The Turn Of A Friendly Card was Alan Parsons (The Alan Parsons Project) fifth studio album. The Alan Parsons Project made slick, progressive theme-base studio albums of rock music, and some times they would tour too. Alan Parson’s day job was as a EMI staff recording engineer and he is is famous for recording Pink Floyd’s critically acclaimed The Dark Side of the Moon.
I had a MIDI sequence laying around for this Alan Parsons tune and I remembered I had produced it in Sonar in the past. I also remembered how I had thought that it was one of the slickest sequences I had ever seen, and so I wondered how it would work out in Cubase and Wave Lab. I have more/better libraries than those old Sonar days and I love the progressive rock stuff – so I gave it a go.
The most interesting part of the piece for me is the lead guitar solo. You’ll hear some really fast bends in it. It makes me wonder how a real guitarist would handle those. The way it’s implemented here, you’ll see some fast half-tone bends upward and then downwards.
This first image show a one up the several down bend. I don’t know if that’s humanly possible, but those bends sound just like the original recording.
Here’s another:
The other thing I discovered is that Amplitube 5, my guitar stack emulation VST, is a bit of a CPU hog. It does its job well, though. I just needed a stratocaster, a metal lead amp, a compressor pedal for some sustain, a tweak of the amp gain – bingo – nailed it.