Rolling In The Deep - Adele - Guitar Cover

Saturday evening, mid-September 2023, the good lady wife and I took our youngest to a concert at Llandaff Cathedral, Cardiff. It was a candlelit concert given by a wonderful string quartet, who played the music of Adele. The concert was excellent and, although Adele’s music is not my thing the evening was highly enjoyable. Great venue, lovely atmosphere, and the music was top class. It occurred to me throughout just how well Adele’s music translated to an instrumental format.

Around the same time I had a very minor involvement with a once a month Sunday evening arts thread on Twitter. One of the regular contributors played and sang a stunningly beautiful version of Adele’s “Rolling In The Deep”. It was as good as, perhaps better even than, the original. Again, I was struck by the strong melodies within the song. I commented that the song would likely make a great basis for a guitar instrumental. A few people commented in agreement, and the idea subsequently took shape in my mind.

Life, and other priorities pressed in, and the plan to produce a guitar version became sidelined for a number of months. I thought about it all again recently, though, and began to work out, on the guitar, the basic melodies and some extra lines with which to end the track. I decided on Friday evening, to pull it all together and record a piece.

So, I found myself a backing track and videoed myself, on my iphone, whilst recording the audio via my Blackstar amp straight into Garageband on my Macbook. I then EQd the audio, tried to mix it sensibly with the backing track, and merge it back into the iPhone footage on iMovie. The backing track intro is relatively quiet and I found it quite tricky trying to realign the audio and the video. I still get a sense that it hasn’t quite synchronised. This has become something of an issue recently with my videos. I think I shall need to research further some foolproof way of producing these videos.

Anyway, I think this is half decent but I have just one minor regret which I only thought about after completion. I wish I had used my wah wah pedal for the ascending line at 3:15. That would have been a very nice touch.

Hope you enjoy this.