MiMa's cover of Tim Follin - Chronos

video upload by mima85

"This is my own arrangement of the theme music of Chronos, a video game made for the venerable ZX Spectrum in the early 80ies. This piece is one of the early tunes from the great Tim Follin, and the term "great" is well deserved here because the ZX Spectrum's speaker by itself was capable to do just boring, monophonic buzzes. Tim, with some very clever programming, managed by software mixing to squeeze five, I mean FIVE channels of polyphony from that thing. So yes, 'great' is very appropriate for Tim.

Nonetheless, the original song is still a mosquitoes orchestra, five channels of polyphony but always of buzzing sounds, which many people can rightly find irritating to listen to. But this means that there's ample room of sound and stylistic choices when doing a re-arrangement. And for me, which I usually stick with the original arrangement and style when doing covers because I don't feel creative enough to come with something of my own, this was a cool exercise of creativity. Who knows, perhaps this means that some time in the future I'll be finally able to make some original music by myself :-)

As usual this video is not exactely a live performance, because the audio comes from the fully finished song. For the video I play the various parts like if I would've beein playing them live, paying attention to all the details (sound changes, execution, etc...) for the most realistic effect.

By the way, if you find yourself puzzled watching the pads I play on the OB-8 in the upper right corner, because chords with higher notes are being played in a lower octave, it's because I have a split patch with a version of the pad with slow attack on the keyboard's left side, and another version with fast attack on the right side. And the left side's patch is transposed up an octave so it matches the other one. This made playing those parts easier. That's one of the details I was talking about before.

As I am, like Tim, a big fan of progressive rock, I chose to do my cover in that style. I hope you're gonna enjoy it. As always, feel free to comment :-)"