But let me update you a bit more on my college audition journey... I'm done with the whole audition process. (Well, with the all the live audition ones. I still have to do one video audition.) I just have to wait to hear back from them. But I'm so glad that's over. No more stress and anxiety. No more long car rides. No more dressing up and doing my make up—but that also means no more eating at nice restaurants whenever we can and not feeling guilty about it :( But that does mean that my weekends are free! I can finally hang out with friends, watch TV, read, write music, do whatever I want to do... that's a lie, weekends are probably going to be dedicated to doing homework. (I don't think Senioritis is ever going to hit me).
But in the current free time I have, I did arrange something, which is what I am dedicating this post about. I will be teaching y'all some simple music theory as I go through the process of how I did this. So let's get started!
As you all know, I've kind of been obsessing with High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (HSMTMTS for short) where I have basically been listening to the soundtrack with a few other songs on repeat. One of my favorites is "I Think I Kinda You Know", and it kind of reminded me of another song that I was obsessed with a few years ago "Can't Blame a Girl for Trying" by Sabrina Carpenter. So I found my guitar song book, where my guitar teacher and I notate songs by listening to them and sure enough, the songs were in the same key. They also followed pretty much same chord progression... coincidence?! Actually no but I'll get into that in another future post.
Since the songs are in the same key, it made this arranging process a lot simpler. BUT WAIT! I keep saying this word "key" like that thing that opens doors or starts a car, but that is not the definition when it comes to music. The key of a song refers to how the pitches are arranged, making a certain note feel like the center of the song or "home" as many people refer to it as and setting the tone of the song. For these two particular songs, they are in the key of C Major, making it feel as the song revolves around the pitch C and giving it a brighter and happier song, as opposed to one of my compositions, "Again..." which has a minor tonality and revolves around the pitch G for the most part.
Regardless of keys, most songs today use the following chords—I, IV, V, vi, and in pop music iii. The numerical value of the roman numerals tell you which pitch is the root of the chord or in other words, which chord it is. In the key of C Major, the pitches are C, D, E, F, G, A, B and are number 17 respectively. The upper and lower case of the roman numerals tell you if the quality of the chord—Major (uppercase) or minor (lowercase). Therefore, the I chord in the key of C Major is C major... That's a bad example. Chord V of the key C Major is G major and the chord vi of the key C Major is A minor.
I fear that this post will have to much music theory thrown at you guys at once that you won't be able to follow so I will be making a part two! However, the information above is the main reason why I chose to do an arrangement of two songs. It is still possible to arrange any two song mash-up regardless of the key they are written in, but that involves a good ear and a lot of music theory to notate and to do it properly.
Until next time my couch potatoes. Look, listen, and lay low.
Images:
spongebob
princess and the frog
HSMTMTS
Sabrina Carpenter
scale
chords
