sing it... Unfortunately, it was going to be too complicated to pull that off because I had quite a backlog of work and I didn't want to expose myself to a possible delay because I couldn't record on time or something like that.

And of course... I'm really bad at writing lyrics.

Some decisions I made:

• Trying to go from the original arrangement, which is quite calm, to areas of different intensity and tone.
• Using the original chords and a simplified version of them in different sections.
• Using a combination of live instruments (electric bass, electric guitar, guitalele) and samples. I wish I could have recorded some live percussion, but I just didn't have my stuff around :(
• Embracing the Bo-En / Katamari aesthetics, which I love, because why not?

To give the whole thing a touch of chiptune, I used some NES sounds from Magical 8bit Plug for the very first time! I also used Vital for some bass sounds (the more d'n'b kind). The use of NI's Kontakt was important for the horn parts, which I enjoyed a lot playing. There's also some Battery and FM8!

sergeeo · Time (original by Observer)

Yesterday night (2:00 CEST), Jneen finally premiered the whole thing, with very cool visuals produced using processing! My track was selected as the closing one, so you can listen to it while watching the credits :) The live chat is quite fun!

 

The quality of the submissions, as you can listen, was SUPERB. I don't think there are music communities out there that are so creative, diverse and powerful. There's a little bit of many different genres: from t-squarish fusion to pure chiptune, with some rock and metal, uplifting JRPG-ish tracks... 

I was honoured to have one of my tracks covered by Narek! He was given a tune from my latest EP, called Gotanda, inspired in the Tokyo district of the same name. He made an amazing job, showing off his amazing skills with Famitracker. I'm sure he's going to be great videogame soundtracks in the very near future.

Thanks to everyone who joined and shared their own music. 

Superb-thanks to Jneen for having the energy and dedication to pull this off!