Project 39: Now’s Your Chance
This project provider our contributors with the chance to record songs they’ve always wanted to record but never got around to doing. It could be anything from an old Basement Sketches project they weren’t able to finish or a song they started but never took the time to complete. It could be a song idea from an old band or former project that was never developed that they always wanted to finish. Some folks even recorded songs they always wanted to cover but never came up in a BS project.
Bill Fricke covers Headmaster Ritual by The Smiths
There were so many options possible for this project. I have a huge backlog of unfinished original songs, unfinished covers, and “alternate” versions of songs I covered in previous projects. It was interesting going back through them and sparking some interest in finishing them some day.
I came upon “The Headmaster Ritual” by the Smiths. The original reason I did it was to get over my fear of thinking Johnny Marr was too awesome to try to cover.
Headmaster was the first Smiths song I ever heard. It was on KQAK (the Quake) when I was living in Northern California in the early-mid 80’s. I thought the guitar and bass line near the beginning was the most incredible thing I had ever heard.
I found a tutorial on YouTube of how to play it starring Johnny Marr. However, the real star of the song was Andy Rourke’s bass part. He was so underrated as bassist. Thanks to a YouTube bass player with the tabs, I as able to learn it to the best of my ability.
I scrapped the old guitar parts and re-did them. I tried to re-learn the bass part, but the original one had the sound that I couldn’t re-create again, so I left it as is. Vocals are as good as I can do. I didn’t want to do a Morrissey impression, so I did my best. Fun Fact: He and I also share a birthday.
This is a straight cover. I just wanted to see if I could do it. I think it turned out decently. Johnny Marr still scares me, but a little less so now.
Welcome, Pete Foss to Basement Sketches!
This is my first project as part of the basement sketches gang. Thanks for including me! It's great to have a reason to make music and a forcing function to get things done. This was also a perfect first project for me: I can't not play music, but my time to work on stuff is very limited and sporadic, so I have tons of unfinished song fragments and ideas floating around.
These are definitely not final album-worthy recordings, more like the demo you would bring into the studio to play for people before the real session or something. I learned to use a DAW so I could make music with headphones on, but I'm not a home studio wizard and could definitely spend more time on vocals and some other things. But I think that's also the spirit of the project?
Song #1 (New Key) is based on a weird synth bells riff I recorded about 5 years ago, which I liked but could never really figure out what to do with it. When I revisited it recently, drums came pretty easily and everything else worked itself out from there.
Song #2 (bang your drum) is a punk rock song that was inspired by a certain 4-year old in my life. I played the ramones one day and was told it was not fast enough. I kept trying to find faster punk rock songs and got the same answer. Then one thing led to another and I came up with this. I finished recording the instrumental tracks over a year ago and had a detailed vocal idea, but got a new computer before finishing it - and then discovered to my horror that all of my freeware amp sims (that I had carefully dialed in to my liking over a decade ago when I had more time) didn't work on my new computer because they were 32 bit, or something like that. So I never finished it because trying to replicate the tone sounded like a pain. This was a good forcing function, and it sounds a lot different now but that's OK!
K.C. McKee covers Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These) by the Eurythmics
Here is my cover of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" by the Eurythmics.
I tried to keep it as close to the original as possible, and used my microKorg synth hooked up to a drum machine via MIDI. I also got a lot of info from an old Sound On Sound interview with Dave Stewart where he breaks down how they recorded the song, equipment they used, etc.
I'm still amazed that they were able to do it all with only 7 tracks at their disposal (it was an 8 track machine, but the eighth track was used for time sync). By contrast, I used 14 tracks to record my version. Cheers!
-K.C. McKee
Kelly Duclos covers a bunch of stuff!
Mashup of Foolish and Like a Fool by Superchuck
Thought of doing this one a week after submissions for the 1994 project.
Cue the Strings by Low
Clay Pigeons by Blaze Foley
I saw that Neil had nominated this song for two separate playlist challenges way back in the Basement Sketches early days and I had happened to become obsessed with the song throughout last year. Now was our chance!
Neil Fasen revives an unfinished song from his former band, Landlovr.
Before the pandemic, I played music with Dave Schroeder, Matt Rahaim, and Tom Stromsodt under the moniker Landlovr. You’ve never heard of us because we mostly just wrote and played songs by ourselves and rarely played in public. We’d record collections of our songs every so often but not all of our creations were captured. I was particularly fond of our song “Tears of the Weary,” which I never felt was quite finished. Now that my dear friend Dave Schroeder is back in action, we were able to rally Matt and Tom and revisit this old tune, finish it up, and record it for posterity. I hope you enjoy!
Randy Dever covers the theme to Chariots of Fire
Here's what I did with Chariots of Fire.
David Cox covers Jesus Etc. by Wilco
Last year, for my 50th birthday, my wife surprised me by having Neil pick me up to play music with Dave Schroeder at what has become the music space. It was the first time I had played with others since high school and the first time I had played with anyone who knew what they were doing. To say I had a blast is an understatement. One of the songs we played that day was Wilco’s Jesus Etc. Neil secretly recorded a few noble attempts, but we never got all the way through, and I’ve always wanted to revisit it. A huge thanks to Kelly for laying down sweet drums over my rhythm guitar without a click track as well as my wife, Jeni, and our friend, Kristen, for help with backing vocals. And, thanks to Neil for help with bass, advice on mixing and taking the time to make my 50th so much fun! It put me on a rewarding path over the last year that I never expected. Looking forward to hearing what everyone else has done for this challenge!
Mike Bettison covers Do You Love Me by Nick Cave
I started this way back on project 30 when we were covering songs from 1994.
I had roughed out the song structure and spent way too much time trying to find the right guitar sound. When I picked it up again over a year later I fell in love with the guitar sound I made and built everything around it. Overall, I'm happy with how it turned out and loved hamming it up Nick Cave style and creating an unholy guitar strangle at the end. Special thanks to my favorite baritone George Rothenberger for adding gravity to the chorus.
Geek stuff: Ableton DAW, Drum sounds and patterns derived from heavily tweaked 1/2 speed Butch Vig VST, Bass sound from Icon Bass, Guitar from NI Session Guitar. Piano was a mix of Ableton Grand Piano and The Granduer from NI. I ran my voice through a vocal synth from Ableton and mastered the track using Ozone 11.
Grant Eull covers Stars by Hum and Within Your Reach by The Replacements
Well since joining Basement Sketches I have been able to cover many many songs “I always wanted to do”. I continue to keep a list and it keeps growing… thought at one point of starting a database of all the songs I have ever played; curious if I can remember them all. Anyway, I was excited for the chance to get around to a couple that have been on this “want” list for a long time. Thanks always for the opportunity to share. Looking forward to hearing everyone’s contributions.