To celebrate World Ukulele Day here’s my version of the Albert Hammond song “It Never Rains in Southern California”.
It was great fun recording this song and filming the video. I started with the drum track which I bought and downloaded from t’internet. From this it was just a matter of building up the song by adding various other tracks. For the rhythm track I used my 8-string electric-acoustic ukulele together with a 4-string acoustic ukulele. The next step was to add the bass track by using one of my bass ukuleles. The vocal tracks were next and I had to be careful of the second verse where the vocal jumps up an octave to reach the word “home”. I think I made that part reasonably well although in other parts of vocal it may be a bit more variable.
One of the distinctive parts of Albert Hammond’s original song is the riff played by a flute. In order to achieve a similar effect I used the pan flute setting on my keyboard. Actually I think it sounds quite good, as though someone is actually playing a pan flute or at least blowing across the top of a milk bottle. Finally to give a bit more depth to the song I added a string track using my keyboard. This was just done by me merely playing the root note of each chord as the song went along.
I had a great time recording it and I hope you enjoy listening to it and watching the video.