Pink Floyd Time Intro with Rototoms

2 years ago

The Rototoms were mic'ed from the rear and run through a board with some added reverb. I had to use 8 Roto's to be able to cover all the notes used for this intro. They are from low to high E3, F#3, A3, B3, C#4, E4, F#4, A4. The way I arranged them was for no special reason other than this is how Nick Mason had an 8 rototom set up in one of the very few pics I could find of his kit with rotos. Roto sizes are from left to right top row: 8,6,6,6,8. The bottom row from left to right are 10,12,10.
Finding each note was a little tedious as there is limited information on the notes used for this intro on the Dark Side recording. As a matter of fact what info I did find was that they only had 2 Rotos in the studio at the time and had to lay several tracks while re-tuning the toms to cover all of the different notes. In the setup I have, the notes are as follows from left to right on the top row: B3, E4, A4, F#4, C#4 and from left to right on the bottom row: F#3, E3, A3.
The heart beat is just a deep kick drum on the e-kit. I just use my regular kick on my acoustic set when I'm at a gig. I went over this intro many times before deciding to try to add the kick to it, in order to cover the heart beat on my own, which proved to make things a lot easier when playing out live, without having to be dependent on the heart beat of a sampled recording and only needing a several minute sample of "Tick Tocks" to play along to that can be cut as soon as you break into the song. I originally uploaded a vid of me playing along to the actual Dark Side cut but the audio was muted due to copy right issues. The music in this version was recorded using an inexpensive Casio.
Samples of the rotos are also available for free thanks to my friends at alanvista.com

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