Birthday (Beatles cover)

Happy Birthday!! Well, if it¬ your birthday, at least I had a one-in-365.25 chance that it was. Here is a video for you featuring my re-creation of the Beatles song "Birthday" from their album "The Beatles" (more commonly known as "The White Album"). On the surface, it&a fairly simple song, however it was not so simple to re-create (more on that below). This video was created as a gift to my cousin on his 50th birthday. Happy Birthday David! Better late than never... :) A bit of technical info: The song features a very distinctive piano sound. On the original recording, this was achieved by running the piano track through a Vox Conqueror guitar amplifier. This amp had a special 3-position tone selector effect, known as MRB, or Mid-Range Boost. It was similar in principle to the effect circuit found in the Vox wah-wah pedal, however it only had three discrete positions (whereas the wah-wah pedal is continuously variable). Unlike the wah-wah pedal, the MRB effect was designed to be used as a tone control--select position 1, 2 or 3 and leave it on that setting for the duration of the song. Recording engineer Ken Scott came up with the idea to manually "play" the MRB switch in time with the music (and is the one doing so on the recording). Even though I could have simulated this effect using various digital audio plug-ins, I sincerely wanted to be able to show how this effect was created using a real Vox Conqueror amplifier. Unfortunately, these amplifiers are hard to...