Music Recording
Introduction
For this project, we were tasked with being the producers for a music production with a local musician. We as Freestyle students were meant to be in the recording studio, guiding the Artist through the recording process, and later mixing and editing the track. I chose to work with my friend and classmate, Karen Chien, a talented and creative artist, dancer, and performer. We worked together to facilitate a recording of the song “Under Our Spell” sung by our artist/musician, Saumya Anand
The Artist
Saumya Anand is an up-and-coming musician with an ethereal, angelic voice. She attends Mountain View High School, and sings in their advanced choir group, the Madrigals. With a lead role in a musical every year in her high school career, she is also a accomplished contributor to the MVHS theatre community. She has two published songs, with more on the way, and she is pursuing a career in the musical theatre industry.
▶ Under Our Spell
⏸ Under Our Spell
For this project, we used the recording studio to help our artist, Saumya Anand, record a cover of the song “Under Our Spell” from the My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks Movie. All three of us, including Saumya, have been fans of My Little Pony since we were children. The franchise, as well as this movie in particular, are near and dear to our hearts. Rainbow Rocks is a movie that inspired a love for music in each of us, and for this project, we wanted to recreate that magic as best we could.
This song was originally sung by the Dazzlings, a group of evil sirens in the movie, and involves a decent amount of harmony as well as multiple voices singing in unison. Using ProTools, as well as the recording studio here at freestyle, we were able to record Saumya singing each of the parts of this song, along with the harmonies, as well as some new harmonies of her own.
We then used those recordings as well as a backing track from the original song, and we cut and spliced different versions of the clips together. We used panning and reverb to add more dimension to the song, and make it more interesting. We used Melodyne to do a few pitch corrections, and an EQ-band to make the voices sound more like a pop song, and as if they were coming through microphones. We then added a couple sound effects to add to connect the song to the world of the original story.Overall, we are really happy with the end product. The song sounds different from the original, but in a unique and equally as interesting way. There are some things we added that the original didn’t have, which we think make the song even better. There were a few harmonies that we missed, so next time we would want to find a way to include them, but otherwise, we are very proud of what we have made.
I believe that I learned a lot with this project. I had a lot of fun collaborating with Karen and Saumya, and it was very fun to cut and splice clips together to create a super cool transition each time. I wish that we had recorded earlier so that we could maybe rerecord the harmonies we missed, but otherwise I am very satisfied with our end result.
