I’d like to start off by saying that this assignment really brought me completely out of my comfort zone. I’m more of an instrumental musician, so singing, let alone posting a song cover that’s open for anyone to hear, anytime, made me very hesitant to complete it.

But I also thought that DS106 has brought me out of my comfort zone already; I’m no photographer, writer, or designer.  It was time to take things into my own hands.  Originally, I set out to complete the A Capella With Yourself assignment, but misread it almost entirely, realizing that only after I had posted my clip to SoundCloud. After spending a considerable amount of time searching for, recording samples of, and playing back multiple songs in order to find out that I sound very little like what I sound like in my head (read: much worse),  I finally decided on Zoe Jane, a song by Staind, that I almost performed with my band at a middle school talent show (we decided on The Red Hot Chili Pepper’s By The Way).

I realized that I hadn’t listened to it in about a decade, so was really surprised that I still knew the lyrics. More significantly though, I realized that I could relate to it now, almost completely, since having my own child.  Immediately, I thought of a few lines from Brad Paisley’s Old Alabama : “Play something with lots of feeling// ’cause that’s where music has to start”.  So, I threw my anxiety of posting my own singing out the window, and started recording in the awesome sound booth on the bottom floor of the ITCC building at, like, 2 AM (I’m self-conscious, sue me) because I hadn’t yet been struck by ideas for a Sound Effects Story.  I recorded it once, played it back to myself and thought it wasn’t atrocious, so I’d give it a go two more times.

After three recordings, I converted them to mp3 format, and opened them up in Audacity, trimmed the random noises and lengthy silence from the beginning of the song.  I then had to align them, which sounds a lot easier than it actually is: you think “oh, just scoot them all over to the left, duh!”, but I had trimmed each differently, so I had to trim them down a bit more, zoom in, trim some more, etc. until they started at the same time.  So here you go.

Sorry about the long silence about 2/3 of the way through–that’s usually filled by the instrumental break.

I estimated this assignment at 3 stars, due to the amount of time taken to find a song, record it in full three times, edit it, and the willingness to put your normal stays-in-the-shower-or-car-so-no-one-can-hear-it singing out in the public realm.