Rush - The Enemy Within bass and synths cover (on my Steinberger L2 and Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave)

Hey folks. Been a while since my last cover but here now with one of the most requested ones - 'The Enemy Within' from 'Grace Under Pressure'. This always used to be a favourite from the album because it has quite a fancy bassline but as an older Rush fan, others from this album like 'Afterimage' and 'Red Sector A' have become top tier songs for me so I don't listen to it as much as I used to. I'm glad it was requested by lots of you guys though because it was a lot of fun to relearn the bass part and practice it a bit more these past few weeks. I decided to play to the live version from the tour rather than the studio version - as always I just find it more fun to jam to live Rush stuff.

The main reason I haven't uploaded for a while is because I got a new synth - a 3rd Wave by Groove Synthesis - and have been spending a lot of my 'music time' fiddling around with that instead of recording videos. The synth is a 'modern interpretation' of a PPG which is the primary synth Geddy used on Grace Under Pressure and Power Windows, so spending time making patches for those songs has been a lot of fun for me. The Enemy Within has one of my favourite synth sounds from the 80s, so it seemed like a good cover choice for introducing my 3rd Wave to my channel. I spent hours trying to get close to the amazing 'glassy' sound on the original, and I don't think mine is too far off, but with so many options for sound design on this thing I imagine I could be tweaking things all day to try and get closer!

Using the Steinberger for this one (gear accurate and all that :)), and I recorded a couple of different angles, but sadly the video kept going out of focus on the camera so I just used my phone recording rather than re-recording everything - nursing a slight injury in my hand/wrist and wouldn't have been able to play much more anyway. I did the other synth parts on pedals originally too but again, those video recordings came out badly so I just re-did them quickly on the 3rd Wave, so apologies to those who like the bass pedals featuring :(

Hope you enjoy watching this one! Lots more 80s synthy stuff coming :)

Gear used:

Steinberger L2 with Rotosound Swingbass 66 strings
Tech21 GED-2112 Sansamp
Trace Elliot GP12X
Palmer PDI-05
Groove Synthesis 3rd Wave

Clips from the live dvd are from ‪@StickHits‬ remaster of the original footage, be sure to check out his channel for amazing Rush videos.