A cover of the song by Simon Dupree and The Big Sound.
Scrap Metal
I upload music to under the alias 'Extar'. The music is primarily heavy metal, but I like trying my hand at other things now and again. I record my music in my bedroom with an old PC and a bunch of sub-standard equipment.
Story behind the song
This song is a cover of a Simon Dupree And The Big Sound song. It's a bit of sixties psychedelia that I discovered on a cheap sixties compilation CD I bought called 'Good Morning Vietnam'. No, it doesn't have anything to do with the Robin Williams film.
I wanted to get a kind of post-metally sound on this one, with loud/soft/loud/soft sections and big half-time drum beats. In terms of a guitar sound, I wanted something approximating the wall of noise at the beginning of the Nine Inch Nails song 'The Day The World Went Away'.
I arranged the song out on Guitar Pro first to test out various ideas I had for the loud guitar parts. Arranging it out first made recording a bit straightforward as I didn't have to improvise as many guitar parts.
I made a proper attempt at some harmony vocal parts in the choruses to make it sound more 'soaring'. This combined with a cold and my limited ability to sing at all made the vocals the most labourious part of the song to record.
After getting the majority of the planned parts recorded I decided that the loud guitar parts didn't really sound loud enough so I added a second bass part (with distortion) and a third(!) distorted guitar (recorded on the Epiphone Les Paul) to the loud bits. I played both of these parts on the bass amp, which helped add to the power. The original two distorted guitar parts (recorded on the Jackson) were then panned out to try and make the differences between them more audible. Not that you can really hear the differences between them still.
The big post metal guitar sound was basically just a case of doing it with open chords. One of the guitar parts has power chords that add a note on the low e-string to any chord, so a C5 would be played with the addition of a G on the E string, this gives a pretty cool mixed chord sound. Again, you can't really hear the part that does this.
I was pretty pleased when I discovered the main riff in the song is played in a mode, this gives it the eastern feel.
As far as I can tell, the lyrics are some kind of eastern/chinese-style stuff. The original has a spoken section during the bridge which might be in chinese or something, naturally, I made no attempt to emulate that particular part of the song.
My main reason for the covering the song was the chorus, there's a really cool chord progression in it.
The Big Sound's vocalist, Derek Shulman, bears a striking resemblance to a certain Trent Reznor. Additionally, the band also had a song called 'For Whom The Bell Tolls'. From this, I can only conclude that both NIN and Metallica started off as Big Sound covers bands.
The thumbnail is a stock image I dredged from DeviantArt called Chinese Garden Water Pond by ~Enchantedgal-Stock.
Lyrics
I will fly a yellow paper sun in the sky,
When the wind is high, when the wind is high,
I will float a silken silver moon near your window,
If your night is dark, if you night is dark.
In letters of gold on a snow white I kite,
I will write I love you.
And send it soaring high above you,
For all to read.
I will scatter rice paper stars in your heaven,
If there are no stars, if there are no stars,
All of these and seven wonders more I will find,
When the wind is high, when the wind is high.
In letters of gold on a snow white I kite,
I will write I love you.
And send it soaring high above you,
For all to read.
