A cover of the Marty Robbins song by Kris O’Brien
When we were first told about this assignment, I thought to myself “I should just sing a cover of one of the songs I like because that sounds like a lot less work than interviewing someone.” Then I thought to myself, “Nah, I don’t want everyone to hear me singing – I sing all the time to myself but I don’t sing well!”
So I decided to do Option B and tried to find an artist to interview, but I kept putting it off and then when I actually started looking, I couldn’t find a current artist that I liked. So I went back to considering Option A.
Since we listened to it in class, The Ballad of The Alamo by Marty Robbins has been stuck in my head and at the top of my playlist. I considered whether or not I wanted to do that song or another of my favorites by Robbins, but I settled on The Ballad of The Alamo, mainly because I (thought I) knew all the words. A Marty Robbins song was also an easy choice because I had already done another assignment on him earlier in the semester.
So I sat down at my desk one afternoon with Marty Robbins karaoke pulled up on YouTube (the link’s below if you want to try it out yourself) and the Voice Memos app on my phone, as well as a free download of Audacity that I took no time to learn how to use.
Five or six terrible, horrible, no good, very bad recordings later and several minutes of cringing at the sound of my own voice and yelling at the AC unit that would kick on in the middle of a recording, I had one recording where I did not sound like a complete fool and hadn’t mispronounced any words.
Then using a completely legal process called “YouTube to MP3” to download the karaoke video, I layered my vocal track and the karaoke track in Audacity, played around with the track volumes, and produced the audio track below:
I had an interesting time making this final creative project. I do not consider myself the musical type, but I do like to sing. I find that I normally match the singing style of whoever’s song I’m singing, and I can hear that in my voice in my recording. I can also hear that I do sound as good as I thought I did before I started, so this was a very humbling experience. I will be drafting apology letters to anyone within earshot of me in the shower.
It was fun to adapt a song that I like from an artist that I like. It wasn’t the easiest or most comfortable thing for me to do, but I had fun laughing at myself for how cringy some of my takes where (not that my final take is any better, but my voice didn’t crack during the high notes in that take) and it was fun to hear the final project. For the culmination of a Music of Texas class, I am glad that I got to make something musical about Texas.
