SPUF sings It’s Beginning to Look Alot Like Dustbowl
It had been a while since the last community project or contest, SPUF needed something to break up the usual chain of threads, and the holidays were coming up soon. So I thought, why not have SPUFers sing a well known TF2 version of a Christmas song together for fun?
And thus, I created the thread for SPUF sings.
It was something I’d brought up in an itsurblog thread or two prior, but I only just created it this last November. Of course, the idea wasn’t original at all, the concept was shamelessly ripped from a particular imageboard. Still, I thought it would be a nice idea to help bring the community together.
The premise was simple. People would submit recordings of them singing It’s Beginning to Look Alot Like Dustbowl, and when the deadline for submissions passed, all of the recordings would be compiled into a chorus and released around Christmas time. How well people could sing didn’t matter, submissions would be accepted as long as they didn’t have poor audio quality.
Thankfully, not a single submission was rejected in the end.
On that note, special thanks to all twenty-five SPUFers who submitted recordings and made this project possible.
Actually, I was initially concerned that there wouldn’t be enough submissions to make for a satisfactory song. After all, by the time it was less than two weeks before the deadline, I had only received ten of them. The ideal number of submissions, however, was about fifteen and up.
What’s more, there were long periods of the time where the thread received no posts outside of my own bumps, further fueling worries that people had forgotten or that there wouldn’t be enough entries.
Fortunately, the submissions jumped in number during the last few days. I also accepted a few late ones until the first weekend of December, since I wouldn’t have time to mix the song until then anyways. Like I said earlier, the final amount ended up being twenty-five.
Naturally, mixing the song came afterwards.
Opening submissions at the beginning of November and setting the deadline in one month was intended to give people enough time to submit while also leaving room for me to mix the song. But in retrospect, I probably didn’t need nearly a month to mix SPUF sings. The actual mixing took about five or six hours of messing around in Audacity while browsing the internet, which could have been spread out over about two weeks without much issue.
Though on the other hand, I suspect that if I had extended the deadline for another week or two, everyone would have simply submitted a week or two later.
In any case, the way in which all the submissions would be arranged wasn’t something that I decided until after I had received them all. Given the relatively large number, I settled on having three to five people sing every one or two lines of the song. This seemed like the simplest way of making sure everyone received a part while not having a ton of people sing at once, which was something I may have considered if there had been less entries.
Having only a few singers for each line also meant it was easier to cut apart and re-time submissions to make sure they were all in sync (which initially seemed like a tedious task, though it ended up being easier than I thought). Although, this meant that the vast majority of each submission wouldn’t end up in the final song.
I would have also liked to have some solo or duet lines, but the song being as short as it is meant this wasn’t really an option.
On another note, I was also surprised that there hadn’t really been any silly or cuh-razy submissions among any of the twenty-five that had been sent, which would have been amusing to mix into the end result. Regardless, I’m satisfied with how SPUF sings It’s Beginning to Look Alot Like Dustbowl turned out, and I think it’s still sufficiently merry.
I hope everyone participating had as much as fun as I did, and I’d definitely be interested in doing another project like this in the future if an opportunity came around.
Happy holidays, everyone.
