Albatross!

A tibute to Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, who is sadly no longer with us, but was one of the best rock guitarists of the last century. He was certainly one of my favorite guitar players, one of my biggest influences, and who, along with Carlos Santana, possessed that really wonderful fluid style, that I try to emulate in my playing,

I filmed this ages ago, from just above the cove in Benidorm. There were supposed to be seagulls circling, as they often do, that I thought would go well with this song. They were there gliding about in the air when I arrived, but as I got my phone ready to start recording them, they all got camera shy, and immediately decided to leave. So the video is pretty much just watching the waves rolling onto the beach – which is also tranquil and relaxing, and goes with the music. Yeah I know a seagull isn’t exactly an albatross, but it’s as close as I could have got in Benidorm!

I originally planned to take the sound off the video track, and replace it with my newly recorded version of albatross, but when I heard how cool the occasional background beach noises sounded on the track, I decided to leave them in!

This is the first time I have made a cover version of an original track, without having to edit out any mistakes afterwards – swapping and changing bad bits for good bits, in my recording studio. I know the track is not perfect, it has a couple of bumps in it, but I am quite pleased with the fact it was just one take – though I did have to practice it a lot! As usual, I had to practice it a lot more than I originally imagined!

I can’t claim complete credit for the track – it started as a backing track I downloaded. There are several different versions on the net, some are better than others – Some are free, this one was not!

My guitar part, which is all the lead bits, were played on my trusty Fender Strat guitar, with a nice new set of Ernie Ball ‘Skinny Top Heavy Bottom’ electric guitar strings – which are my habitual string choice. Its all plugged into my RP200 Digitech multi effects foot pedal – Non of the presets seemed quite right, so this is on a manual setting, that took me loads of tries to get just right, and although it doesn’t sound exactly like Peter Green’s sound, it’s not too bad at all, and fits in great with the track – though I did add a bit of reverb to it afterwards, just to try to give it a bit more life.

I Recorded the track using Audacity audio software, which is a free multi-track audio editor – Which meant I could keep my guitar track separate from the backing track, so I was free to change volume levels, or to add a bit of reverb, or echo, or whatever was needed afterwards. When I was satisfied with how it sounded I exported it to a WAV file – Then I used Shotcut, my favorite free video editor, to add the music to the video – or the video to the music! After that I uploaded the finished product to my ‘Amazing’ Youtube Channel for the enjoyment of all!

I have had fun making this, I feel I have learned, and progressed, as a guitarist – as a filmmaker, and as a video editor too. I hope you enjoy the result!

Yours – Tim Buktoo