When Leonard Cohen passed away at the end of 2016, I wanted to create a tribute to him. He’s the one who inspired me to be a singer-songwriter, and as a kid I played many of his songs to learn how to finger-pick on the acoustic guitar.
With the LinnStrument being the instrument I co-created with Roger Linn, it felt like a nice symmetry to try to cover some of Leonard Cohen’s songs on the LinnStrument 128 with just one synthesiser as the sound source, very similar to the simplicity of an acoustic guitar. I’m playing LinnStrument on my lap with the right split in strum mode, allowing me to finger-pick the chords on the left split with velocity, while having per-note pitch-bend and vibrato control over the left hand touches. This brings the playing technique quite close to the actually guitar finger-picking of the original song.
The sound comes entirely from the Futuresonus Parva synth, set up as an 8-part multi to match the 8 rows of the LinnStrument. I spent quite a long time fine-tuning the sound of each multi-timbral part to be suitable for that particular note range and playing intent, not unlike each string of a guitar having a different thickness.
This is one of those projects that I worked on for such a long time, that I have no idea if it’s actually any good or not, so I just throw it out there. I plan to record a few more Leonard Cover songs like this if people don’t consider it complete heresy.