Freestyle Academy proudly presents
I had to think for a while before being able to figure out what to do for my parody song. There were many that I considered, but couldn’t quite figure out a direction that didn’t make it sound childish or overly-idiotic. Eventually, I was listening to "Strangers in the Night" and made a quick joke about how if that were me, I probably would not have approached them. That got me thinking about how an introvert, like me, might react to a "Stranger in the Night" and write the lyrics I did to the song. The issue that came along with this was the fact that worded the wrong way, it sounded creepy. I tried to counter this with the lyrics of a friendly stranger—their specific actions—instead of simply the thoughts of the speaker. Panicking about someone looking at them might sound creepy or dangerous, but paired with a handshake and introducing her name, it clarifies the fear is about conversation. The person is being friendly and nice in order to talk, not for a more sinister purpose. Therefore, the emphasis is on the awkwardness of the situation (as sung about later) in the speaker’s head. More specifics like the "stranger" being a "neighbor" came later to add more relatability and realism to the song. Most strangers you meet and talk to will probably be someone you vaguely know and talking to neighbors is an especially common one that fits well within the lyrics and the character. I’m proud I was able to take a very romantic and dreamy song and turn that on its head with the lyrics. The comedy comes out of that romantic and realistic clash.
Editing was entirely different story and probably the place I grew the most. Mainly because my song was difficult to remove the lyrics of for entirely different reasons than I was expecting. When I had removed lyrics previously, the challenge came from trying to get the high notes of the musician’s voice out of the instruments with various tricks in the first half of the process, like the shifting and inverting of tracks. However, with this song, the voice was in the bass range. The inversion eliminated it completely, but also much of the music, so I had to find the right balance between adding those bassier instruments in and limiting Sinatra’s voice. I realized how difficult it is to really eliminate specific elements from audio and then add others in and have it sound like it belongs. There are a ton of tiny little tweaks that one must do to get it perfectly right. I plan to go into film later on and ADR is a huge part of that. Learning to edit different noises into whatever I’m working on is a big part of that immersion. I never truly got to master it with this project (my reverb and echo is off, the overall voice doesn’t blend, and there is still too much of Sinatra), but it certainly helped me start and be able to see how much work and effort goes into audio alone.