We had Thanksgiving dinner at an aunt's house and they'd jammed this twelve-pound turkey into a little toaster oven. I laughed so hard. It was pressed up against all of the inside walls of the oven - we really hard to push and pull to get it out of there. To be fair, it was a pre-cooked turkey from the store so they were just warming it up for an hour or so per the instructions on the package. And it tasted great.
Back to the music:
The "Grim Reality" SongFight songs are not posted at SongFight.org yet. I'll post another update as soon as they are. Since submitting my Grim Reality song to SongFight, I've listened to the recording a few more times and I think it sounds really rough. The guitar is fine enough, but a lot of the vocals are very noticeably out of tune. I'd been pretty pleased with myself for re-recording (and thus slightly improving) the vocals for the first verse just prior to submission the morning of the deadline, but after listening to the song a couple more times I'm realizing that I should have re-recorded almost all of the vocals.
I am irrationally reluctant to use sound effects in these songs, so there is no auto-tuning in the recording. I played around with it a bit, but my only attempt sounded awful. I think that my acoustic guitar was slightly out of tune (i.e. in tune with itself in terms of pitch relation among the strings, but not in tune with a 261.6 Hz C4 note standard) so when I tried to apply GarageBand's pitch correction to my vocal track it pushed my voice into proper tuning, which was out of tune with the guitar. So I switched back to my unaltered vocals and that was what I submitted. Maybe I can apply pitch correction to the entire song (guitar and vocals) after the fact. I probably should have learned more about GarageBand before starting this thing.
I'm also thinking that I shouldn't be shy about adding effects to the songs, especially since my singing is nowhere near the quality I'd prefer. Heck, people consider Adam Levine to be an accomplished vocalist, and he is the personification of auto-tuning; every note he has ever recorded sounds more robot than human.
The SongFight submission out of my hands at this point. My first-ever SongFight entry is nowhere near as good as I'd hoped, but it has the virtue of being done (such as it is) and submitted, which is much better than the many, many times over the past dozen years that I considered submitting something to SongFight and then didn't.
As for this Commuter Challenge EP project, I am definitely going to try to improve the quality of Grim Reality before the end of the month, but (as noted earlier), I need to make the other songs presentable first. That means I need to re-record the vocals for Butterfly, I need to write and record vocals for demo #2, and I need to compose song #4 before re-visiting Grim Reality. Maybe I'll wait for the next SongFight title before starting on song #4 so I can make that one another SongFight submission...
What a great toaster oven. It looks like it's from about 1978.
ReplyDeleteHeartfelt congratulations on your SongFight entry. You've joined the ranks of the top 2%...the ones who finished.