Hey Viewers. I’m back with a Donkey Kong Country cover, my second one after my Hot-Head Bop cover back from February. This song is without a doubt one of my all time favourite VGM tracks and so I was really itching to do a cover of it. I wanted do a very ballady and melodic approach to this song, incorporating a variety of sounds as possible and not be it all guitar based turn out as a straight up rock/metal rendition. So I made sure whilst arranging my cover for this song I would retain the feel of the original; for example, keeping the synth chords the same as they are. I wasn’t able to replicate that pitch bend you hear in the beginning of the original on my keyboard as it doesn’t have a pitch bender, so instead I recorded some whale noises on my guitar, which as a result invokes that vibe of being in an ocean underwater.

I used the delay effect quite extensively on various instruments to produce a big effect and to further invoke that ambient sound. On one of the synth parts I used automation so I could change the tempo of the delay, replicating what happens in the original recording. Chorus is another effect I used on various instruments, chiefly on all the guitars, but also on the bass too. However I didn’t dial too much into the instruments as I didn’t want to saturate them with too much chorus. I found it to be a very fitting effect to use, what with it’s shimmery and watery sound, further invoking that underwater vibe.

For the video I did what I usually do with editing, except on the softer parts of the song I used a fader to transition on some clips instead of jump cuts and not cutting the clips so shortly. And as you can see I used a glow filter on all the clips simply to make the video look more polished and epic and holy (LOL).

Overall I’m very pleased with this cover and believe it’s one of my best covers yet. It was a lot of fun coming up with ideas for this rendition. David Wise certainly is one of the best composers for video game music and one of the reasons why I love the Donkey Kong Country games so much is because of it’s music. I will no doubt be doing more DKC covers I future so expect more.

Hope you like this cover and stay tuned for more VGM covers in future.

Donkey Kong Country is the property of Nintendo.


Equipment used:

Interface: Lexicon Alpha USB
DAW: Cubase LE 5
Drums: MT PowerDrumKit 2 (Drumming assembled in drum editor)
Hand Clicks: HalionOne VST
Bass: Ibanez GSR180-BK
Bass amp sim: AudioAssualt Bassgrinder VST
Keys: Yamaha PSR-200 & HalionOne VST
Guitars: Squire Stratocaster Standard
Guitar amp sim: Peavey Revalver HPse
Camcorder: Sony HDR CX-405
Video editing Software: Sony Movie Studio 13

My Soundcloud:   / 6metal6legend6