Comparative Analysis - Cover Arrangement
For this task, I arranged and recorded a cover of Dead To Me by Kali Uchis in Logic Pro X on my laptop. I played an electric piano part on my keyboard, recorded vocals with a microphone, played a simple melody on an acoustic guitar, and added a few quiet synth software instrument parts to blend it all together.
I focused on duration and structure. Overall, my version was slower and less energetic than the original.
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You can listen to both versions here:
DURATION
Duration was now of the main concepts of music that I explored in my cover, and the main change I made to the duration was the tempo. The original song has a tempo of 119bpm, whereas mine is at 100bpm. Both versions are in 4/4 time and their rhythms are almost identical.
The original makes use of dotted polyrhythms to make it feel energetic, fast, and bouncy. For its majority, a bass synth plays a syncopated arpeggiated rhythm for each chord, but I chose to not include bass at all. I also removed the semiquaver pulse of hi hats in the chorus and the backbeat of kicks and snares. These both made my version sound more laidback and gentle, contrasting with the original.
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I removed all of the melodic and rhythmic details such as brass accents, adlib guitar, and dramatic strings from the original and simply played chords one note at a time on an electric piano in a dotted rhythm. I held each chord for two bars. This rhythm made the cover more interesting, and it also matches the rhythmic style of the original. Apart from the vocals, the only part I kept rhythmically (and melodically) identical to the original was a synth part that plays in the intro.
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I added some gentle synth ostinatos intermittently and one guitar part, all of which I made up. These also followed the rhythmic theme found in the original, except for one synth part which consisted of two tied semibreves per chord.
PITCH
The original song is recorded in the key of E minor. To make the song easier to sing so that my vocals would sound nicer, I transposed it down by one semitone, landing in D# minor.
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A lot of the vocals in the original are melodies accompanied by harmonies, but I decided to only sing harmonies in half of verse 2. Here, I simply sang the melody up a third.
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The chorus consists of a call and response pattern. In the original, the call is just the melody and the response is the melody and one harmony, but I decided to change this in my cover. For the response, I sang the melody in one track. But for the call, I sang the melody in one and then the same melody down an octave in two tracks. Then, I panned the two lower vocal tracks in each direction to give the cover some depth and dimension.
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The range stayed quite similar to the original, except for when I sang down the octave in the chorus.
STRUCTURE
Structure was another one of my main concepts explored. Since I was slowing an over three minute song by a significant amount, I decided I would have to adjust the structure so that my cover wouldn't become boring and repetitive.
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This is the structure of the original:
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Intro 1 - Intro 2 - Verse 1 - Chorus - Verse 2 - Chorus - Bridge - Chorus - Outro
Note: by "intro 1" and "intro 2" I don't mean that there are two intros, but rather that it is divided into two clear halves.
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This is the structure of my cover:
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Intro* - Verse 1 - Chorus - Verse 2 - Chorus - Bridge* - Outro*
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The sections marked with asterisks are the ones that I made alterations to.
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Intro - I halved the length of it.
Bridge - I halved the length of this too, and layered the call part of the call and response vocals from the chorus.
Outro - The original outro is eight bars long, but mine is twelve because I wanted it to have more time to fade out. I kept the call vocals once again for the first eight bars.
TEXTURE
Texture was not one of the concepts I focused on, although I may have unintentionally made the most significant changes to it. Matching its upbeat, bouncy duration, the general texture of the original is thick and polyphonic (however, the intro is homophonic and therefore thinner, and texture varies slightly with each section of the rest of the song).
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But my cover was slower and more laidback, so to compliment this, I thinned out the texture. The verses are the thinnest (with only electric piano and one or two vocal tracks) and can be considered homophonic, as can the introduction. Technically, the rest of the song is polyphonic since there are multiple parts, but the texture still feels rather thin because a lot of these parts are quite gentle, quiet, and/or subdued by a low pass filter. The thickest part is the second chorus, consisting of electric piano, four vocal tracks, two synth tracks, and one guitar track.
TONE COLOUR
The tone colour of my cover was drastically different to that of the original because I used some very different instrumentation.
The original consists of electric piano, vocals, soft synths and acoustic guitar, whereas the original consisted of many more synths (some stronger than the ones I used), a large range of percussion and drums, brass instruments, and strings. overall, it sounds bright, electronic, shimmering, brassy and clean.
My cover was more based around vintage electric piano, soft synths, vocals, and acoustic guitar. This made for a tone colour which was more warm, dark, muted, and almost haunting tone colour.
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Another change in tone colour was to do with the difference between Kali's voice and mine. Her voice is deeper, warmer, and fuller, and her general style of vocals is clearer and stronger. My voice is higher, airier, and sweeter than hers, and I tend to sing more gently.
DYNAMICS & EXPRESSIVE TECHNIQUES
The dynamic contour of the original song is interesting.
It is soft (piano) in the introduction, and starts verse one only slightly louder (mezzo piano). Halfway through the verse, there is a drum fill, transitioning into its moderately loud (mezzo forte) second half, with a syncopated bassline and drums. This dynamic level is maintained throughout the rest of the song, only becoming loud (forte) in the choruses, quietening slightly (mezzo forte) in the bridge, and returning to loud (forte) in the outro.