The Babys - Midnight Rendezvous (Guitar Cover)

The Babys are a British Pop or Pop Rock band and in my mind one of the definitive power pop bands of the late 70’s.

“Midnight Rendezvous” is the third track from the fourth studio album by the Babys “Union Jacks” which peaked at number 42 on the Billboard 200 in 1980. The lead single "True Love True Confession" failed to chart and was succeeded by the minor hit "Midnight Rendezvous," and finally the hit single "Back on My Feet Again", which was their last Top 40 hit, reaching #33. Union Jacks was reissued on 26 May 2009 under Rock Candy Records after being out of print for many years. This was the first Babys album to feature keyboardist Jonathan Cain and bassist Ricky Phillips.

Head First & Union Jack are two of my favorite albums and I will eventually cover every song on both albums so if you’re a Baby’s fan and want to learn to play these classics stay tuned.

"Midnight Rendezvous" (Waite, Cain) – 3:36
• John Waite - lead vocals
• Wally Stocker - guitars
• Tony Brock - drums, percussion
• Jonathan Cain - keyboards
• Ricky Phillips - Bass

The song is in the key of A major and revolves around an E chord in the verse. Obviously, I love Wally Stocker's playing and consider him one of my favorite players, I really enjoy learning these Baby songs. Living in Atlanta I haven’t gotten a chance to see the Babys much but look forward to catching them soon. I did get to see John Waite recently and that was a thrill.

Equipment used in this video:
The process of final product you are seeing is as follows: I import the original track from iTunes into PreSonus Studio One, tempo map it in PreSonus Studio One, and record all of the guitar part as close as I can get them a track at a time, for reference I only used four tracks to record the guitar parts on this song.

I then buss the guitars to an effects track where I generally use EQ and Compression and then a Send for reverb. On the master I have a limiter and I usually master in the same workspace. All of the guitars are recorded through a Fractal Audio AXE FX III, I generally use Fractal presets and tweak (I actually have one Fractal Preset I named Wally Stocker) them a bit, and then I record the video on my iPhone 12, import the video onto my desktop where I use Adobe Premiere Elements to edit the video. I then drop the audio from the video and import my guitar tracks from Studio One.

On this track in the video, I used a 1981 Gibson, Les Paul Deluxe – Tobacco Sunburst. I fell in love with the Deluxe when I saw Thin Lizzy using them in the late 70’s, very cool Gibson and love mine. It’s all original but the tuning keys, I had the Gibson restoration shop replace those with the ivory keys.