We made a cover of "Something's Got a Hold on Me" by Etta James
We started by listening to the song together and deciding who would get which part and what we would change or keep the same. I would play drums, Alexandra would play violin, Mary would be lead vocals, Strahan was on bass, Aden on saxophone, Mia on guitar and we would all do back up singing. We also decided to change the pitch down to C as it would be much easier to play and sing.
Then we started to rehearse the song, first by listening to it by ourselves to get to know our part and then coming together to (try and) play it. We got to a point where we could play through the song and it would sound pretty good.
Then on the 2nd of September, we went to Mary's place to record everything, as her dad's kind of an absolute madlad with all that sorta stuff. We weren't able to bring a drum kit over so I ended up playing my part on a cajon. We used the actual song as a sort of clikc track to play along to. First we recorded my part where I imitated what I'd played on the kit, then Strahan's, then Mia's, then Alexandra's and then Aden's. Then Mary was like wooooOOOoooyeahh with her epic singing and then we did all the accompanying ooh's and ah's. Then we added in some extra little percussion parts like tambourine and clapping. In the end it sounded actually really good and we were like like damn were like actually really good.
Our cover of "Something's Got a Hold on Me" is quite similar to the original. The only thing we properly changed was the instrumentation; where the original has a lead singer two electric guitars, a trumpet, an electric bass, a saxophone, a piano, a drum-kit and a tambourine, and the cover has a cajon, a tmabourine and various other percussion instruments (rhythm), an electric guitar (chordal accompaniment), an electric bass (bassline), violin (melodic accompaniment), saxophone (riff) and lead vocals (melody) with 5-part harmonies (melodic accompaniment). Our cover is homophonic, has a time signature of 4/4 and is allegro with a tempo of 151 bp, just like the original. We did however change the key from G minor to C as it is easier to play and sing. There is a strong underlying pulse and a thick texture. We didn't alter the structure and kept it as; intro, chorus, verse 1, pre-chorus, chorus, verse 2, chorus, bridge, pre-chorus, chorus and outro. There was frequent call and response from the lead and accompanying vocals and warmth from all of the other instruments, such as the saxophone which isn't found in the original. Our dynamics were basically forte for the whole song, although there's a diminuendo at the end of the original version, but we ended at the end of a verse and repeated the chorus until coming to a big ending.