A few months ago I recreated some famous sculptures as part of the Getty Museum’s challenge, I enjoyed it so much that I thought I’d turn my hand to recreating other art mediums. Today was the day to recreate a song, more specifically, Song 2 by Blur.
I like this song, it’s fun to listen to and “woohoo!” along, but there’s no deeper meaning behind it than I thought it would be easy to recreate. I wanted to use my beatbox drum loop from a few weeks ago in this challenge, and it already sounded a little like the drum loop from Song 2 so I thought I was halfway there. Oh boy how wrong I was.
Music is not my strong point at all. I love it, but I can’t identify an instrument or rhythm from it which made this challenge pretty hard. Fortunately my husband is a musical genius, has a good knowledge of Garage Band, and teamed up with me to try and complete this challenge. It became clear after half an hour, that we wouldn’t be able to recreate the whole song in one day, so we settled for the iconic opening instead.
Garage Band has a library of instrument sounds that you can adjust and add effects to so you can get the sound just right. We used this for the guitar, but I was determined to put my beatbox drum sounds to good use, and add them instead of the applications sounds. I would have loved to have done the whole thing using just beatbox, but my guitar sounded so shocking, it’s probably best it wasn’t recorded. This drums required some heavy editing – not only because the pitch was so high, but just in order to get the rhythm just right. You can see from the picture below, how many different drum components (all in blue) there were.
Ultimately, I didn’t enjoy this very much. It was a long process of which I only understood minimal amounts, and my attention dipped a lot. However, I did have a lot of fun recording the “woohoo”s at the end, even if they did sound like Mario at some points! This was an interesting project, and I’m pleased that we did it, but I don’t think I can listen to Song 2 again.
New Day, New Thing 