Def Leppard Pyromania Cover Song Contest Winner Announced!

After poring over literally hundreds of entries that were both sonically and visually creative, the Def Leppard lads have picked a winner from the very cream of this impressive crop. Drum roll, please! And the winner is:

Cade Roberts and his studio cover of “Photograph,” featuring Chris Payn on lead vocals.

Congratulations, chaps! To be exact, Cade performed bass, drums, all guitar parts, and backing vocals while his English (of course!) pal, Chris, belted out a stunning lead vocal plus a couple of the higher harmony parts in the chorus. Cade also did the mixing and edited the accompanying video. Watch Cade’s winning cover on his YouTube channel!

Cade’s Story

Cade started playing guitar at age six during the early 2000s. “I grew up with musician parents, so it wasn’t really an option,” he quips. “My early influences back then were riff-rock bands like Van Halen, Lenny Kravitz, and Def Leppard.” Like most of his generation, Cade initially learned from lessons he found on a fledgling YouTube and from tabs he found online. “My dad showed me a few things, and then I basically taught myself.”

Then came a rude but welcome awakening for the youngster. “I showed my dad something I’d learned from a tab I found online,” Cade recalls. “I was really proud of it, and then he said, ‘That’s not right!’ I was playing it wrong! I was really bummed out and asked him what he was talking about. He told me I was playing the right notes but in the wrong position on the neck and that I needed to learn how to listen carefully so I could hear where on the fretboard it was being played. That taught me how to start trusting my ear more than tabs and YouTube. So, from then on, I mainly learned by ear.”

While Cade played in a couple of “mostly cover” bands toward the end of high school, it didn’t really work out. “Back when I was in junior high and high school, it was really, really uncool to play guitar and much less to be into the sort of music I liked — y’know, classic rock and ’80s rock,” our grand-prize winner recalls. “So, for the most part, I kept it a secret!” That said, he did find a few people to form a “mostly cover” band with toward the end of high school, but they were invariably short-lived. “Which is ultimately how I ended up being a multi-instrumentalist, recording and all that stuff,” Cade concludes.

“To be honest, I didn’t really like recording initially,” Cade admits. “It was basically an annoyance as it took so long to get my ideas down. It was frustrating, too, because I’d get a guitar tone that sounded great in the room but ended up completely different once I’d recorded it! It was that way for a number of years, so I was definitely a reluctant starter on the recording and production side of things.”

The truth is that recording and production slowly transformed from an annoyance into a true passion for him, thanks to perseverance, experience, and better equipment. As a result, Cade now makes his living via recording, playing sessions, producing, mixing, and mastering — plus the YouTube channel he’s currently focused on growing. The three years he spent working at the legendary The Church Studio founded by Leon Russell in a historic church in Tulsa, OK, definitely didn’t hurt either! “It’s an amazing place that was definitely formative for me on the engineering side of things.”

The Contest

Fast-forward to today and the Sweetwater Def Leppard Pyromania Cover Song Contest. “A few months back, I started a YouTube series where I would do a reproduction of classic songs and then break down how I did it and what I learned from the process. And, funnily enough, the very first one in the series was ‘Hysteria’ by Def Leppard, produced by Mutt Lange. As a result, I had a cover of ‘Hysteria’ on YouTube, and somebody commented about the Sweetwater Def Leppard cover competition and that I should look into it.”

After some self-admitted procrastination and a slew of other production work, Cade finally dove into recording and filming his cover of “Photograph” a week before the competition deadline. “It was super-last-minute, but that’s invariably the only way I get things done,” Cade admits with a loud chuckle. “If it’s not super-urgent, I tend to keep blowing it off!”

Armed with what he’d learned from his “Hysteria” video and analysis and a couple of all-nighters, Cade delivered his cover of “Photograph” right at the deadline. And, in true Mutt Lange/Def Leppard fashion, that classic opening guitar riff is made up of six guitar tracks. “It’s almost like a choir of guitars, and the layering gives it that symphonic, arena quality.”

As for picking the lead vocalist for the song? It’s an interesting tale of good ol’ happenstance.

The first two vocalists Cade called both turned out to be sick, and, due to the looming deadline, he literally couldn’t wait for them to get better. So, he reached out to Chris in England. “He’s a really great singer, and I’ve known him for years, but we’ve never worked together due to the distance,” Cade reveals. “It all worked out in the best way possible though. Almost like it was meant to be.”

He Won!

Armed with his prizes from winning this contest, Cade will continue his series of re-created productions of classic songs on his YouTube channel. “I’m really enjoying this new path, and my ultimate goal with these videos is to hopefully inspire people and use these classic recordings as great teaching examples for production and recording. I hope there’s something inspiring in seeing how to use modern recording techniques to capture the amazing sound and feel people like Mutt Lange, Todd Rundgren, and Jeff Lynne created using tape machines and Neve consoles.”

Cade won big time! He earned two fantastic axes, a bass, a complete wireless mic system, and premium electronic drums.

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Achieve Your Dreams with Sweetwater

If you’re just starting out on your musical journey or want to get better gear, then call your Sweetwater Sales Engineer at (800) 222-4700, and they can help you take the next steps.
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