I’m guitar player for a local band in East Texas, all 3 of us conservatives. We don’t talk politics a lot, but when we do it’s almost never more than a mild disagreement over details. The other 2 guys weren’t originally big Trump fans, but I think they’re coming around...
Here’s our remake of ‘Southern Cross’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKnqSKQCIs4
I’m the old fart doing lead vocals and lead guitar. And by the way nothing is lip synch, video was done as we recorded it by Shane’s video camera sitting on a tripod. At times it doesn’t look like it, that’s because with his non professional equipment and editing team, it was really difficult to synch up vocals and video from two different sources. When one of use was doing our part, he hand held it and did the moving camera trick...
Audio was not from the video camera, it was recorded on computer through a mixing board and multitracked, and he had to try and synch it with us on the video. Tempo was not an issue, it was done with a drum machine, just getting everything in synch was a nightmare, so he had several places that don’t look quite in synch.
This was an all day project, the last track was after about 9 hours of recording different parts over and over and over...I did just the second harmony vocal part about 4 times before I got a decent track and I’m not happy with it, lead vocal part 2 or 3 times, lead guitar took 2 or 3 tries, simple as it is, but one sour note managed to slip in several times...the background vocal tracks with all 3 of us were done 3 or 4 times, then we did it again to add depth, that’s 3 tracks put together to get the “choir” effect. No, we didn’t just duplicate one and go with it...We also added other vocal parts, for a 4 or 5 part harmony instead of just the usual 3. That was the other reason for doing it 3 or 4 times. In places you can tell my voice was getting tired...
I think on the final recording I played drums, and we muted the electronic drum track. Can’t remember, it’s been a few years. He put it on youtube in 2011. I did do that on a couple of other things we recorded, we would use electronic drums at first and keep all the timing steady, then I would play drums and record that for the final recording, and just mute the original drum machine track. the drum machine (keyboard) keeps time a lot better than I do.
Alan played bass, Shane did acoustic guitar, I did acoustic and electric guitars and probably drums. I can’t remember if we used keyboards, Alan does those. Onstage he plays bass and keyboards (but not at the same time) and cues up the drum machine. If you look up ‘Nightfall’ on facebook, Shane has a band page, he might also have some onstage videos up.
I’ll have to check, I’m not sure if anything else is online, we’ve recorded a couple of Doobie Brothers tunes too. Ukiah and South City Midnight Lady. I played drums on both of those. We also did the Eagles ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ a while back, but Shane scrapped it because he wasn’t happy with his vocals. I didn’t do drums on that one...not sure if Alan had his electronic drum set at the time. That was before Southern Cross was recorded by 2 or 3 years.