Week 3: Covering "Left Side" by Eloise

"Left Side" by Eloise is a typical broken-heart song. As I was working on this piece, I was reflecting on when my boyfriend and I hit our own rough patch this past spring. It can be hard to admit when you had something really good. Luckily, Mitchell and I didn't have to completely leave each other before we admitted that. It goes against our mental health to simply discard a relationship; we instinctively know that these relationships greatly increase our chance of survival. I think singing is such an emotionally heightened way of articulating these feelings of distress that we actually process them, and we feel heard, physically and metaphorically, when we share these songs with others.

This was my first attempt to use Soundtrap's beat-maker, and I would say it was pretty successful in that regard. Replicating a beat takes a different level of attention when listening to music; every genre influenced by African rhythms has subtle variations on how to organize rhythm, and getting one aspect wrong can throw off the entire musical effect. So I listen to the reference track at least a dozen times. I use Spotify to go to specific points in the song; when I am really desperate I will find the track on Youtube and slow down the playback speed. When I am intentionally listening to a song over and over again, I can feel my stress easing and my blood pressure dropping. I have Soundtrap's beat-maker depicted in a screenshot below.

I also think now is a good time to go over my current set up. There isn't really room in my apartment to keep a desk next to my keyboard, so I have the keyboard on its own stand, and I set my laptop on a music stand. I connect the keyboard to the laptop, which doubles as a power source for the keyboard. I usually pick an instrument from Soundtrap's digital library, and the keyboard sends the information like pitch, duration, and dynamics for Soundtrap to process and produce the actual sounds. 

Listen to the cover on Soundcloud.