Thursday, September 22, 2011

My initial reaction to "Death of a Turtle"

Now that we're all lovely jubbly and released, I can reveal this video showing my initial reaction upon hearing Sam and Julian's song product over my "Chelonia mydas" backing track. At the time I was unaware of Sam Berry's contribution, so I'm sorry for not mentioning it then. The video is sort of funny. I hope you like it. Towards the end I look a bit serious, but I was only concentrating. I really liked it and now I love it.


Monday, September 5, 2011

Just finished my Kakapo vocals!

I had a pretty tough time writing melodies for this one -- and the one melody I really liked turned out to be way too high for me to sing, so I made up something else on the spot. I tried to resist adding background vocals, but to no avail -- I did, however, manage to keep the focus on one main vocal line which was mostly unprocessed. I know Barney wanted a more "live" type vocal, and for the most part I used big chunks of 2 or 3 takes. So I was somewhat successful there.

As for the lyrics...pretty soon after I was researching the Kakapo, I discovered that there are only around 86 left, and all of them have names. I knew that was my angle right away. I came up with the idea of a kakapo family reunion, having just attended a family reunion of my own. Then I added some half-clever bits about regurgitation and mating calls. I did procrastinate a bit on the lyrics so I wish I had some more time to tweak them, but overall I think most of it works pretty well.

I finally got to use my new mic on this recording, too...I don't hear a huge difference from my last one, but hopefully it sounds good to you guys!