Eivind Sommersten - Miami Vice
I really had no intention of remixing this iconic tune. Martin Galway’s original is perfect in every way - in a retro-museum it could be an exhibit of it’s own, playing 24/7, and I felt like maybe it should be left in peace.
But I was thinking about how he made it, four notes playing in three voices with varying delays - and I was curious to see if I could replicate the effect in my DAW. This in fact turned out to be harder than I thought - to get the delay lengths and everything exactly right. And anyway it was just an experiment so I abandoned it for a while.
In other artforms, perhaps especially in painting and drawing, you are taught to paint what you see, not what you think you see - it occurred to me that the same principle could perhaps be applied in an attempt to recreate the riff(s) in Miami Vice. So I just started playing what I hear when I listen to Miami Vice instead of focusing on the technical or accurate aspects of it.
And before I knew it I had made so much progress (and was having so much fun with it) that I decided to finish it. It’s not necessarily exactly the same notes/effects as Galway’s original, but my contention here is that the music is still the same.
The original is three or four parts (it’s actually a little unclear to me), I tried to mimic the sound from those a bit but as the project progressed I strayed into my own subdivision of four parts. Also I introduced simple but pretty wide-ranging dynamics to the arrangement in order to change things up a little, it is not a copy after all, but rather a homage. A detail is also that the structure of a single part in the original is AABABCCCC, I shortened it to AABABCCC since the added dynamics made it a little overpowering during the climaxes.
The four parts are:
- Synth/piano/staccato strings (matches the filtered part 1 from the original)
- Flageolet acoustic/electric guitar/electric bass (matches the short unfiltered $51)
- Long/legato strings (similar to part 3 of the original)
- Funk/guitar (I added this just for fun 😊 )
Hope you enjoy - I sure did making it!
Technique
Artistic skill
Nostalgia factor
Overall rating
The parts I like the best is where the vocal is added to the mix - I wish there was more of that! It sounds really deep with that female singer.
As Eivind also mentioned it, this may not be a 1:1 cover, but it definitely conveys the spirit and the feeling of the original SID tune, and it does it really well.
Also, just like the STIL mentions it, too, this is not exactly an original Martin Galway composition. The arpeggiated chord sequence that is the backbone of this tune, plus some other parts are covering Jan Hammer's tune for the Evan
episode of Miami Vice ( [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3YIz84thzY Jan Hammer - Evan (YouTube link)]). But of course, Mr. Galway took Mr. Hammer's original idea and ran with it quite a bit further…