The Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd - Piano Cover of Complete Album

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (1973)
By Pink Floyd
Piano Cover of Full Album
By Ranjit Souri

0:00 Track 01 Speak to Me
0:51 Track 02 Breathe
3:43 Track 03 On the Run
4:15 Track 04 Time
10:32 Track 05 The Great Gig in the Sky
15:08 Track 06 Money
21:32 Track 07 Us and Them
28:33 Track 08 Any Colour You Like
31:54 Track 09 Brain Damage
35:48 Track 10 Eclipse

I still remember the first time I heard Pink Floyd's 1973 album "Dark Side of the Moon" all the way through and with headphones. It was around 1985, at the Kent State University Listening Center in Kent, Ohio. I was a teenager (taking summer classes at KSU during my high school years) and this album changed my understanding of what was possible with music.

30+ years later, I decided to make a piano cover of the entire album.

The project took me hundreds of hours of work over the course of a year-and-a-half, from early 2016 to late 2017.

I listened to the guitar and sax solos endlessly, often listening to a single measure many times in a row, to try to recreate those solos on the piano. This was an incredible experience that gave me a whole new appreciation of David Gilmour (guitar) and Dick Parry (sax). I did the same with Roger Waters's bass lines, trying to emulate them exactly at least at certain key points of songs. I attempted to emulate the keyboard-playing of the master Rick Wright throughout this album. In a few spots on the album I even tried to emulate some of Nick Mason's drum fills.

"Any Colour You Like" baffled me for weeks, as I attempted to convert it from an effects-heavy synth piece to a piano piece. The worst part of it was its penultimate chord. That chord is one of the strangest ones on the album, and it was an enigma that I spent weeks trying to solve. I even watched videos of Pink Floyd playing this song live, in the hopes of lucking into just the right camera angle at just the right moment to see exactly which notes Rick Wright was playing. (Answer: Nope.) One night in the middle of the night I was asleep and dreaming about finding that chord, and in my dream I got an idea of trying a polychord (one chord with the R.H. and a different chord with the L.H.) and I woke up right then and went to my piano and after some experimentation, discovered that the right chord WAS a polychord -- E-flat Major in the R.H. and C Major in the L.H.

"Money" was a favorite for me during this process, not only because of its iconic bass line and its challenging 7/4-to-4/4-to-6/4 cyclical time signature, but also because of its not one, not two, but THREE guitar solos all in a row -- which come immediately after a sax solo. Together, these four consecutive instrumental solos occupy a whopping 3+ minutes in the middle of this song. My speculation is that the record company executives were probably not unanimously in support of this! Those 3 minutes alone took me several weeks of work to translate to the piano.

In the end, my performance of this timeless album is rife with imperfections -- and every time I listen, I hear each blemish the way a teenage girl looking in the mirror a few hours before prom sees a zit on her nose. But still I'm proud of having achieved this seemingly quixotic goal. I don't regret a single morning I woke up early before work to figure out the next couple of measures of a song; or a single time time I listened to a measure of a song over and over again to decipher the exact notes, chord structure, and rhythm; or the countless hours I spent practicing to work these songs into my muscle memory.

These piano cover tracks are also all on YouTube as separate videos. But this one is for anybody who just wants to listen to the whole thing in one video, as an album.

If you have ever listened to DSOTM in its entirety with headphones -- and NOT while you were doing something else -- then you and I are kindred spirits ... even as we sit alone in chairs perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles apart ... listening to the music that takes us where no other music can.

And I hope that this piano cover album will give you even a fraction of that same pleasure.

***

All songs by Pink Floyd. All tracks arranged for piano and performed by Ranjit Souri. All tracks engineered and recorded by Matt Griffo. All imperfections are mine and mine alone. I do not share my sheet music, because it is full of notations only I would understand, and because it is incomplete and inaccurate compared with what I play. We do use a camera angle designed to give the viewer a good view of what I'm playing. All love and respect to Pink Floyd, Clare Torry, and Alan Parsons. And of course to the copyright-holders of all of these songs.

"And everything under the Sun is in Tune / But the Sun is eclipsed by the Moon."