I created this acapella following this tutorial: http://www.halo3forum.com/music/164655-how-create-cpu-acapellas-full-tutorial.html

I decided to follow the original song closely, because it is just easier that way.  I should probably make the kicks more prominent, and add some more interesting drum patterns with open hi-hat, but seeing as how it is already two days late I’ll take it for what it is. I’ll probably use the acapella for a mashup if I get around to it. Enjoy!

I did this sitting in the Georgia Tech Library (pic) over the past few hours. This is more in the “poodleface” vein than the “erf” vein, though really it goes back even further to a group I was/is in with my friend Joe (he of “Six Hands” fame) called Social Security. Any poodleface mashup video ideas I’ve had have likely been possible due to my participation in this project, which was highly influenced by the collage artistry of Negativland, among other artists.

I wanted to do something simple, so I made a simple additive composition in Live 8, starting first with the drumbeat, then the keyboard part, then the bassline. After this I decided I wanted to have a tremolo post-rock sort of part, so I used one of the Guitar presets from Tension and filtered it through NI Guitar Rig, using the MIDI plugin Arpeggiation ahead of the instrument set to 1/32 to give an approximation of what I was looking for. Lastly, I used a strings preset from Tension, running it also though a Guitar Rig amp, then panned them left and right. (pic)

I was not satisfied with the mix, so I went hunting for resignation speeches of a certain length to match the sort of tone I had stumbled upon. Eventually I turned to Spiro T. Agnew’s, who is someone I’ve used before as far as sampling. There is another speech where he criticizes the Yippie movement that I had used in a short piece back in 1999, so I knew the timbre of his voice would fit in. I didn’t do any warping to the voice as I’ve done before, though I would have been tempted if I wanted to spend more time on this piece. The very last thing I threw on was some crowd noise in an attempt to make the crescendo and subsequent ending feel a bit more… anticlimactic I guess.

The title “God Reigns” is intoned several times within the speech. I had no particularly reason to emphasize one thing over another, so feel free to interpret and feel however you wish to. Though my mixing skills are still lacking, I’m mostly happy with this, especially since I played all these parts on the QWERTY on this laptop with no velocity.

Samples used:
Crowd Noise
Agnew Resignation Speech

For the “cover image” above, I traced over a portrait of Agnew with my Tablet PC and grabbed a random image labelled “Our God Reigns!!” on Google Image Search.