Freestyle Academy proudly presents
This project was mainly inspired by the fun attitude of the class when we talked about parody songs. I thought that it would be funny and interesting to try to take Rick Asley’s hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" and turn its main message into the exact opposite one than it was striving for. I did this by replacing and adjusting some of the lyrics. For example, instead of "Never gonna give you up," I wrote "I’ll just give you up." This was not the most clever idea, and it was not very original, as I later found out. I do, however, think that it worked for the project, and that it fit with its overall theme.
As I worked on this project, I became more proficient with many different applications and workflows. I learned how to download songs off of Youtube to use in Pro Tools, and how to import them into it as well. I also learned how to record my own voice, how to edit out mistakes, and how to use my microphone to record lyrics. My main challenges included my microphone, as my voice was usually not loud enough to be heard over the song. This took me a while to fix, but after some gain manipulation in Pro Tools, the issue was mostly fixed. I still have to work on my overall tone and posture to make my recordings sound more professional and consistent. I struggled finding the right plugin to add reverb in Pro Tools, and I still think that I need to familiarize myself with the overall plugin suite more.
There are many things that I would like to be able to change now. I would probably want to re-record my "singing" as I find that I stumbled over the lyrics too much, making it very difficult for a listener to understand what I am saying. I would also write in a few more lyrics to really express the new message of the song better. I am not particularly proud of anything I did in this project, however I recognize that it was very hard for me to let myself go and "go crazy" with the singing/songwriting. I am very interested in making more music in the future, and I will use this experience to better my ability for future projects. This project opened my eyes to the difficulties of using such a complex program as Pro Tools, and helped me appreciate the average song just a little bit more.