Creep (acoustic STP cover)

My attempt to exorcise some high school nostalgia. The lyrics are as dumb as they always were, but now there's banjo and mandolin!

A few rough bits in here; the timing going into the final chorus is all effed up, is the main thing bugging me. But all in all it fell together well, I think.

I continue to experiment with per-track and master EQ, and I played with a master track peak limiter this time around to try and bring up the overall volume of the track without mindlessly compressing or introducing significant clipping into the mix. I've been a little frustrated with Garageband compared to Adobe Audition in terms of my sense of control over that leg of things, but I'm hoping this is a step in the right direction.

• play
• pause
• min volume
• max volume

posted by cortex (14 comments total)

There's a little more story behind this cover happening, viz the nostalgia angle, but that's kind of embargoed for a couple weeks.
posted by cortex at 2:48 PM on March 3, 2009

Oh fine, be all secretive then.

*taps foot repeatedly, and looks in the other direction*
posted by -t at 3:46 PM on March 3, 2009

Hey man, I like this a lot more than the original, and I LIKE the original...

I'm glad you posted this. There have been quite a few of those '90s songs in my head, related to memories too, but sometimes they seem a little impotent or muted because of the "sound" people were focusing on then. You know, like some of them weren't fully realized.

Big applause from me!
posted by snsranch at 5:01 PM on March 3, 2009

Thanks to crappy internet tagging I always thought this song was called "Not Half the Man I Used to Be." Some good vocal work on this one, you've got a voice when you sing out. I was wondering if that was an upright bass than I saw the tags. On a side note, for the first 1 sec of the song I could've swore this was "I'll follow the Sun."
posted by BrnP84 at 5:44 PM on March 3, 2009

Yeah, it's upright bass. Gave myself a damn blister from that, actually; wish it was because I tore it up, but it's really that I don't play enough to have calluses on my right hand. I should really do something about that.
posted by cortex at 5:46 PM on March 3, 2009

You know you're getting old when you lose your calluses on your right hand.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 5:53 PM on March 3, 2009

Oh, that Creep. "STP" doesn't immediately say "Stone Temple Pilots" to me, so I was expecting a Radiohead cover and also trying to figure out if STP was an instrument or what.

I have this weird problem where I always believe that all Stone Temple Pilots songs I'm familiar with are Nirvana songs until someone points out otherwise to me. And then I forget again.

At any rate, I think this is pretty great.
posted by Caduceus at 8:19 PM on March 3, 2009

I haven't been around much lately, but I listened to this because (probably for nostalgia-related reasons) I've always liked this song. This is a really nice treatment. You've got, uh, great feel when you, erm, play with yourself.
posted by uncleozzy at 8:27 PM on March 3, 2009

Oh, that Creep. "STP" doesn't immediately say "Stone Temple Pilots" to me, so I was expecting a Radiohead cover

hell, i honestly thought he meant TLC and wondered why he would do an acoustic version of that

i like that one better than stp, anyway
posted by pyramid termite at 9:04 PM on March 3, 2009

Haha, this is fantastic. Your mixing is sounding way better, too -- EQ is working very well to, uh, "lift and separate". Bass is tricky to manage because it's really hard to correlate what you hear with the visual representation of the meters/waveform. I can detect no hard clipping, and it's a nice punchy mix, so you've limited well.
posted by jake at 8:50 AM on March 4, 2009

I too think I like this better than the original (a song I have quite a nostalgic liking for myself). I also wonder what it says about the roots of pop music that so much of it works so well in slightly mournful bluegrass-y with banjo style.
posted by mostlymartha at 6:40 PM on March 4, 2009

Wow! This is really excellent, cortex.
posted by wastelands at 12:30 AM on March 5, 2009

Sounds great. I can imagine it's a challenge to mic an upright.
You did a nice job and the banjo and mando are nice 'n punchy.
posted by chococat at 10:43 PM on March 6, 2009

Embargo lifted: Me and Wilder and Creep, and happy birthday, dude. L'chaim!
posted by cortex at 9:25 AM on March 15, 2009