Ceremony (v2) | New Order Cover

Ceremony, is a song originally written and recorded while still Joy Division in the months before the death of Ian Curtis. It was then re-recorded as one of the first tracks of New Order in 1981. Actually there were two versions recorded. Version 1 in March of 1981, and version 2 in September 1981. The version I am playing to in this video is Version 2. You can find it on the expanded version of Movement and also the Total comilation.

How it was recorded:

Like other play alongs, I set the guide track and played the drums to that. Once I completed that, I did the guitar, and then finished with the bass. When my parts were done, I lowered the volume on the main track so you can hear my playing more. There are hints of the vocals here and there, but you mostly hear the music.

Drums

The drums for many of the Joy Division/New Order tracks are crazy to play. This song is about 141 bpms and has a constant hi hat pattern where your left hand plays it consistenly for the duration of the song which is nearly 5 minutes. Your right hand plays some quick pattern fills so you get a small break for that hand, but its still rough to play. What makes it even harder is trying to get a decent take and then when failing at that, having to do it again. Fatigue becomes a real factor. There are some issues with this take I selected, but it was actually painful to keep trying so close enough is what worked.

As far as the recording, I did them the same way I did The Strokes, Last Night where I went from my alesis strike module, out to my Focusrite 18i20, and that came into logic. 8 outputs allow me to record each drum separately and I can mix them each individually.

For the drum sounds I recently purchased some pre-configured drum kits from Drumtec. I used a Gretch kit that came with that package

Guitar

I played the guitar through my spark amp. For the Spark Amp I used a Joy Division tone from the tone cloud. Its labelled as “Joy Division Shadow Play” but it is essentially the Joy Division and at least early New Order tone.

Bass

To make this easy, I used the 60’s combo built in Logic plugin.

Video editing was done in Final Cut Pro