Freestyle Academy proudly presents
Coming into this project, Reed and I already knew we wanted to be partners off the bat, but weren’t quite sure what song to sample our parody off of. After giving it some thought, Reed remembered an old song he had been listening to recently: Scream and Shout by will.i.am. The flow of the lyrics is nice and we know we could form something together that worked and somewhat complemented our vocal ability. Initially, when we started writing it, we were brainstorming super basic on the surface ideas, but, we wanted something a lot funnier and childish. Hence, we came up with the idea to incorporate Chuck E. Cheese, a child restaurant. Neither of us have ever really wrote lyrics or produced any kind of song, so this project was a big first for us. Singing anything in general, has never been any of our strong suits, so we kind of stepped out of our comfort zones and grew into an area we haven’t enjoyed previously. Additionally, both of us were able to learn a lot more about various softwares like Pro Tools. As you start to dig into the different features of the application it seems very complicated, but with the help of Mr. Florendo, we were able to learn the software and experiment with the different features and sound effects.
We not only came across problems in Pro Tools, but also while recording. Because we have never created a song before, we weren’t sure how to go about the process of producing and recording the song. Both of us had to re-record our parts numerous times for us to come across one we really were fond of. However, once we actually recorded our lyrics, without a doubt, the hardest part was putting it all together in Pro Tools. Nowadays, it is so easy to get used to everything being done with the click of a button, immediately, exactly how you want it. On the contrary, Pro Tools is a lot more complex. Once you actually apply one of the effects, like an EQ, you have to go into the pop-up and experiment with the different frequencies and filters until you find the perfect one. This process took us about 45 minutes throughout the whole project as we were fine tuning it, which is a lot more time than we predicted. If we were given the chance, we would’ve written the entirety of the song instead of a couple verses. We also would’ve changed how the song came out if we had more knowledge and experience with the software. For example, we would have made the beat more prominent for sure and we also would have done some more fine tuning of our voices and annunciation.
I’m most proud of how we matched the lyrics to the beat without having to do much audio editing. Going back and listening to ours and comparing it to others in breakout rooms, we believe we did a good job of timing our lyrics to the beat. In our elective classes we can both use the experience that we gained using Pro Tools to create professional audio for projects. This project changed the way we see other art because we are much more empathetic of others that are doing the same project. Seeing that we ran into many issues along the way, it gave us a new understanding of how difficult art can be to create, ultimately, giving me a lot more respect for each artist and their piece.