(Attempting To) Harmonize With Myself

Since I do not have a lot of experience with Audacity, I wanted to do an assignment that would challenge myself and would give me time to mess around in the program to familiarize myself with it a bit. I decided to do the assignment “Solo Vocal Trio” because it sounded fun yet complex at the same time.

Since the assignment calls for you to sing a song in your natural vocal register, I had a bit of a hard time deciding which song I wanted to sing. I know a lot of songs, but most of the ones I wanted to sing were too complicated. At first I wanted to sing “It’s a Kind of Magic” by Queen, but the harmonies prevented me from successfully doing this in one sitting. I am interested in going back and attempting to harmonize with myself by singing a song with multiple parts like this song, but since I am not familiar enough with Audacity, I backed off it. My second choice ended up being something by Fleetwood Mac, since there are many songs where Stevie Nicks or Christine McVie sang solo. “Oh Daddy” was my first choice, but I subconsciously sing at a higher note when attempting that song, so I moved on to “Dreams” only to discover a similar issue.

At this point I was a bit worried I wouldn’t be able to find a song I could sing without my voice cracking. Then, it hit me. I know a lot of songs by Crooners, and their natural deep dulcet tones are easy for me to match without running out of breath or straining my voice too much.

So, I decided to sing one of my favorite songs, “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” by Dean Martin.

From there I recorded myself three separate times in Audacity, making sure to listen to the song in my headphones while doing so to make up the times. I then layered each of the audio recordings over each other. I had a little difficulty lining them up, since there was differing lengths of silence at the beginning of each recording. I modified the outputs on each of the recordings, sliding one all the way to the left, another all the way right, and balancing the last in the middle. Afterwards, I was so happy with myself for doing this that I decided to add music. I obtained a karaoke version of the song from YouTube and lined it up with the lyrics and voila! A new file of me singing “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head” three times over!

Unfortunately, the Sound Cloud Police wouldn’t let me upload the version accompanied by music. It got claimed so fast my head swam. Fortunately they don’t appear to have an issue with the plain vocal version, which can be found on my Soundcloud. Thankfully I was able to upload the version with music to YouTube without them taking it down or muting the audio. Both versions are embedded in this post. Please give either or both a listen and comment what you think down below!