The Random Song

Just a quick sample (with commentary before and after) of one of the things I do when I'm in the right mood - improvising solemn melodies. You'll find the lyrics of what I'm singing in the ID3 tag of the file. It's just a poem I slapped together in about five minutes.

"The Random Song" (2.94MB .MP3)

Reminder: this is posted as a demonstration only, so vocal quality isn't that great.

Starving Artist Update

I went without food and hardly any drink for 23 hours (around 9AM yesterday to about fifteen minutes ago).

I'm going to be disappointing my group members again today because I don't have my part of the homework done.

I forsake everything for this dream, but I'm having trouble focussing on the flesh of the dream, that is, I'm thinking about all these other important things like presentation, but I lose touch with the most important task of taking care of my voice, so that I can actually sing and get stuff recorded.

(no subject)

All hail the speaker of the night! / All hail, for she walks within our hearts,
Casting a spell o'er winter skies / Bring[ing] life to the lands we know have died.

— March 5/2006

Dark Chest of Wonders!

(not to be confused with the similarly titled series of posts on UF)

A few listeners have suggested that I should sing something very, uh, dramatic and intense on my demo, and so I looked all over my music collection to see if I could find anything that fit that description. The only reasonably singable stuff I could find was NW stuff, and since the ability of a custom version of "Sleeping Sun" to show off anything is... limited, to say the least, I think I'm going to switch to a custom version of "Dark Chest of Wonders." I'm keeping the chorus, and the choir parts happen to suit my theme very well.

So in preparation for that, here's a recording of the original lyrics (4.15MB .MP3), done by me.

I know I don't hold the pitch of the last note of the first chorus properly (it goes flat). The entry to the bridge section is insanely difficult. That's why my entry is somewhat weak there. On the up side, I recorded this in separate segments, and my songbook was very helpful for following the guitar parts between sections.

Just for fun, I sort of wanted to do "Wish I had an Angel" (for fun because there's nothing I could possibly do to rewrite these lyrics), performing both parts (hey yeah I can do a raspy voice too), but that nasty little bit where the two parts overlap I can't deal with. Yet. It just means it has to be recorded as separate tracks, which sometimes causes me to lose momentum. Here's an a cappella sampler (1.57MB .MP3) of the first verse (with me complaining about my voice, because it really *is* crap in this clip).



P.S. I listened to a couple of songs by Within Temptation. The orchestral style of the music is nifty, but there feels like there's something lacking in the vocal line AND the vocals.