This assignment proved to be a lot harder than I initially predicted! I knew almost immediately after Cathy assigned it to us that I wanted to sing a cover of “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, as it was one of the first Beatles song I’ve ever heard and has always been one of my favourites. I toyed with the idea of making the song into a slower, more melodic cover, but after trial and error I realized I had to increase the tempo if there was any chance of me not singing
out of tune. Then I started off with the fun part: listening to the song a couple times and figuring out the solfege for the melody. This was relatively simple for the chorus and became slightly more challenging when it came to the verses, but it was fun to sing along with the song regardless! After I had the melody written out, I realized it was going to be a bit harder trying to fill in the other voices and listening to the song over and over and over again quickly grew tiring. Though the process was slow and tedious, I loved working on it and would unknowingly spend hours at a time trying to fit all the parts together. Recording the song was where I struggled the most; I couldn’t figure out how to sing in time with the other voices, kept singing the wrong pitches at the wrong times, and going out of tune. After some practice and a lot of recording attempts, I finally figured it out and was able to layer all the voices together. I’m really proud of the final copy but I also think there is lots of room for improvement as well. My tuning could be better throughout the song; I found I kept singing a little flat, especially after leaps in the solfege. Overall, however, I’m really happy with what I’ve created and feel significantly more comfortable and fluid with solfege than I did before!