Though I didn’t follow the exact constraints of this assignment, I was definitely inspired by it! I knew I wanted to sing a song in Spanish (even though I shouldn’t torture anyone with that) for my story because my mother always sang and I thought it was a great way to tie our stories together.

I used this video because it was one of the only instrumentals of “De Colores” I could find on YouTube. I downloaded it with KeepVid and imported it into iMovie. Then I separate the visual media from the audio by right clicking on the clip in the editing bay.

I saved the file from iMovie as an audio MP3 file and exported in on to my Desktop. Then I opened up my Audacity application and dragged over my MP3. Then using the red button up top, I recorded my voice over the audio, turning the audio of the music lower than my voice because I wanted it to have the vibe of someone just practicing singing in their bedroom.

I exported the audio as a MP3 again and then uploaded it to my SoundCloud account. So, pretty easy self-explanatory. The hardest part was actually singing. I know I’m not the best singing but my mom always sang around the house so she kind of rubbed off on me. I’m the kind of person who sings in the shower and sings in the car. Just imagine me in the dorms freshmen year where you have to share showers with the whole side of girls you’re on. Maybe I’m not the best roomie, but it makes for good free entertainment!

For our audio assignment in ILT 5340, I choose Audio Assignment 1601 titled Solo Vocal Trio from DS106.  For this assignment, we were required to record our voice three times singing the same song.  We were not allowed to use effects nor edit the tracks.  I chose a special song that I used to sing to my children when they were babies to put them to sleep. As I did a little research on the composer tonight, I found out that is an old Welsh Air written by Sir Harold Boulton.  I love the words to this lullaby!

I used Garageband for this project.  The process was fairly simple:  I laid down my first track using the internal microphone on my computer and then added another track.  I put headphones on so I could hear the first track and sang along with myself (strange feeling actually).  Then I did the same thing with the third track.  Finally, I sent the file to Soundcloud, and it was finished.  It took a quick google search to find out how to embed the Soundcloud player into WordPress, the directions can be found here.

So I decided to do this assignment (3 stars). It called for me to record myself singing a song three different times and layer them together. I decided to cover Vance Joy’s “Riptide”

This is the result:

I chose the song because it’s been stuck in my head for a bit. I mean I really do like how it sounds, it’s just one of those songs that haunt you for the rest of the week. I found myself humming it in bed, on the way to school etc etc.

It also makes me happy. It’s a bright cheery song. I think the ukulele has something to do with that. It’s hard to make something sound sad on a ukulele.

Anyway, was this assignment weird to do? Yes. I like singing, but it’s weird to do it in a house full of people. Which mine was today. Cry.

I really like the final product though, the layering makes for such a cool sound. It gives it a sort of full echoey feel.

To create this, I used the program Audacity. This was kind of a flashback. In a recent blog post I talked about how I’ve recently started using other music programs, but before all of those, I used Audacity.

Take it I wasn’t making music per say, more of creating covers of different songs. Most which will never see the light of day.

This was also the reason I decided to use it instead of those other programs. It’s simple and straight forward. No bells and whistles. Perfect for what I was doing.

So after I opened up Audacity, I set my mic up, hit record and sang. I took the three tracks of me singing and panned one right, one left and one remained in the middle.

Panning btw, is basically sending sound somewhere. Think hearing drums in one ear and flute in the other. Those instruments are panned left and right.

It’s actually really simple and only requires the movement of a slider on the track. After that I exported the song and uploaded it to soundcloud.

Admittedly I felt a little hesitant to have my voice sans effects, but thats what the assignment called for. I think a lot of people feel that way about not only their voices, but their appearances as well. It’s a product of the world we live in unfortunately. People with self confidence are often looked down upon or teased.

“What makes you think you’re better than me?!”

But it’s not being better than someone, it’s being the best you. No one is trying to put you down with their achievements. I feel this is something more people should figure out.

We need to encourage each other! °???(???)???°

For this assignment (worth 1.5 stars), I had to revisit one of the first songs I learned on guitar. For this, I chose “Remembering Sunday” by All Time Low, my first full song on guitar.

I love this song because of the major seventh chords. This was from memory, which in some ways made it as if I was just learning it and not so good at guitar yet. I recorded using Garageband, no editing involved. It’s kind of quiet because I was recording during quiet hours in my dorm.

This assignment, worth 3 stars, required me to record a solo vocal trio. I did this with “Rockin’ Rockin’ Pet Store” by The Mountain Goats.

Garageband, as usual, served as my recording software. I used guitar to keep my vocals on track. After recording all the parts, I realized that my voice is awful. Because of this, I used a megaphone filter on all of them. It was really awkward and uncomfortable to record this in any public space, so I headed to Trinkle at night to do so. So, if you think you heard a tone-deaf ghost in Trinkle one night, it might have been me.

Although I’m not CRAZY about how this turned out, I think it’s nice. I don’t think the megaphone filter was the best, but I was unfamiliar with how to manually edit the vocal effects. That’s definitely something I’ll have to look into in the future.

I was very skeptical about this assignment. I knew how much editing needed to be done to fuse the three tracks and that made me pause slightly. However, I couldn’t help but feel curious about the assignment. So, I decided to try it out. I chose one of my best sounds to sing which was “Beautiful War” by Kings of Leon. It was tiring, expansive and time consuming but I did it. And at the end, I was so overjoyed to hear that it came out so nicely that I took a moment to just bask in my happiness. I chose to sing each version in a different octave to kind of harmonize with each other. I think I succeeded somewhat. Regardless, I needed the music to follow along and it kind of needed to be heard so I left it in my final track.