by Josh Shirt – Head Mix / Mastering Engineer, Music producer, Instructor @ Shirty Mastering
“It’s Almost Like You Saw An Alternate Universe”
Within our Fort Collins Songwriters’ Workshop, I asked people to come forward who wanted to hear someone else reinterpret a song they’d made – and up stepped Katie and Christopher!
Katie had written a song called ‘Orb Weaver‘ (giving many references to the unique behaviors of this spider as analogous to human life). I asked her to hand it to Christopher in pieces, and she gave him:
- Her recorded music (an mp3 file of her strumming a guitar) with no lyrics
- Her lyrics as text only (devoid of musical pitch information and rhythm) – i.e. just words printed on paper
Christopher, having never heard Katie’s original song, then had the challenge of singing those lyrics over the top of Katie’s music – having to devise the placement, rhythm, and melody, from scratch!
Katie did exactly the same with Christopher’s song ‘Endless‘.
In this podcast you’ll hear the songs, before and after, and we talk about what happened in this process.
The Method Behind The Madness
When making music, or any type of art, it can be very useful to make multiple versions of the same piece of art to later compare them with a fresh perspective, to see which versions are the strongest.
Given that the creation process can feel so endless (pun intended), this type of comparison can help the artist to focus on what’s working – allowing them to do more of it.
This is often called an A / B comparison, but there’s no reason it can’t be extended to be an A, B, C, D, E etc comparison and it can be applied at any stage in the creative process – from comparing different stanzas of lyrics, to comparing different instruments used in a recording, to comparing different mixes of a song, to comparing different masters of a song.
In the case of this podcast, the experiment also allowed Katie and Christopher to experience new versions of their original songs coming from the perspective of a different artist- to allow them to compare and contrast what they already had and giving the possibility of creating a superior ‘hybrid’ version.
For me, setting this challenge was especially fun because the songwriters had never heard the originals of the songs they remade, so at the point they presented their new (blind) interpretations, they finally heard the originals, too! As Christopher put it well – “it’s almost like you saw an alternate universe where you’re like this could have been this”.