Hive Open Mic Week #162|| 'Landslide' by Fleetwood Mac

Ok here's a real attempt at joining Hive Open Mic.

The girlfriend is away at her parents for the weekend so I've take the opportunity to sit around twiddling my thumbs, cleaning the floor and whatever else lonely people tend to do in their free time.

Finally, as the sun set, I realised it was a good time to try an Open Mic song, last minute here.

The theme is 'Be Okay' and I felt this song, which I taught as a song in my beginner guitar class, was pretty suitable as it does have some connection to me through the lyrics:

I've been afraid of changing, 'cause I built my life around you

This stuck with me, something I am guilty of. I want improve myself which is a positive change, but when it comes to changing location, apartment, country, job, career... I have certainly been procrastinating because I don't want to mess anything up and destroy the status quo. I'm happy, and all the concerns that haunted me deeply before, such as the whole dystopian country, communist politics, anti-white racism, they all kind of faded away. Now the haunting concerns come from that which is ahead of me. My home country, the 'cost of living', politics, broken family, and more.

So, if I just stay here and keep chugging away, everything will be okay.

But time makes you bolder even children get older and I'm getting older too.

Don't remind me! I'm approaching 36 which is depressing in itself but the last year or so I've really gotten bolder with my 'responsible adult' vibes. I've been financing and planning more deeply than ever before, something very uncharacteristic of me when compared to the previous 34 years. I've grown a greater understanding in the last year about how the world works economically than ever before, whereas I would instead learn to understand people, psychology, and science around me and the world beforehand.

I suppose I really grew up when I realised it's up to me to make sure in the future, we will be okay.

So yeah, that's how I figure it was relevant.

If you saw my blog before, I emphasised the point that I am growing a heavy distaste for manufactured, heavily produced music. Autotune is ok when done tastefully, but it rarely is. Often, even in the multi-billion dollar industry chart toppers such as Bieber and Swift, I can hear that autotune lazily stitching shitty vocals together. Once you hear it, you can't un-hear it.

I really appreciate a good singer expressing their music with flaws. Hell, even a bad singer can express emotion that touches the heart without the need to go through years of training. Bob Dylan, and Radiohead's Thom Yorke are pretty bad singers but their voices are famously distinct and loved.

Now I'm no pro when it comes to singing (or anything really lol) but I'm more capable than those two, yet lack the character that makes their voices so timeless. I've been trying to change that recently in what little time I have for such endeavours.

So, I did not use Autotune or take multiple edits in this recording. I simply added a bit of reverb for mood, and EQ'd a bit of the muddy low frequencies out. A combined 7 seconds of effort.

I made sure I was comfortable rather than concerning myself with warm-ups, tone and posture as I would in my choir class, and just made an enjoyable, stress-free recording. Another 'be okay' connection there.

However, I did, out of curiosity, use Melodyne (basically autotune) to scan my vocals, just to see how in-tune or out my singing was, given it was done in a single take. To be honest, not bad at all!

Where the top says -9ct, that means '9 cents' or 9% out of tune. if you divide a single pitch, say, 'C' into 100 chunks of pitch before you get to C#, this note was 9 chunks out.

This is mostly imperceptible to humans. A regular person might just be able to distinguish 10 cents, and if you're musical, perhaps 5. If properly trained, 2 or even 1 is supposedly possible but I'm skeptical.

You can test yourself at the bottom of this wiki article, there are 3 examples with different amounts of cents out of tune.

A few clicks suggested I was averaging about 11-15 cents sharp which in a musical context was negligible.

Other than the obvious bummed up notes. But that adds flavour.

This particular section averaged about 4 cents out:

So that's pretty cool.

Anyway, Enjoy!