Musicianship Project Reflection

     This semester, I, along with my group members Theresa Perez (whose reflection can be found here) and Jacob Reeves (whose reflection can be found here), developed a cover of P!nk's What About Us. We developed this cover completely by ear, which was a relatively new experience for me. Our final project can be viewed here.
     Our group approached this project by first looking through a list of the Billboard Hot 100 hits. We then found a song that was approachable at our current level but not overly simple and one that also had a good message. Once we decided on a song, we listened to it to determine what parts we needed and who could do each part. It was decided that I could handle piano, Theresa could cover vocals, and Jacob could cover percussion. We then learned our parts individually and recorded the parts once we felt comfortable enough to do so. A big issue that we encountered upon recording was staying with one another. We did have cases of illness while attempting this project, which made it fairly difficult to get together. This is where being able to record individually was useful. However, we found it difficult to begin with a backing track, so we tried to set the tempo with piano and listen to that recording to do the rest of the parts. However, this did not work incredibly well, as we ended up out of sync with one another. In the end, we got back together, but the recording could use some improvement. If we were to revisit this assignment, I think a better way to approach it would be to get together to practice our parts as an ensemble. This would have given us a better idea of what the tempo needed to be and what parts needed improvement. I would also say that we could try to use a metronome as a backing track, rather than the recording of the song; this would have allowed us to begin playing or singing when we felt appropriate but also stay together.
     This project enriched me as a musician, as I am a vocalist - not a pianist. However, I felt comfortable enough with this song to attempt piano. This project forced me to use my ears to learn something other than the vocal melody - something I am not used to doing. This stretched my ears and led me to better musicianship as a whole. I was also forced to practice the piano more than I normally would in order to learn this song properly. While the piano in this song is generally the same throughout the song, the nature of our recording software required me to play for a full five minutes. Playing a song this long is not something that I do often, so this also stretched me as a musician. A big issue that I had when approaching this project was playing the song straight through without messing up. In the final recording, I mess up a chord one time, but this was the cleanest recording I was able to get. While I could play the song successfully, piano is not my main instrument, and play a full song was difficult for me. In addition, I did have some issues with tempo since we were struggling to use a backing track. If I were to attempt this project a second time, I would use a metronome as a backing track so that I could keep myself on track without trying to play with a recording in my ears. I would also practice more before attempting to record, as I had to record many times before getting a nice run-through.