Jan 11, 2010
I recently opened up the archives of an old acapella song that I did with my group back in college: Poprox (formerly PopRocks). Aside from having the coolest name of all the boy bands on campus (very few true "boy bands" existed there ;) ) we also were the only acapella group to perform at major assemblies, concerts, paid gigs and of course every girls dorm in sight. To be honest, we were a lot of fun live. However, we recorded our own material using only the technical know how we had at the time which was like a die hard star wars fan's best friend, imaginary at best. Even still we made several cds, all of them terrible but offering great memories for those who knew us.
Just yesterday I opened up the source files of one of the songs that is a Rockapella hit remake of Three Dog Night's "Shambala". It was a terrible listen, the perfect song for me to put my most recent engineering skills to test on. Make no mistake, I am an amateur hobbyist engineer. But I wanted to gauge my skill level based on what I could do in college. This project represented a unique challenge as I did not have access to the dry recordings, only post FX tracks. The software I used back in college doesn't exist anymore (can you tell how high we set our standards) but luckily I exported each final track for remixing later. Unluckily I exported them with FX so I could not mix from the ground up, uggh. However, the results turned out surprisingly well compared to the original material.
I give you what might have been if we had even minimal engineering skills back in the day: Shambala by Poprox (arrangement by Rockapella).
