'Camino
Royale' from the album 'Highly Strung' has been re-recorded
from scratch for Steve Hackett's forthcoming 'Genesis
Revisited II' double album!
When
Steve told me that he wanted to include 'Camino
Royale' in the track list, I couldn't have been
more delighted when he also asked if I'd like to reprise
my role on keyboards for the song. Hard to believe
it was almost 30 years ago when we first recorded it
- scarily more than half a lifetime ago, but it seems
more like 30 minutes..! Amazingly, it was all
still there in the memory banks, pretty much intact.
Roger King had prepared and sent me a
template with guide stems for drums, bass and Steve's
guitars, so I fired up the 'puter and got to work. A
lot has changed in music technology since 1982, mostly
for the better. So it was great to be able to improve
on the original keyboard sounds considerably - especially
the Hammond and fairground organs, originally done with
a Korg CX3 and a DX7 - but now with the VB3 Hammond
plugin, and some fantastic fairground organ samples
in Kontakt. Steve also suggested featuring Mellotron
brass (we used Jupiter 8 synth brass on the original) so
I loaded two sorts into M-Tron Pro, layered with some
JP8 soundalike synth brass. The resulting rough
mix (even without the additional icing provided by jazz-fusion
outfit Djabe) sounded really meaty! I can't wait
to hear the finished thing with the real drums, bass
and additional bells and whistles in place.
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