Category: Covers etc.

A project for Music Producing & Arrangement, we had to choose a song we knew by heart and cover it, staying as true to the original as we could. Again, there was a 2:00 time limit, and First Day of my Life didn’t flow as smoothly as a wanted after cutting things out. After a few hours of tweaking I gave up and decided to add parts from another song with a similar progression, I Will Follow You Into the Dark (after transposing it down a half-step). Turns out they work pretty well together and have an interesting depth to the lyrics. Rhythm Guitar panned left, picking pattern on right. Bass and Vocals right up the middle. Pretty much how the original is set up. As a requirement we needed to have some kind of harmony in the song; I sang the introduction as an a cappella arrangement.

A few weeks ago it was requested that I do a mashup of Radioactive and Royals (my family was on a Pentatonix binge and they happened to cover both songs). I definitely had more fun with this than I thought I would, and it was just challenging enough to still be enjoyable. The most annoying thing about mashups is figuring out a way to isolate the vocals, which is harder than you might think. Sometimes you can find the stems (groups of instruments; e.g. guitar stem, drum stem, vocal stem…) of a song somewhere online, but I had no luck with either track. Luckily, Royals is a pretty simple song, and it sounds like they just used an MPC or drum loop for rhythm. This was good news! Once I searched through the song and found a sample of just the drums (no singing), I was able to work my magic and remove the entire rhythm section. There’s a lot of boring numbers and explanations to go along with that process, but the important part is that I got the isolated vocals I needed.

So sit back, take a listen, and enjoy!