I chose Dead to Me for a few reasons. It's a song I've liked for a few years and it's lots of fun to sing since it has such interesting melodies. I admire the production in particular and how upbeat and fun the song is. That's why I thought it would be interesting to make a slower and more stripped back version, similar to the acoustic version performed by Kali Uchis.
My cover will have thinner texture than the original thick texture and no bass or percussion. It'll be slower than both the original and acoustic versions, and I'll have different instrumentation too. I'll play the chords on an electric piano, sing the melody and harmonies, write some subtle synth parts and play some guitar intermittently. The two concepts I'll be exploring are duration (slowing the tempo) and structure (altering the structure to keep it at a normal length and make it more engaging).
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The original song has a structure of intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, outro. In my cover, I'll remove the last chorus and merge it with the bridge, while also halving the length of the intro. I will play it at 90bpm as opposed to the original 119bpm.
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The original has lots of synths, drums, a punchy bass synth, stringed instruments and many vocal tracks. To contrast with this, my cover will simply have electric piano, some soft synths, a bit of guitar, and a few (7) vocal tracks. This means the texture of my cover will be thinner than in the original.
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I recorded my cover in Logic Pro X, utilising multi-tracking. I used my microphone to record vocals and my lead to usb cord to directly record guitar. I recorded electric piano by plugging my keyboard into my laptop as a midi input and I quantised the notes slightly to keep everything perfectly in time. I brought the velocity of the notes down a bit to make them sound gentler.
I used a lot of reverb plugins, especially on vocals, and played with the EQ of many tracks including the output track. The reverb made my voice sound smoother and as if it were in a huge, empty room. EQ enabled me to pinpoint exactly how I wanted each track to sound in tone colour.
Task #2 - Cover Arrangement Portfolio
For this assignment, I created a cover of Dead To Me by Kali Uchis on Logic Pro X using my voice, guitar (played and recorded as an audio track), keyboard (played on a keyboard plugged into Logic), and miscellaneous software instruments such as synths (played on musical typing in logic due to their simplicity).
You can listen my final arrangement, view the full score, and listen to the score to the right. Below are links to my weekly reflections and comparative analysis.
