Today’s music/video insight is for the song “Words With Friends,” produced by ME!
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INSIGHT INTO A SONG:
During the week when I’m not working on a project, I’m usually playing “Words With Friends” on Facebook. I play it so much that I figured it would be worth me making a song about.
Writing the song itself fun; making the beat for it, though, was a chore. I wanted to use sound effects from the game to make the beat, but couldn’t find them available for download anywhere online. So, I had to go through the daunting task of playing the game against myself and recording the sounds as they came up.
The main sound in the song – which you first hear when the song opens up – was the last one I tried to get. I heard the sound once while playing, then couldn’t seem to get it to pop back up when I wanted to record it. I didn’t figure out until late in the process that I could get the sound by simply starting a game then resigning. Go figure.
Anyway… so, aside from the base drum and clap sound, every other sound – from the tapping to the bubbling up tile regeneration sound – are from the game. Once I got the beat, it was just a matter of figuring out what I wanted to talk about specifically in reference to how I play the game.
I’ve gotten into the habit now of taking more time when editing my songs. I’ll write a complete song, then sit on it for a minute and see if I can go back and take out things that were just okay to make room for something better. With that said, I re-wrote parts of this song quite a few times just to make sure I had a song that was funny and getting my point across (about just how much I like/play this game).
Some Interesting Song Tidbits:
1. I wrote this song at the very end of the week. How can you tell? The last line of the song has a mention to Don Cornelius’ passing. I won’t spoil it for you by telling you what the line is…
INSIGHT INTO A VIDEO:
I didn’t have much time to really create the video I wanted to create, especially since I had shot another video that week (for my “Rack City” parody, “Black President”) and didn’t really want to edit together another video involving a plot.
That’s why the majority of this video is just me standing in my room rapping the song, with the occasional shot here and there of different things happening. As I have discovered time and time again, though, even the most simplistic of videos take a while to edit. Between the 1-shot take of me rapping the song and the various pics used, I still put in a good 5 or 6 hours completing this video. Eh, go figure.
Anyway… that’s all for this week’s video. Check it out and enjoy!
-A.P.T.
