The music in my mind

I asked my daughter's viola teacher once, am I the only person who walks through life with a soundtrack in my head? There is always a song in my head. Always. I have proposed many an orchestra version of songs I hear. One time, I came in and said, "What about Justin Timberlake's What Goes Around... Comes Around?" I hear all the string instruments in my head. I can tell you when bass and cello start, when violins come in, which parts viola can take. I think that maybe I just lack the technical knowhow to make these music productions come to life. I also need to learn to play these instruments or do I? Hmmm.

For Project50, I do a lot of tinkering with arrangements. It isn't so much a showcase of *ahem* vocal prowess, or me the guitar virtuoso, but a reimagining of songs. When I take a piece that was originally recorded by a male singer, sometimes I need to change the key and adjust it to my range (or lack of hahaha). One song that I couldn't get out of my head is a dance track that I envisioned totally stripped down. I just fell in love with the concept. I couldn't get a certain line out of my head and I kept hearing like, a run I could do with it. I was also thinking, this is a great way to bring together the music I like and the music that my husband likes. Mr. Electronic, right? I performed the song for him, because I was so excited to hear his thoughts, and I can't tell you the flood of emotions that came to me when I realized that he didn't know the song I was singing. He thought I was singing With or Without You by U2. I was not. Totally not. More on this later.

An old logo I found online

Honestly, the concept right now is MTV Unplugged. If you remember that, you must be my age <laugh> I have a few favorite MTV Unplugged albums that I'd totally love to just fangirl about. But if you're unfamiliar, MTV Unplugged was a program that they had on the MTV channel and they have artists performing live, with acoustic instruments. These performances are recorded and released as an album later on. Admittedly, I have such a limited repertoire that so much of this year will be spent learning songs to beef that up. If I could, I will record all of them as guide tracks and I can deal with figuring out what makes the album and what doesn't later on, and also, in what order they should appear. Worst case, this is going to end up an album of guide tracks recorded as live with a one mic set-up. Mental note, I need more hard drive space. Or an external drive. I figure that if I get better at it, I can think about re-recording everything later, with instrument and vocals as separate tracks and then mixing down. Yep, I need that hard drive. 

It's really kind of cool, I realize now, that we lived through all the format changes. Back in the day, we listened to entire albums on cassette tapes because it was too tedious to have to rewind and forward to skip songs we didn't love. Later cassette players had an auto search function and you could forward to the next track or rewind the song that you wanted to loop. Before that was vinyl. Oh it takes practice to find specific spots on those records. We had a record player at home and before we got all the mini component systems or boomboxes to play cassettes, my sister usually bought the latest Madonna record and I could play them. I knew how to use the turntable! When I went to college, the radio production studio was so archaic, we were using turntables to play DJ. It was so, so sad because after class I would go to my job and we didn't even have a turntable in the booth. If we had any songs whatsoever that would be played on air and it came from vinyl, the music librarian or one of the production guys could move the song to another format. The thing that outlasted them all was the CD. When Philips came out with the very first CD player, my dad bought one in Singapore, I think. And we were the only household that I knew had a CD player. You couldn't even buy the CDs locally so he had to get those in Singapore too. There was an Elton John one. I loved it. 

Well, that was a fun trip down memory lane. I could show you some old equipment one of these days. If you've never heard of the mini disc, I have that and I'll shoot some photos and tell you about it another time. For now, it's me and Apple Music, where we all create our own playlists, like little music programmer ants, each with their own radio station. I have to wonder how the playlist has now affected the idea of "the album" or concept albums... or album concepts? So, if everyone is walking around with their own playlists, oh wait, we can share playlists. Ok, nvm. Wow. Just look at where we are now.

Playlist Recommendation: What Goes Around... Comes Around (Radio Edit), Justin Timberlake