Cover Log
Entry 1
30/3 - 5/4
This week I didn't get much done. All that really happened was my partner Strahan and I chose the song we would make a cover of, which was 1955 by Hilltop Hoods.
Entry 2
6-12/4
Not gonna lie, this week I completely trumped doing any work on this assignment. Whoops.
Entry 3
13-19/4
learnt lyrics, started notating drums.
This week I started notating the drum part on notelfight, I'd say I got about half way through.
I also learnt the lyrics to the song, in other words I sat behind my laptop with the 1955 music video and lyrics open and going through it over and over again.
Here's two bars of the drum score:
Entry 4
20-26/4
This week I finished notating the drum part on noteflight as well as learnt how to play it on the drums. Strahan and I decided who would be singing what. I also got the lyrics of the song and highlighted the parts that would be sung as backing vocals by one of us in the others verse.
Entry 5
27/4 - 3/5
This week I finished notating the rest of my assigned parts, vocals in the verses, choruses and bridge of the as well as the trumpet part on noteflight. Strahan and I figured out which editing software we wanted to use, we settled with bandlab, and we created a collaborative project on it. I fully recorded the drum part onto bandlab and edited it into place.
Something quite annoying was when I had gotten about halfway through the notation of the vocals in the verses and I pressed save, turned my laptop off, came back onto it the next day and it. had. DISAPPEARED. So I had to do it all over again. There were also some issues with finding which website we wanted to record on as there were many to choose from, though most we thought would be quite annoying to use. It also took many many takes of playing the drum part to get it right, but I got there in the end and we finally had something to keep time with while recording.
Here's the drum part (skip to 00:11 to get to where I start playing) :
Here's a section of the chorus vocals score:
Entry 6
4 - 10/5
This week we finished everything!!! I recorded the trumpet part using bandlab's instruments, the finger clicks in the pre choruses and recorded my vocal parts; the first verse, the second chorus, the backing vocals in the second verse, the radio ads I was assigned (which were super fun when experimenting with sexy and not-so-sexy voices) and all the little extra bits in the choruses. Everything took many, many takes to get right but after a good solid 2 hours of painful work I had it done...until EVERYTHING THAT I HAD JUST DONE DIDN'T SAVE, not a vibe. So the next day I did that all AGAIN, so a brilliant 4 hours of recording were undertaken.
During this week Strahan and I also completed the graphic notation. It suprisingly took us about 10 minutes over a call, although Strahan had sort of figured it out a bit earlier on.
I also edited a hell of a lot of Strahan's recordings, generally splitting and moving tracks so that they were in time and altering their volumes. The most important part being his humming in the verses. Initially he had done this long thingy but I really liked a little section of it and we found that it sounded way cooler when it was just that repeated, so I did that and then afterwards notated it on noteflight.
Here's a section of the humming score:
Here's my radio ad part (the 3 ads in this track can be found at 01:03, 02:17 and 03:22):
Here are my vocal parts:
Here's the trumpet part
Here's Strahan's edited humming part (it starts at 00:23):
We had some issues with dynamics on our tracks as everything Strahan recorded came out really quiet, so I had put the volume of my tracks down as well which proved very annoying, eventually it was sorted out and we got some decent recordings.
Another little thing I wasn't super happy with was how in the final bass tracks we went with you can also hear the drum track faintly in the background, which has made the drums sound a bit messier and heavier as well than they were before as well as going a bit out of time towards the end but at that point we just decided to leave it as we were so sick of doing this, it was mother's day and it was the day before it was due.