I surprised Tamara with this one because she LOVES Brenda Lee.  If I have my facts straight, Brenda Lee was one of the first records she ever owned and she loved to sing and pretend she was Brenda Lee with her tape recorder.  Now don’t get all excited and think that she is the one singing on this song.  No sirree.  I picked a key I thought she would like and laid down everything before asking her to come sing this.  I must have picked the key she NEVER sings in, because she could not make this work.  I tried to do some pitch shifting with the software but it made the guitars sound bad or it made her sound like Kathleen Turner (sultry, sure, but not what we were going for).

So rather than let some leftovers go to waste, here I am singing a Brenda Lee number:  Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree!

Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree

I have to add that I messed around with an auto-tune plug-in and I think it is really weird to hear any twangy phrasing in my voice get corrected.  I pushed the slider up there and it is interesting to hear what that does.  I like just singing and letting myself be flat if I don’t have the time or the chops to fix it, but I can see that if I took the time to learn the ways in which auto-tune alters the shape of my voice, that there is a skill there akin to yodelling.  I should to the Lonely Goatherd song from Sound of Music and auto-tune it intensely!

I also got to do slide guitar, something I have always enjoyed but was too lazy to re-tune my guitar to give myself some prettier options sonically.  Still it is fun to dabble in things I used to have so much time for, and now seems like a luxury.

Postscript:  BTW I chose these pics for that ole-timey flair and because my wife’s hair looks FREAKIN’ AMAZING!  What a cutie.  She curled it after we did Guinevere’s hair for Santa and it was so fun to see her transform.  Honestly don’t know if I would rather kiss her more with the curlers in… or out.  I guess I will take ’em however I find them.  Hubba hubba. (P.P.S.: This isn’t facebook.  If you don’t like my public airing of affection go put your hairshirt on and crawl back into your monk’s hole).


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