The Ventures were incredibly important to me growing up. I'm starting a music project and I recently recorded a cover of Diamond Head... one of my favorites.

Hope you enjoy:

Mantis Rex - Diamond Head

https://soundcloud.com/mantisrex
Youtube
Download my rock cover of Diamond Head

Last edited: Oct 22, 2014 23:54:19

Why all the distortion?

Craig Skelly

Little Kahuna
www.littlekahunamusic.com
The Breakaways
The Curl Riders

Very well-played, aggressive version.

This is Noel. Reverb's at maximum an' I'm givin' 'er all she's got.

I liked it.

Mantis,
Played it through once - an extremely painful listen. But to each his own.
Pick and strum on..
J Mo'

Great playing on that recording man! Very reminiscent of Gary Hoey surf. Wah wah pedals kinda kills the whole surf vibe for me but that's just me and not a reflection on the work you put into your recording. Rock on!

The Kahuna Kings

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Kahuna-Kings/459752090818447

https://thekahunakings.bandcamp.com/releases

Last edited: Oct 25, 2014 14:03:20

Mantis,
"Sucks to hear that with nothing constructive."
?? Sure there was.. I said
"But to each his own." I also said "pick and strum on." That's two positive sentences out of the three I posted.
See?
J Mo'

Surf is a funny thing Mantis. Some on here have heard and played it their entire lives and some who have stumbled onto it coming from different genre's like me. The deeper you go into it the more it can transform your whole worldview as far as what music really means to you. To give you an example I have become this kind of "anti-vocal music" dick when it comes to vocal based rock music. It's hard for me to listen to music where the vocal track is the focal point of the entire song. There is so much music centered around someone trying to tell a story vocally that you just plain don't relate to and you can't even understand and may not even be done well. I hear multitudes of songs where the vocal track kills the flow of the music so that someone can whine about something. I compare that sound to the sound of a great surf guitarist playing a a lead melody with a pristine chime drenched in reverb, That tells a story the whole world can relate to in any language. It can be a very purest based genre because the deeper you go into it the more of that surf based sound you crave.

This sound I listen to and try to create is an addiction for me at this point. It's a form of non-spoken communication that has given me a whole new vision of what music is to me and how I may be able to communicate that vision to the world on a whole new musical level.

Embrace the surf and welcome to the machine but be warned. As David Gilmour once said, "there's no way out of here when you come in your in for good".

The Kahuna Kings

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Kahuna-Kings/459752090818447

https://thekahunakings.bandcamp.com/releases

Last edited: Oct 26, 2014 07:11:51

What's all the fuss ?

I listened to it. Here's MY 'opinion', wanted or not.
The arrangement is true to the original - good.
It's not a photo image of the Ventures - good.
It has some reverb in it - good.
The little 'whip-whips' are there - good.
The playing and drumming has fire and love - good.
There's a surf picture to look at - good.

Anyone who doesn't like this, probably doesn't like Davey Allen and the Arrows either. There's plenty of 'fuzzy' Ventures tracks. The wah-wah isn't really over used...it works, somehow.

I see (hear) exactly where Mantis is going with this effort.
My only remark in the negative would be that I hear nothing in this song that seems 'psyche', (aka: psychedelic). Distortion and wah-wah doesn't automatically make a song 'psyche', IMHO.

The "whip-whips" always made me think of tropical island birds and gave it a sort of fun, islandy, surfy...dare I say "cartoonish"... sound in my opinion. It made Diamond Head unique to me so I didn't want to make it a point to remove them as I still wanted it to sound like a surf song, just done differently.

Thanks for the words Louie! I originally wasn't going to use the wah-wah at all because Wah is a tricky road to walk down. It's so easy to overuse so I tried to add it just a little bit to add some "bells and whistles" so to speak; some extra expression on certain notes, etc. Glad to hear the feedback that it was used just enough, that's something I was concerned about after it was already recorded.

And Johnny, we are way far off from my original comment about "not constructive." I think you're confusing the words "constructive" and "positive." I didn't say that because you didn't like it, that would be gross, immature and ugly of me. By "constructive" I meant that you didn't say why you didn't like it. I'm just gonna assume you didn't like it overall and didn't isolate which elements of the song you found distasteful. It's alright, I really wasn't expecting it to spiral into this kind of back and forth Again, thank you for listening. Some people I know in real life didn't even take the time.

https://soundcloud.com/mantisrex
Youtube
Download my rock cover of Diamond Head

Last edited: Oct 27, 2014 11:00:40