Rock The Casbah

What with revolutions going on in the Middle East, this seems like a particularly appropriate song right now. It's a cover of the Clash's fantastic original, although I have to say I'm not sure Joe Strummer would recognise it as being anything close to his creation. Video version is here.

Arranged for ukulele, electric bass, melodica and various bits of percussion, including my laptop pretending to be the Electric Camel Drum. (Whatever that is.) Recorded this a couple of weekends ago, but I've only recently had enough time to finally pull it all together into a coherent whole. Hope you enjoy it!

• play
• pause
• min volume
• max volume

posted by ZsigE (3 comments total)

Thanks for posting this. My question is totally about the video, though. I've been wanting to do something similar for ages. Did you record every take? Once you had that, how did you put the whole thing together? I have the technical means to do it and I'm a skilled video editor, but I've always been a bit baffled by the best way of going about it practically.
posted by unSane at 6:32 PM on April 13, 2011

I quite like this!
posted by Pallas Athena at 2:59 AM on April 14, 2011

unSane: Yep, recorded every take - just had to remember to delete the video file after every unsuccessful take to avoid confusing myself later. Once that was done, I imported all the files into Premiere Elements as separate layers, synced them to the music (recorded separately on my laptop using Reaper) and then manipulated their opacity using keyframes to bring each to the foreground when necessary. The picture-in-picture stuff was pretty easy after that - brought in the clips only when I needed them and used the Crop effect to get the right size. Hope that's useful!
posted by ZsigE at 7:03 AM on April 14, 2011