MiMa - The Unknown Song

There's a story behind this song. Some years ago a former colleague, knowing that I'm into music stuff, asked me how to record a music cassette into the PC, because it contained an amateur song which was done by a friend of him, that was never commercially distributed. The cassette was very old and decaying, and he didn't want to loose the song in it. So I explained him how to connect a cassette deck to the PC's line input, how to record, etc.

The following day, he came at work with the recording for me to listen to it. The recording was of very bad quality, both because of the low quality of the recording itself (8 KHz/8 bit or something similar) and the cassette being very ruined. But despite the bad quality I quite liked the song, so I listened to it a few times. Then the time passed, I changed workplace, the recorded song remained on the PC at the workplace where I was and I never listened to it again. This happened about 16 years ago.

In the meantime the song remained in my mind, and I thought that it would be a pity if it would end being completely forgot. I don't know what was the fate of the old cassette and its digital recording, but I guess they don't longer exist now. So at a certain moment, some months ago, I decided to concretize the track.

This is the song featured on this video. The music had also a singed line in english, but as at the times I was a complete novice with english (and the bad and ruined recording didn't help) I don't remember what the singer was saying. But I remember the melody, so I rendered it in the song with a simple piano line.

I have reworked the track a bit, because with just what I remembered it was a bit poor, so I added some things (synth strings and fillings) to make it more enjoyable. The song had definitely a late 80ies/early 90ies vibe, for example I distinctly remember the intro's Roland D-50 "Staccato Heaven" sound in the original, so I stuck to this music style in redoing my version.

Except for the rythm and the bass line, is all played by hand in the recording. To make the video I filmed myself playing the various parts but without recording the sound from the synths, then I assembled them in the final video, over the original audio track (this is my first attempt at video editing). It's not exactely a real-time show like my previous videos, but when I filmed myself playing the parts I paid as much attention as I could to the timing, to match it with the music.

The bass comes from a Juno 106 (not featured in the video), which I sequenced via MIDI, and the rythm is made from Linn Drum samples, for true 80ies feeling :-D

I hope you like it. As usual feel free to comment :-)

Here are the download links:

1) Version as heard in the video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/j4iz32bioqkmoj4/MiMa%20-%20The%20Unknown%20Song.wav?dl=0

2) Version without the piano "singer" line: https://www.dropbox.com/s/osiet744fna7ri8/MiMa%20-%20The%20Unknown%20Song_nopiano.wav?dl=0

Видео MiMa - The Unknown Song канала mima85