Since my girlfriend was out tonight for some work-related grand opening.
Despite having 800 things I needed to do, I seized this opportunity to do some recording on guitar.
Here I present I'm a Stranger now by The Tallest Man on Earth
I don't normally have the time to do this at home because I tend to prioritize my time with her, given that by the time we're both home, there's only the second half of the evening left. So yeah, I don't do it much.
And you can tell. Just look at the video lol. Any musician will be cringing:
Not only am I using a terrible choice of microphone for vocals, but I'm dangling it precariously on the wrong support, the pop shield is incorrectly placed, the positioning is terrible. I'm wearing open-back headphones for a recording, A Cordoba is definitely not the right guitar either. Probably a whole host of other things. Not to mention I hadn't even spoken for about 8 hours so my voice was somewhat crappy, I even had to lower the capo a good 3 frets or so.
I don't really have a setup for my music in this apartment. Bad Feng Shui and no time. So yeah I just threw this together.
To be honest I only ever heard this song a couple of times. I certainly didn't know the lyrics which is why you can see me constantly look down at the screen. The guitar part is somewhat of an estimation, too!
My point here is not to make excuses. I think the performance is fine really. I just want to encourage music for the fun of it. I'm quite sick of 'perfected' music, with heavy autotune and atomically-quantized beats. There's something nice about the rawness of music like this. The imperfections, the failures, mistakes. It's easier to connect to.
So yeah, despite all the issues and rush, I went with it anyway since I wanted to join Hive's Open Mic for a change, and when I saw the theme was 'A Good Friend', this song spoke to me. Start the clock. I only got a brief window!
Enjoy:
[Removed cuz a proper rendition will be created soon]
'I'm a stranger now' has some meaning in this context for me, as my friends in England who I grew up with for many years, spent every day, entire summers and beyond together, are now distant vestiges of what once was. I moved abroad, and moved for so long (13 years now), that, well... I'm a stranger now.
I don't know their wives and their children. I never attended their weddings, I don't know anything really. The song, however, is seemingly more specifically about a partner. But whatever, I can interpret it how I like.
For anybody interested, the tuning is FACFAF. Tallest Man on Earth is notorious for his altered tunings.
I didn't do any autotuning or other editing other than adding an amplifier plugin to the guitar, and some reverb.