It Only Takes A Taste
Here's my cover of It Only Takes A Taste, from the musical Waitress. Featuring me on vocals, piano, accordion, alto sax, and... finger snaps 🤙.
Assorted random, possibly-uninteresting personal notes about this song:
I think this is the first recording of me singing anything, possibly ever. Basically from the age of 5 or so I've mostly been an instrumentalist (piano, then saxophone). At the beginning of college I was looking for a change from all the band stuff I had been doing, and ended up joining Db Singers, the choir arm of CMU C#. It really took four years with the infinitely better singers in the tenor section (side note: I'm not really a tenor, but the tenor draft claimed me as someone who has an E4) for me to even get comfortable with the idea of recording my own singing as main vocals. Fun fact: I had to go for a quick run to find the range to hit those high notes. I can't do it without cardio.
This is also my first arrangement involving accordion! One interesting thing I realized while recording - it's hard to tune to the accordion when you're using both middle reeds together ("violin" stop). This produces the characteristic "beating" or wavering effect... because the two reeds are slightly detuned from each other. In hindsight this is obvious just by thinking about it, but I can tell you it's even more obvious listening to my early takes. I started learning the accordion just over a year ago, and I have found that just like the piano, I am very capable of writing unplayable parts. My excuse for this is that I can't even sight-read normal accordion music, so maybe it'll get better over time.
The piano part is much more playable, because it's mostly copied from the piano reduction. The rest of the soundtrack is also really fun to play on piano, thanks to Sara Bareilles. The piano on the recording is actually a digital piano (Casio Privia PX830) that I bought off a guy who was moving out of town. Nice sounds and solid weighted keys. Yves, if you're reading this, thank you. It's a joy to play on.
The saxophone part is fun. I really like the sound of the saxophone-accordion harmony towards the end - gotta use that more in the future. Honestly, I haven't really played sax very consistently or seriously for five-ish years now, and I can feel it. My tone is worse than it used to be, I've definitely lost some of the technique it takes to play faster stuff. But I still consider it to be my primary instrument. I can just close my eyes and play. There is absolutely no friction between thinking a musical idea and playing it on the sax. I've never really been able to do that on the piano for more than a single line. At times I've felt it playing chords on the accordion, where the left hand - arranged in the circle of fifths - can play through chord progressions with just muscle memory in any key, which is exciting. I'm hoping that will develop more, since finding chords has always been a little hunt-and-peck deal for me.
In terms of recording it, all parts are recorded on an AT-2035 mic, through a Zoom H6, to my laptop running Audacity. A couple of technical blips with this setup (as always, using any hardware on Linux). First, if the Zoom is plugged into my laptop, then Audacity hangs on start. I didn't investigate this because I can just avoid it by starting Audacity before plugging in the Zoom. Second, there's an interesting effect where playback through the H6 is about a whole step down - I'm almost sure this is a 44.1k / 48k mismatch somewhere, but I didn't find an obvious way to fix it and I could just playback through the laptop directly. Audacity is perfectly fine for the fairly straightforward mixing I'm doing here. There aren't a lot of fancy effects or layers here - I think subconsciously I just want to be able to perform my music live. This would, unfortunately, require at least three clones of myself for this song... and if I had three clones of myself there's a lot more I would do first.
And some meta-commentary, I think this is the first music project I'm posting in over five years now. This is partly because of time constraints: in college I put all my time into buggy - rightfully so, because I have all the rest of my life now to do music while buggy is/was ephemeral. And partly because of reasons like self-doubt and whatever that I'll probably write more about soon. (Edit: that post is here). There's a lot of details that could be better in this recording, but I'm not agonizing over them and I won't re-record anything; I'm just happy to complete something after all this time. Anyways, I'm excited to get back into it and looking forward to more in the future!
Big thanks to Joanne and Andy for encouraging me and inspiring me in this music thing.