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Walk of Life - Dire Straits 1

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Here is my attempt at Walk of Life by Dire Straits. It was easier than I thought it would be because of the VOX Continental organ stage setting from Mike Martin. Until I heard that, I had never associated that sound with that instrument. Thanks Mike!

I made a couple of tweaks to the VOX, though. The first is that the drawbar organ layer was to mellow. I replaced that with a sawtooth. The other is that there wasn't enough "ping" on the attack, so I added the GM Thumb Piano, which has become a remarkably useful patch.

On the FX, I realize that I have greatly underestimated the impact of delay, reverb, and chorus in the past, so that is added in there. However, I have some strange settings, so if you want an explanation, read on... We don't have a drummer so I usually have the percussion and the rest of the keys split between the left and right channels. Each channel goes out independently through a DI to the mixer. When I practice at home, though, I like to use the headphones and I like the channels balanced. To help with this, the drum pan is assigned to K1 and everything else to K2 (usually on the right channel). Unfortunately, the FX aren't usually channel-specific, so I have bleedover into one or the other channels or, in this case, I have the delay set to the right channel.

The percussion loop is assigned to Pedal2. Load the phrase into slot 180. The other item of note is that I have a kick drum assigned to Pedal1. I wish there was a way to do this natively within the PX-5S, but for now, I'm running MIDI out from the PX-5S into a MIDI Event Processor then the MIDI out of the event processor back into the PX-5S. I use an unused CC message assigned to the pedal and the event processor turns it into a note-on/off message

It sounds a little bare in the sample MP3, but when you get a band behind it, you're in business!

Oh! I almost forgot! There is another keyboard part that I don't attempt to mimic here. If you listen to the VOX, you can hear a layer behind it which sounds like a sawtooth-ish sound playing harmony. I thought I'd add that as layers, but it changes with the chords, i.e. it's not just simply 3rds and 5ths. Because I run out of hands between the rock organ and the VOX, I didn't bother adding it in, instead opting to just add some harmony on the VOX.

The rock organ isn't quite perfect, either, but because I use Zone 1 for percussion, I couldn't add the upper drawbar which you can hear in the original recording. It's close enough for rock 'n' roll, though!

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