I was noticing the other day that some songs I like are done by talking with the music rather than by singing. In the songs I am listening to the talking is not the entire song but it takes the place of singing in parts. My favorites so far are:
Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy by Big and Rich – now this one I didn’t hear the talking right away. The one guy is constantly singing the lyrics while the other mostly speaks the lyrics, but he does it in such a melodic way, like he’s a newscaster- (listen to the news sometime and notice this, I’ll get to it more in a minute) anyway where was I? Oh yeah so Big and Rich talk and sing simultaneously and it just sounds really good. I should look into more of their music. That talking thing is gold.
Convoy by C W McCall and Black Bear Road C W McCall – I like the entire album actually. My parent have it at their house so don’t ask me the name. This type of talking is more like he is telling a story that there just happens to be music along to which for some reason works. Maybe it’s the deep voice again. Those get me everytime. Vocal stuff from a guy is always impressive.
Pete Seeger story songs – these are really off the edge of what you’d call straight songs. He really is telling a story and music happens to be included. I think of them as stories rather than songs (maybe in a addition to songs?) and I only included them because I think Seeger is cool and because I like to have three examples for something.
So in an earlier post I said I wasn’t going to explain the T-Pain sound but lucky for you I lied. Here go the explanation. When this rapper guy T-Pain sings, he uses a mechanism called autocorrect. It adjusts the pitch of your voice in real time to what it assumes you meant to sing. Usually this means that a half a second after you hit any pitch, it is slid up slightly to be exactly in tune with whatever key the autocorrect has chosen for you. It sounds like your voice is cracking or echoing back a little different, and it also sounds electronic-y like it belongs in a pop or rap song. (hey it does!) Now you can get it as an app on the iphone and toy with it for yourself. Dan did just this (ask him about it he’s very excited) and at the same time both of us learned all about autocorrect. We discovered that it doesn’t always work, you have to sing a certain way. Also the way newscasters talk – with a bit of a pitch to their voice – is good for autocorrecting. In fact there are a number of videos of songs created by autocorrecting and sampling the news. They sound just like pop songs.
One for the road!
I wrote the word Chocolate in big letters on the dry erase board. I really want to eat chocolate but right now I am back to my conservative diet (trying to get gastroparesis under control) and chocolate is not on the list. So I wrote it on the board because I’m thinking about it and seeing it there makes me happy. Today the town shut off our water for 6 hours. We were warned in advance and I knew we would need to shower the night before. So on the dry erase board I wrote ‘Shower at night’ and seeing how I wanted to leave the word Chocolate, I wrote ‘Shower at night’ underneath. (following so far?) I called to remind Dan to take a shower at night because of the water shut down and his comment was, “Oh that’s what you meant! I thought it was time for chocolate showers today.” Ha ha. Dan, I love you.