There goes my chance at a Grammy…

One of my ambitions for this course is to have a Dr. Oblivion’s Greatest Hits album up on Bandcamp by the end. So it was fortuitous that Tyler produced some rhymes this week.

The first step was to get Dr. Oblivion to recite the poem. I copied it and pasted it into https://oblivion.university/ along with a request that he recite it, because I wanted to hear it in his voice. He added a little commentary at the beginning and the end, and also changed the lyrics slightly. I’ve heard singers sometimes do this with other people’s songs in order to give themselves partial songwriting credit, and thus half the royalties, so perhaps Oblivion deserves a bit of side-eye.

Then I needed a backing track. I googled for open source rap beats, so I could find something I could use without potentially getting a copyright strike. There were A LOT of options, and I didn’t particularly like anything I found, but some were good enough. I settled on The Passion HiFi – Beat Machine – Rap Beat from Soundcloud.

I used Audacity to put them together. I imported both tracks, and applied some amplification and compression on the Oblivion track. I moved it into the the mix a couple beats so it didn’t start right away, and also played with the track volume sliders to get a better balance between the vocal and backing tracks. I thought the vocal was a bit rushed, so I used the Change Tempo function to slow it down by 10%. Then I exported it as an MP3.

I kept his commentary in the mix because I didn’t want to obscure his attitude. I think it came out okay. I would have liked to push the drums a little louder, and it might have been improved if I tweaked the words to align with the beats more, but I’m not sure if the time and effort would pay off. There goes my chance at a Grammy…