Aye Carumba!! *Deep breath*
It is 9:29 pm my time, which means it is about half an hour from midnight eastern time, which means I have half an hour (less now because I type slow) to hand in my project for week 3. An amazing thing has happened…I finished it!! As long as technology doesn’t fail me, and the universe doesn’t interfere, I might actually be handing in my project for the week…and on time!!!
Did I have challenges? Pffft, of course! The challenges were entirely technological, though. The actual song just sort of happened, really easily, so the songwriting part was a breeze. As we know, this is my first completed project. The incomplete recordings of my incomplete projects from week 1 and 2 (I will remind you that week 1 is not due yet, though) did not involve any external recording (yet). That is, what tracks I have recorded for these two songs have all involved the arrangement of instrument sounds on my computer. Since I’ve had a lingering cough from a flu I had a few weeks back, I haven’t attempted any vocal recordings until this week (any deep breaths would result in coughing, so singing was difficult). This week, my cough is almost completely gone, so I was finally able to record a vocal track. Yeah, about that vocal track…
This is definitely a song that should be sung by a 5 year old and I don’t have any 5 year olds handy. However, my natural singing voice is very young sounding. I am 44 and I sound about 14. Since I already sound about 14, it wasn’t a stretch to make myself sound a little younger still. I just went into character and really simplified how I sang. I think it worked not bad. I will be curious to hear the feedback.
The recording of the vocals had a couple of technical issues. Though recording with the mic worked well the first couple of takes, a delay (between singing into the mic and hearing it in my headphones) suddenly developed. I asked my fellow SAC members for advice, and with their help, I discovered the cause. I wish they would always be there waiting to answer my recording questions! Another issue was that the mic volume was really low, no matter what I did. I just worked with it as best I could, but will want to address this issue for future projects. Maybe I need a preamp of sorts, or maybe there is something in the settings that I need to learn about.
The recording of the guitar was also not without its issues. One of my cords (a brand new one at that) does not plug in as snugly as it should and was cutting out. I ended up borrowing the one from my husband’s from his bass guitar, and it worked fine. Even though I was not using percussion on this track, I wanted my timing to be reasonably good, so I did use the clicker. Being out of practice playing with the clicker, it took some practice, but I think it turned out okay. Not perfect, but not bad.
And actually, I didn’t want the recording to sound TOO tight. I wanted it to have a looser, acoustic feel, with some minor imperfections, because I felt it suited the song. Whether it would suit what the advertiser wanted is another question. With regards to what was required of us, I think I came pretty close. It was a few seconds over, but that time includes a brief pause at the start of the song (my first strum kept getting slightly cut off, so I added space at the beginning and cut as close to the start as I could in the after editing), and a fade out at the end. I probably could have made it fit perfectly if I had made it just a smidgen faster, and if this were a real pitch, I would do just that.
So there are my thoughts for this week’s submission. I have 7 minutes to submit, so away I go…
Shauna 