Freestyle Academy proudly presents
The song I chose to parody was “99.9” by Mob Choir, the opening song to the popular anime “Mob Psycho 100: Season 2.” Funnily enough, I've never actually watched the show, but the opening song is super catchy and fun, and at the start of production I had been listening to it a lot so I chose to parody it. The production of the song required a bit of improvising; Mob Choir has multiple vocalists in it, however I am just one person, so I utilized a few of the tools in Audition to fill the gaps. The harmony vocals were relatively low-effort, I just sang over the original lead recording, about an octave up, and then minimized the gain to make sure that they didn't encroach on the lead vocals. For the crowd chants, I recorded just one take with normal vocals, then duplicated it two times for a total of three voices shouting the crowd chants. One copy is panned left (and pitched up 2 semitones), one copy is panned right (and pitched up down 2 semitones), and one copy is left untouched, however I used a chorus effect to add a few extra voices in the center of the stereo field. There was a bit of accidental tonality, but I think I managed to get the chants mostly right. Lastly, I tuned the gain + EQ on most of the vocals, applied a vocal-centric EQ curve to the mix (with the backing track bypassing said curve), and did some automatic phase correction to make sure that nothing was cancelling out in phase (I was getting phase cancellations early on in the recording process which sucked). If you're not a music nerd like I am: song has many vocalists, so I used effects to “multiply myself,” then did mixing shenanigans to make it sound nice.
The original song is about the main character of the show, Mob, finding himself and coming to terms with his existence. I totally flipped that on its head for my parody, which is sung from the perspective of the inner voice of an angsty teen that just started high school and is struggling to make friends. I wouldn't say I relate to that scenario 100%, but I am definitely not much of a social person and through my lyrics, I got to vent out some of my social anxiety. Additionally, this parody was a bit of a strange project for me, for the most part being that, while I like to sing, my voice is also a huge source of dysphoria. I have tried my hand at voice training, usually without much success (especially in singing), but I'm hopeful that in a few years from now, I'll be more confident in how my voice sounds.