Two of Hearts Cover and Quick Tutorial - Instrumental with Samples (Uncle Dan's Synth Shop)
My instrumental cover of Stacey Q's 1986 hit, Two of Hearts (I need you), as an instructional and (hopefully) inspirational 80s music video. It's totally retro!
As always, this whole production was done inside Reason 11. My favorite DAW (Digital Audio Workstation)!
This is a fairly simple song featuring a classic 80's octaved bassline, and a stutter-effect sampler that was new and all the rage at the time. I used to have a Casio SK-1 consumer-level mini sampling keyboard that worked really well for this and I was surprised to learn a lot of pro musicians used it, too. The other samplers of the day were crazy-expensive. For this cover, I did the vocal sample in Reason's NN-19 sampler.
I decided to do this song when I learned that it was made using a Linn 9000 drum machine and realized, "hey, I have an emulator for that!" The Spark 2 from Arturia reproduces the Linn 9000 (as well as the original Linn Drum) brilliantly!
All the drums are Linn 9000 reproduced by the Spark 2, except I added heavily reverbed snare drums on Redrum and Kong for extra 80s snare oomph. So, each snare beat is actually a compound of three different snare drums and a handclap.
Besides a grand piano sample, all the keyboard parts are played on Juno 106 VSTs from the Roland Cloud.
My aim here was to put together an entertaining "synthwave" (or synth-pop) music video that also serves as a tutorial or basic "how to" of sorts, without any additional commentary by myself. It's just the song (instrumental), with shots of the instruments and tips added with occasional sticky notes.
Let me know if you like the concept and maybe I'll do another song like this!