Soundalike Reflection.

For our soundalike project, we found a vocalist and asked her to know who she sounds like. She gave names like Missy Higgins, Eva Cassidy, etc. So, we started looking for songs of these two artists. We just chose a song called “Where I stood” by Missy Higgins as it sounded great sonically and to the ears as well. It has a specific mixed vibe to it. We weren’t sure about the instrumentation yet but it seemed traditional as every other pop song and so we thought it won’t be that hard to recreate the sound. But as we critically listened to it repeatedly through different speakers and headphones, we came to know it won’t be a piece of cake!

According to the requirements, we’re to hand over the link of the song on YouTube to our artists who will be playing for us. The drums weren’t a problem for us as the drummer we were provided with was on time. The only problem we encountered with recording drums was there was a lot of leak from hi hats into the microphone that we used for snare top. It was an AKG414. The technique we used was recorder man.

We recorded vocals as well which didn’t sound as husky as the original one because of the mic choices that we had. But we selected the one that sounded the closest to it. Apart from that, there were many acoustic guitar licks in the song which was played successfully by the player. However, for the electric guitar, the amp was not turned up as it should be, but it was fixed later in the mixing session. After that, we recorded piano sounds using a keyboard of an artist who played for us well. There were little details and embellishments in acoustic guitar which we came to know about later after the recording was done. In terms of instrumentation, we touched pretty much everything except for minute details.

If I am doing a soundalike project in future, I’d make sure that to have proper contingencies sorted out so that even if any artist bails out, we can have someone to do the same. I’d also try to record everything perfect so that it doesn’t sound leaky or bad that cannot be fixed even by mixing. I’d also focus more on the file management as there were a lot of people in the group and so we had different ideologies in terms of everything.

https://soundcloud.com/kashish-mehta-497757461/missy-higgins-where-i-stood-soundalike-mp3