The Moody Blues: Tuesday Afternoon (Drum and Keyboard Cover)

The Moody Blues are one of these groups that can be considered a genre of their own. Their album Days Of Future Passed from 1967 combined rock and classical music and created one of rock’s first concept albums, as well as establishing them as a pioneer of the progressive rock genre. While known for their orchestral, psychedelic sound, they initially started out as an R&B group with singer Denny Laine, who would later work with Paul McCartney in the group Wings and scored a #1 hit with “Go Now” in 1964. Unfortunately, this lineup of the group never achieved the same success in the UK (although their singles did really well in France), Denny Laine and bassist Clint Warwick left the group in 1966, only to be replaced by Justin Hayward and John Lodge creating the second “classic” lineup.

One of my favorite songs of all time is “Tuesday Afternoon” from The Moody Blues’ second album Days of Future Passed, a concept album that chronicles a typical day. Written and sung by guitarist Justin Hayward, the song opens up the second side of the album and, coupled with “(Evening) Time To Get Away”, begins the “afternoon” phase of the album. The official title of the song is actually “Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)” but “Tuesday Afternoon” is what is listed as on the single as well as various compilation albums.

The song was recorded at Decca Studios in London on October 22, 1967. The main part of the song features acoustic guitar, bass, Mellotron, and drums set to a steady rock groove, while the bridge turns it into a shuffle groove with a grooving piano bass line that’s reminiscent of their R&B days. After the bridge, the song essentially repeats the form with the two verses and an instrumental outro with a flute solo played by Ray Thomas. While the album was recorded with the London Festival Orchestra, most of the orchestral sounds in the song are from Mike Pinder’s Mellotron.

Drummer Graeme Edge, who was the only member of the band to play on every Moody Blues album, is another one of those drummers who was never too flashy and kept the groove going with his steady and energetic playing. The song opens up with Edge playing a hi hat figure and then transitioning into the song’s main groove with a neat snare and hi hat figure. He stays on the hi hat for most of the song except during the bridge when he switches to the shuffle groove and plays on the ride cymbal. The snare and hi hat figures always sound “washy” except for the one at 3:07, where you can hear the two open hi hat hits distinctively. This hi hat figure occurs repeatedly throughout the song. Now you might be wondering, why do I have the crash and ride cymbal swapped? If you look at live footage of The Moody Blues, you can see Grame’s ride cymbal placed where the crash cymbal would normally be. So I did that to follow suit.

A key sound of The Moodies during their classic era is that of Mike Pinder’s Mellotron. After playing only the piano during their early years, he acquired a second hand Mellotron from Streetly electronics, a place where he worked as a development engineer, and used it on multiple recordings. The Mellotron, known for being incredibly hard to work with, can be heard on every Moody Blues album from 1967 to 1978. Pinder used the Mellotron MKII model which are now incredibly hard to find and expensive. Using a free plugin, I was able to mimic the Mellotron sounds on my Yamaha keyboard into my DAW. After studying live performances and extensive listening to isolated tracks from moises.ai, I came up with a performance that matched what I had studied. It may not be correct, but it still sounds cool. There are two different sounds form the Mellotron in the song: a brassy, trumpet-like sound on the left speaker, and the famous 3 violin sound on the right. To my ears, one part seems to double the other part. To tell which part is which, the video with the camera in the right side of the piano is the string part while the other is the brass part. Mixing wise, I panned accordingly. The R&B piano in the bridge is panned right matching the stereo mix. I can go on longer about the song and the group, but I want to keep the description somewhat short.

Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoy!