Last semester, I had a chance to continuously perform cooperative activities through my community service club. Due to the corona virus, I focused more on individual tasks this semester. These activities mainly covers two CAS strands, creativity and activity. Though the pandemic limits a lot of things, it gives me an opportunity to really pursue my hobbies. One of the creative CAS that I did is on singing. I’ve always love singing, but am just too nervous to perform in front of others. I decided to start from making a cover.

Making song covers was spurred on by the Cadenza performances. While I was watching my classmates making awesome performances, I wanted to be up there singing too. But after two consecutive rejections during audition and being self-patronizing, I just gave up. Though deep down I still love singing. So that weekend, after hearing the Cadenza performance, I went back home and was determined to sing. I decided to start by making cover. But what song should I choose? I think one of the reason I was rejected was because I didn’t choose the right songs to sing. My voices are breathy and weak. (for a long time I despise my voice) This time though, I decided to choose one of Billie Elish’s song I felt like my voice match hers more. Then came the recording problem. I don’t have a proper microphone. I ended up coming up with various creative ways. At first, I just used the microphone attached on my wired earphone to record my voice. But with no noise blocking system, I could hear my fan spinning in the background and random wind rustling noises. I tried to put the recoding into imovie and tune down the background noise but it didn’t work. So, I turned the fan off, buried myself in blankets, and record again. But since there’s little space under the blankets, and I need to listen to karaoke without stuffing my computer under the blankets too, I decided link my airpod to my computer and use voice memo on my phone to record. I then realize that my voice isn’t clear enough, so I had to use the microphone on my wired earphone and attach that to my phone and restart the whole process again. With the recording finally acquired, and numerous fails where I twitched mid singing and create rustling noises or went out of breath or sang the wrong lyrics or wasn’t on beat, it was time to combine it with karaoke. Since I don’t know any song producing programs either, I’m stuck with imovie. I tried out various sound effects in imovie and some turned out pretty cool. The echo effect works like reverb. The lower pitch effect, though limited, allows me to making my voice an octave lower. So when I stack the lowered voice with my original voice, it creates a basic harmony. That’s basically the process and the challenges I faced during my song cover making.

After making the song cover, I’m more motivated to explore the singing department. I wanted to create my own song. I often sing random melodies in shower wishing I could make them into songs. But I usually forgot the melody right after. I decided to bring my phone into the bathroom. That way, I can record down what I sang in the shower right after. But another problem came up. I have no idea what notes I sang. Therefore, I cannot create background music according to the melodies I sang. Plus the only instrument I know is ukulele, and there’s limitations to the chords I know how to play. I realize that I need to swap my process. Instead of creating the melodies first, I need to come up with a set of chord progression on ukulele first. Since I have little to no knowledge in music theories too, I could only take the chord progressions from songs I know. (basically, I don’t know what chords sound good together). So I started from using the same chord as the songs I like, and then only listen to the chords and try to come up with my own melodies. The next step is to write lyrics. This would be done in the next post.

Overall, the next step of my project is to learn how to produce songs and enhance my music theory knowledge. This includes finding a program, probably garageband for now, learning how to operate a keyboard, and figuring out all the effects garageband has to offer (more details into all kinds of instruments in garageband and creating cool beats in the next post).