Keith Medley studio web

First of all I have to admit Keith blames me for this idea, but it’s for his own good! It actually was my suggestion to Keith to re-arrange this famous piece of music for his amazing 27-string guitar, I imagined it would cover the full tonal range and show Keith’s talents in a classical music setting. Easy for me to think of, tough for HIM to do! But, he took on the challenge which required several amazing techniques he had to come up with.

In the opening he is playing strictly on the bass register while muting the strings with his palm, a great tonality. He then moves into a “Chet Atkins” type of thumb-bass/four finger-picking that looks like a crab crawling around. Then when he moves up to the highest register strings he still needed to catch some notes on the middle-guitar neck during some challenging chromatic sections. This song also required Keith to carefully figure out a tuning that would even allow this song to be played! And then there is the every increasing tempo followed by fierce strumming and full-range sweeps. Must be seen to be believed!!

My job was simple by comparison. I used my Canon 7D system on a ZazaSlider which allows me to dolly lateral moves. On this one I used my new 2.8/17-55mm Canon zoom lens and really like how it turned out. I edited in Final Cut Pro and color-graded in Color as always.

This song may also be familiar to those of you who have seen the recent David Fincher film, “The Social Network” which featured Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ version of the song. If you watch the bonus features on the BluRay, Reznor talks about how composing the music was relatively easy for the film since Fincher liked everything he turned in. But “The Hall Of The Mountain King” was a special request from Fincher, and Reznor & Ross really struggled with it, doing multiple versions over weeks and weeks. So knowing that, it is all the more impressive what Keith has accomplished here with his version.

Since today’s Keith’s birthday take a look! Enjoy!

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