Monday, March 27, 2006
No Meaning No part one
I listen to some hip hop and consider it an influence. There are a crapload of reasons why I don't rap nor incorporate rap in most of my music (though a couple of attempts have been made). On top of that list is the amount of words per verse in rap compared to your typical pop song. I'm waaay too lazy a songwriter to have to deal with that. Perhaps I'll give it another shot though, since I'm writing more songs this year than usual (1 per week). There's also the issue of me not being very good at it, despite also not being a good singer. Some people would like to believe that rappers are people who simply can't sing. If they tried it for themselves (recording or performing live), they'd find it's not as easy as it seems.
This month's cover is No Meaning No, originally by Chuck D and The Fine Arts Militia. This song joined a bunch of others on Wired magazine's Creative Commons CD a while back and immediately struck me as one of the best songs he's written in a long time.
The Fine Arts Militia is Mr. D's funk/rock/hip hop outfit. I'd always assumed that the song they did together was a one off collaboration, not having heard anything about this group (even in the magazine) till I did a (unsuccessful) search for the lyrics. They apparently released an album in 2003 which I've downloaded (legally) from e-music. I'll listen to it later on.
My lyric search proved fruitless, so I jotted down what I could and came up with substitutions for what I couldn't hear correctly. I then made a couple of other minor alterations.
There was a sampling/remix contest of some sort. I knew the magazine invited readers to mess around with the songs on the CD, but hadn't realized that a set of samples were made available online. I got those and imported the beat and the bassline into Ardour. From there, I recorded the vocal for the verses. Like I said, this sort of thing is not as easy as some would make it seem. I had to do multiple takes (as I would normally if I were singing) and for the first and last verse I had to record them in halves, and then put them together. I didn't do the choruses. I'll save those for tomorrow-ish. I kept the basic structure of the song and incorporated some of the guitar and vocal samples. The complete vocal wasn't provided. I would've been completely happy to just use that rather than do it myself, but that would be cheating. I'm not sure this would be a true cover in that case. I may sing the chorus.
Here's the song so far...
Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
next...
This month's cover is No Meaning No, originally by Chuck D and The Fine Arts Militia. This song joined a bunch of others on Wired magazine's Creative Commons CD a while back and immediately struck me as one of the best songs he's written in a long time.
The Fine Arts Militia is Mr. D's funk/rock/hip hop outfit. I'd always assumed that the song they did together was a one off collaboration, not having heard anything about this group (even in the magazine) till I did a (unsuccessful) search for the lyrics. They apparently released an album in 2003 which I've downloaded (legally) from e-music. I'll listen to it later on.
My lyric search proved fruitless, so I jotted down what I could and came up with substitutions for what I couldn't hear correctly. I then made a couple of other minor alterations.
There was a sampling/remix contest of some sort. I knew the magazine invited readers to mess around with the songs on the CD, but hadn't realized that a set of samples were made available online. I got those and imported the beat and the bassline into Ardour. From there, I recorded the vocal for the verses. Like I said, this sort of thing is not as easy as some would make it seem. I had to do multiple takes (as I would normally if I were singing) and for the first and last verse I had to record them in halves, and then put them together. I didn't do the choruses. I'll save those for tomorrow-ish. I kept the basic structure of the song and incorporated some of the guitar and vocal samples. The complete vocal wasn't provided. I would've been completely happy to just use that rather than do it myself, but that would be cheating. I'm not sure this would be a true cover in that case. I may sing the chorus.
Here's the song so far...
Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
next...
