New Year's Resolution - Hotline Bling

The Challenge

For information on the New Year's Resolution Challenge that started all this, with a video of me singing "Bitch Better Have My Money" by Rihanna in four part harmony with a ukulele, CLICK HERE. The short version: Cover the #1 song in iTunes for every month of 2015. You can hear them all on THIS PLAYLIST.

The Tune

I have absolutely no business covering Drake. It just doesn't make any sense. Me covering Drake would make about as much sense as Drake making a bluegrass album. It's just way out of character; entertaining, perhaps, but not what you'd expect.

Having said that, I enjoyed this tune a lot more than I thought I would. There's not much to it, structurally, but it's a lot more heartfelt than I expected, and emotional authenticity goes a long way with me. I worked out the arrangement of this tune on the couch, playing Mr. Entertainer, while some of my wife's grad school friends were visiting. It turned out okay.

The Tech

Here's where I screwed up, and why the video isn't as good as I wish it was... I put a guide track, a metronome, in where the vocal goes, so I could record the instrumentals to a click. That worked great, until I had to take the click out to record the vocal, and then sing the song with nothing but clicks and thumps and weird stuff going on to guide me. That's why the vocal isn't in great time, but at this point it was about 2AM and I was damned if I was going to do the whole thing over again. Moral of the story: be more careful with your guide tracks, dumbass.

The Schedule...

From here on in, I'm dropping these videos/blog posts once per week, on Mondays. Check back! New stuff every week.