Better Off Dead -A Elton John Cover

[stratmonkee]

I was actually trying to sing it yesterday, seeing it's now in my head - it's not an easy vocal line, I will say! Lots of la la la la la la la la la la stuff with a different pitch on each la in the verse. Good luck!

Hahaha I know right? Funny, like I said earlier, this is one of the very 1st albums I ever bought as a kid, and have sung along with the song for years and years, have the lyrics totally memorized which always helps when doing a cover for me and not having to be reading them while tracking, was totally surprised when it came time to do it how much of a struggle it was and how different I sounded.

[vomitHatSteve]

People paying to hear a faithful reproduction of the songs /artist they love deserve that kind of effort. Thats just not for me as desire, or ability, I lack the attention span to focus on that kind of detail .

The amount of attention to detail can individually be a lot less than you think, I've found. In the 90s band, I try to play the bass lines as faithfully as possible, and that's usually pretty simple. For difficult passages, I think the key is often to figure out what the original artist was trying to accomplish musically at that moment rather than exactly what they played.
e.g. Krist does a lot of octavey fills in "Lithium". Memorizing those note-for-note would be a lot of work that no one would appreciate. But figuring out the basic "feel" of how he plays a fill and doing that, it pretty straightforward.
I've noticed this is a challenge for our vocalist. A lot of these 90s rock songs have vocal vamps all over the end of them, and she likes to perform them exactly like they are on the album. If someone loses timing, or she loses count at the end of the song, she gets very flustered and has trouble recovering; whereas, I'm sure the actual band just... vamps. The vocalist makes up new noises to sing every night.