Have I gone too far? I'm standing in a corner of a home recording studio, behind a Japanese screen divider, pretending to be an giant obese mouse who is sneaking up on a tribe of Native Americans chanting around a firepit in the forest and I'm attempting to blend in by making mouse-chanting noises so I can sneakily make my way over to the snack table. Um....yah. So this was my first attempt at making strange sound samples for music recording. I'm half embarrassed and half crackin' up. I worked with Yuxxi today creating a Drum & Bass track with my vocals. Before ending our session, I wanted to experiment with making some sounds, just for the fun of it to see if anything cool would come out of my mouth. I started off super lame, going through the alphabet to make sounds for each letter. Half way through I stopped and asked, "Is any of this useful for you?" I got a flat NO. Great. Yuxxi explained how he does it (he's a master at making strange sounds and turning them into killer beats) -- you gotta get deep into character and then make your voice sound as unlike human as possible. Then you'll start to get some really interesting synth-like sounds that add texture to your music. Until you're really being that character, the sounds are just empty and meh. On my drive home, in the privacy of my Miata I continued practicing until I started to make progress. I gotta say, when I started my music career I was not picturing that a typical day in the life would involve making abstract Native American mouse noises as I drive down the freeway. // Cha

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