The Acappellapedia Blog

You know, what the hell! Let’s do another homebrew arrangement!

So, for anybody who looks at this site, slash cares at all, I got into college a few weeks ago (HOORAY!) and suddenly find myself with time to so much more fun stuff than I ever had! Like this site, for example… let’s not kid ourselves, it hasn’t been exactly updated in a LONG, long time. But I refuse to be extinct! I refuse for this site to be deemed obsolete in a world of more and more blogs. All hail freedom of speech for whomever the hell decides to listen!

Anyway, this arrangement is one for my group, Don’t Panic, which we first performed a few months ago… it’ll be on the upcoming CD we’re releasing which I’m SUPER excited about, but for now, here’s the arrangement! For those of you interested in performing it, the arrangement just goes up to the second chorus… we skipped the crazy MIDI solo in the middle, and just added in something we made up as an intermediary. I’ll explain/write it down if you email me. I went a little crazy on articulation markings, but ah well… Anyway, enjoy!

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Song Artist Album Download:

Kids MGMT Oracular Spectacular Finale 2009- Kids

Sorry for the confusion, but look no further, acappellapedians- this is simply a link for my group to get the score for rehearsal. The full article will be up soon, courtesy of Appogiasaurus… thanks guys!

Viva la Vida

 Hello all you acappellers out there! I’m a new writer for this superb blog, a friend of jacres’ in his a cappella group. I’ve had this arrangement sort of in my back pocket for a few weeks, just procrastinating writing the actual article.

The song is Slow Me Down by Emmy Rossum. It’s a very nifty song, with it’s arpeggios and bell chords and loveliness, perfect for adapting to a cappella since, in actuality, the whole song is already made by just Emmy’s voice. Certain amount of changes had to be made to adapt it to a mixed arrangement; For instance, the top-heaviness of the song which is attributed to its lack of a strong bass(base) had to be sacrificed. The 7 part “accompaniment” wouldn’t be able to fit in a middle range, and thus the sopranos would have to be way up in the stratosphere… It would be an unbalanced mess.

Other changes I made… I took most of the little harmonies that are actually in the song, but I also added some additional ones. Also, I’m pretty sure verses 1 and 2 are the exact same accompaniment in the song, so to make it more interesting I made some adjustments to the second verse. In the actual song, there are a lot of small echos that are hard to pinpoint, so I added a few of my own that will make the song that much more interesting. I also made the third verse more of a runoff at the end, tying in some themes from earlier in the song, and the final chord is something to celebrate.

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Song                                      Artist                 Album           Download:

Slow Me Down                    Emmy Rossum    Inside Out

This is a post mainly for those of you who are currently using my site as a learning tool for EFA, in which case- congratulations on finding it! I’m actually really really excited about getting this whole thing started as quickly as we can- you all sounded great for a first rehearsal! I know my tabs at the top are kinda hard to read at the moment (my knowledge of HTML is not exactly stellar), but it’s the tab up there that says Broadway Cares/EFA! that will get you right to where you wanna go. I’ll be updating that portion of the site after every rehearsal, and I may go ahead and upload a few songs ahead of schedule, just in case you want to practice for the next month. Also, PLEASE TELL whomever you can about what we’re doing here- the more the merrier! Thank you guys!

And for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about… our school is doing a fundraiser for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids in May by hosting a Gala, where we sing, dance, and do all that jazz from all sorts of musicals, past and present. It should be a night of laughter and fun, and the proceeds all go to EFA’s fund for Aids research.

Well ok fine, it’s actually been more like a month… but who’s counting! In truth, Windows 7 was not exactly the best thing to install on my computer, or the beta version rather- in a strange twist of events, after randomly partitioning my hard drive, it won’t start up anymore. Great. I’m reinstalling Windows as we speak, but this has proved more of a hassle than anything else. Nothing against Windows 7 though- though I have a few things to say against installing Windows 7 on laptops from 2004. In the meantime, I’m using this very cute (and dare I say sexy) netbook… it’s absolutely excellent for blogging. I mean, you’re not gonna go play Call of Duty IV on it, but everything else works wonderfully…

Ok ok, enough sidetrackingness! Up this week I have an arrangement of The Blower’s Daughter by Damien Rice, arranged by yours truly with inspiration from the Trojan Men’s version. I say inspiration and not re-arranging because that’s actually what I intended to do in the first place: I found a copy of the song on the site www.singingisfree.org, run by the wonderful Evan Bregman, that they did a few years back. I was planning from the start to just re-arrange song for mixed, and I emailed him about doing so… but when I realized what I wanted to do with the song and how it was different from the arrangement, I started changing things left and right. I’m ashamed to say that only four measures in the song survive my hacking and revisioning, in that those are the only ones that look even remotely similar to the original. So in a sense, I failed miserably in adapting the song for mixed… but the end product sounds very nice (well, on paper at least- we’ll see how the group handles it).

I tried to address some of the issues of Bregman’s version he mentioned, like the fact that it’s difficult to tune because of the sustained pitches between chord changes. My group is an octet as well, so I had a lot of room to maneuver (especially in the upper voices), and I tried a new idea of changing the chord even as the initial chord is played, essentially having each voice move from one chord to the next of their own accord (no pun intended. Seriously. Total accident). It gives the beginning section a bit of an ebb and flow to it, and hopefully it will keep my singers in tune because nobody stays on the same note for very long.

All this to say that I’m SUPER grateful to Evan for letting me use and mark up his arrangement- it’s such a beautiful song in its simplicity, and I really am looking forward to hearing how it turns out. Here’s the whole thing:

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Song                                      Artist                 Album           Download:

The Blower’s Daughter     Damien Rice        O            The Blower’s Daughter Final

Does this one need much explanation? Unless you’ve lived in a cave for the past three months, the king of pop has died in a horrific medical accident, and the world may never quite be the same.  Emotional stirrings aside, Michael Jackson is perhaps the most well-known and successful singers of our time, and you don’t need me to tell you that. And… I can’t quite say enough good things about Kurt Schneider’s arrangement here, or Sam Tsui’s vocals, or his multitracking, or… yep, this medley does the man so much justice. His youtube posting offers the SATB arrangement up for free if you email him (dangerous stuff, Kurt) but take a look at the finished product. Very well done.

Got another arrangement of this song you wanna share? Comment below!

Let’s face it, folks- there’s no way I’ll be able to ignore the King’s Singers for much longer. Heck, I’m surprised that I’ve been able to do stave it off for this long. You just cannot match them… in pretty much any category. Musicality, talent, originality, variety… and, especially, arrangements. They’ve managed to meserize the world for fourty years with music of any style you can think of- be it chamber, folk, or pop arrangements. They do it all, and they do it beautifully. In fact, practically anything they’ve ever arranged I would qualify as something I wish I had done. I could profile any number of their arrangments and be perfectly happy with myself.

Up this time around is Billy Joel’s piano-driven “Goodnight My Angel” by Billy Joel- an excellent rendition of the piano man’s heart wrenching song. Just the simplicity of the arrangement is stellar here- the multiple voices singing the melody, the ninths, the incredible basses… it’s all there. And you just have to want to be a counter-tenor after hearing around 2:36. These guys know what they’re doing- watch their expression toward the middle, and you can tell just how emotionally in tune they all are. Warning: audio quality’s not the best in this one, but you get the idea… here’s the video:

And just watch this:

Got another arrangement of this song you wanna share? Comment below!

I cannot express in eloquent enough terms how happy I am right now. And why, you might ask? I GOT MY COMPUTER TO WORK!! This could not be a better day. And it’s Windows 7, to boot! (No pun intended… seriously… NO pun intended) I’m using the RTM version of Windows 7 on my aging, but still going, Dell Inspiron 700m. Install worked just fine, but for some reason my wireless card wasn’t… showing up… so I spent 5 hours of agony and hair-tearing torment trying to figure out what was wrong. I tried installing drivers, putting in the old hard drive… nothing. Until I realized the wireless switch in the BIOS was off. Yeah yeah, not funny. You know how sometimes your internet isn’t working and you’re like, “AGH this should be working!!” until you find out that your hand bumped into the switch on your laptop that turns the wireless off? Yeah, well… this was like that, except for six hours. I want my life back.

     Good news: Windows 7 is simply wonderful and I’m loving the fact that I have near unlimited space now, so yay! Expect that arrangement I promised by the end of the week, fo sho.

…or at  least, get you pushed into the Oak Bluffs Harbor on Martha’s Vineyard. According to urban legend (aka it was caught on tape), an unsuspecting Henry Kiely of Vineyard Sound got pushed right over into the nearby harbor by Casey Eason while the all-male group was promoting for their concert that night. Apparently they were standing  around singing when ol’  Casey comes up and pushes the guy flat into the water, tries to run away, and then gets cornered by five guys and arrested by the police. Don’t get me wrong- I love the Vineyard to death. And who doesn’t love Vineyard Sound? But MAN, that video is just pure comedy gold:

You know what else is comedy gold? The comments under the news article from the Martha’s Vineyard Times by some hardcore Vineyarders. Some of my favorites: “you did what the majority of Islanders always entertain the notion of,” “30 dunks off second bridge would be my sentence,” “someone should push all of these nerds in the water,” etc, etc. In all seriousness, I suppose that’s dangerous, he could have gotten injured or killed, it was wrong, blah blah blah. But this… let’s just  say if I was that guy, that would be the highlight of my day.

That’s right- I’m an unabashed fan of LOST. In fact, I don’t remember a time in my life where I WASN’T watching LOST.I could go on for pages, pages of blog, describing my LOST obsession- about that one night where I was in Italy and couldn’t watch the latest episode and almost died, about how I have my very own fish biscuit recipe, about that one time where I decided to make a website for Season 7- the zombie season, how I write to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse weekly…  woah, that’s a little much. Calm down there.

     But imagine for a second the pure joy that appeared on my face when I found this: an a  cappella version of Locke’s theme from the world’s greatest television show. I’ve always wanted to make an a cappella version of the opening theme- though my friends and I do a pretty good imitation already.  It goes kinda like this: “wwwwwWWWWOOOOOOOEEEEEEEWWWWWWdeedoodeedooodeedooo” 

This cover’s just a little bit better.

I kinda wish the guy just had a cappella version by itself, without the dialogue… cause it’s that good. When I do my own LOST tribute… I’ll let you know. And, speaking of ominous music…

“Deeedooodeedooodeeedooo…”