Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness, Miror B (Cover)

A couple of days back I asked my facebook friends to suggest me something to cover just for fun. I asked the question on the 2nd August and had no idea what to expect as suggestions but, one of my friends suggested that I cover Miror B's Theme from the game Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness. I was a little unsure at first because I had never heard it before despite being a fan of Pokemon but, I decided to take it on as a challenge as I don't challenge myself enough! 

I spent the next couple of days learning the song and listening to it repeatedly so that I knew it well, I wanted to make this cover the best that I could with equipment I have.

On August 4th, the first thing I had to do was make a drum track. I used Cubase 5 for this and used three tracks. One track for the snare one for the bass drum, hi-hat and any other percussion (crash) and on for the audio of actual track for me to work with so the structure of the song matched the original. This didn't take too long to do. I remember that I didn't finish it on the night I started it even though it just needed a few finishing touches, (eg. reverb). I finished it the next day on August 5th and then continued to export the track and then import the track into audacity. I decided the first track I wanted to layer on top was the bass because this would be the most useful after the drum track to guide me through the structure. I recorded the bass using a line in from my AD-82 Mixer before that going into my Zoom G7.1ut Guitar Effects Console on a clean setting. This is the best method I have to record any guitar/bass parts, I used this method for my guitar several times later on but, with a distorted setting.

I also had two keyboard tracks that I wanted to add to the track were I used the headphone output at the back of the keyboards and put it into the mixer on a line in. I used two different keyboards purely to get the exact sounds I was after. I used my Yamaha NP-30 for a bright natural sounding piano and my Casio CTK-651 for synthetic Midi sounds which I wanted to use the trumpet. My Yamaha only has about 10 different sounds loaded where as my Casio has nearly 200 to choose from.. I'm not sure that I'm ever use them all though...

I was recording footage of me playing whist I was recording the cover using a Sony NEX-3 camera, moving it around the room for different shots. I only use Windows Movie Maker to put my video together so, it was quite challenging to get everything smooth and perfectly in-time but, I'm happy with the final result.

Here is the final result:

My cover of Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness, Miror B's Theme is also available for free download and to listen to on Soundcloud.

Please follow the link:

https://soundcloud.com/kimkeeton/mirror-b-cover 

Thanks, for reading :')

Enjoy!