The Lonely Shepherd (Guitar Cover) // 8-track cassette recording - Tascam 688.

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My own instrumental arrangement of "The Lonely Shepherd" by Gheorghe Zamfir (Composed by James Last). . For this arrangement, I wanted to try combining really natural, live guitar performances with some of the shiniest, and most robotic 80s synth sounds ever known to man.

I started by recording an old Epiphone acoustic at the same time as I was controlling the analog drum machine. The drum machine's output was directly routed into the tape machine and the acoustic was recorded using a Neumann TLM 102 (external phantom power needed).

Once these two were recorded, I overdubbed two electric guitar parts over the top. The electric guitar is a 'G&L Tribute Doheny' and is running through a 'WEM Copicat' tape echo unit into a practice amp.
I mic'd the amp with a single Shure SM57 microphone, which is plugged directly into the tape machine's XLR input. The main inspiration for the guitar sound was surf music, spaghetti western soundtracks and psychedelic/60s rock.

I recorded the tambourine too, just using a Shure SM57.

The rest of the synth/drum machine sounds were recorded directly in OR on top of the master after the whole mix was converted to digital. There were two units I used for the synthetic orchestra in the background.
- The first is the analog drum machine, the MFB-301 Pro. I love this thing, it has a classic sound and there are lots of happy accidents while programming.
- The second is the Korg Volca FM, which is a slightly limited version of the Yamaha DX7 (80s in a box). It's full of the shiny & pristine sounds of early FM synthesis. As I've probably mentioned before, taking cheesy inappropriate sounds and sneaking them into my music like a weird ingredient is one of my favourite things to do. I never get bored with the Volca FM.

The original is one of my wife's favourite pieces of music and I recorded all this as my gift to her :)
Should I upload this version to Spotify? If anyone would like to be able to hear it on-the-go, let me know. You can follow Sleeping Orchard on Spotify here .

Peace & Love✌️