Dinner Music Of The Gods Bass Cover

The conga line starts here.

If there was such a thing as a "bucket list" song, this would be mine.

I remember seeing a soundstage performance of this song late one night on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and being completely blown away by it. I really couldn't believe what I was hearing. I'd only been playing for, maybe, two years or so at that point and had discovered Rush, but this was all together something else. One of the things I recall clearly about the clip was the drummer. It must have been the first time I saw someone playing double-bass drums and, once the song got cooking, his whole kit was just rocking back and forth. I loved the crisp, clear sound of the bass and, of course, the rest of the instrumentation and arrangement. Of course, I ran out and bought the album the next day and started slowly picking away at it.

I've never seen that clip again, even though I've searched high and low.

I've posted a few other covers off this album but this song has always eluded me even though I've picked it up and put it down many, many times over many years. I finally committed to sitting down and finishing it off once and for all. The fact that, bassist, Tim Landers played with a pick was one hurdle to clear, as was all those dreaded 16th notes. I was able to split the 16th note sections between my patent-pending-simulated-picking-technique and my fingers. Learning the notes and scales was extremely difficult because not only was the timing extremely tricky, but they were played so fast. It was a doubly challenging to figure the notes out and then try to play them up to speed to see if they were correct. I learned the majority of the parts back in the days of the record player. I can't tell you how much easier relearning them on a media player was. There's one riff toward the end of the song that, for some reason, I could never touch. It's an ascending, discordant little run. For some reason, on this last go around with the song it came right to me.

As with most of the videos I am most proud of, this is not perfect, but it's not too awful bad either. I hope you enjoy it.....all 8.5 minutes of it.

The song is "Dinner Music of the Gods" and is by Al Di Meola off his "Splendido Hotel" album.