Africa (2026)

This is my cover of Africa by Toto. I love this song but I bit off more than I could chew with this one. Toto were a group of top notch studio/session musicians in the Los Angeles scene. They were masters of their instruments and could all read music. Thankfully I bought a copy of this from JamKazam and had to use a few of their tracks. The iconic big sound of their Synth(Horns) track is made up of various effects and once I started to look at tutorials I realized I couldn't play this track myself. It had various inverted chords and other features so after a brief frustrating attempt at learning it I chose to use the JamKazam studio track. There are various other instruments like a Kalimba (African thumb piano), a Shamisen (3 stringed Japanese instrument), a Bottle blow (blowing into the top of a large glass or ceramic jug), a flute, etc.

I was able to simulate the Kalimba and Shamisen on my Midi keyboard although I had to simplify their parts. I played some of the flute parts on my Midi Keyboard but could not master the main flute solo so used the JamKazam flute track. I also used JamKazam's drum and percussion tracks.

And the vocals...well way too high for me so I used the JamKazam vocal tracks (very good studio vocalists)

In short I had to defer to a lot of studio parts on this one. A note to myself...don't pick such hard songs to cover.

Vocals - JamKazam studion vocalists
Drums & Percussion - JamKazam studio tracks
Bass - My Vantage bass
Acoustic - My Peppino playing chords panned 60% Left
Elec Gtr - My Fender Strat playing arpeggios panned 60% Right
Elec Gtr - My Fender Strat playing licks panned Centre
Bottle Blow - JamKazam studio track panned 16% Left
Flute - JamKazam flute solo starting at 1:50 panned 16% Right
Flute - My Midi keyboard from 1:50 to 2:23 panned Centre
Kalimba - My Midi Keyboard with a Kalimba plugin panned 18% Left
Shamisen - My Midi Keyboard with a stringed plugin panned 19% Right
Piano - My Midi Keyboard with a piano pluging starting at 2:57 to the end panned 25% Left