If you are reasonably skilled at singing along with such, there is basically no such thing has hitting wrong notes (unless the song is deliberately confusing). Instead, you end up hitting harmony notes. Basically, each note constrains the note that come afterwards and there are only a few “valid” options.
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And then by the middle of Solstice, when you get to things like Brighter Than Today (a moderately complicated song), it’s actually an achievable ask to sing along if you haven’t heard it before.
So I noticed this year that in particular songs like “Brighter Than Today” are musically complicated in ways that made them harder to sing along to than some of the others. Maybe this problem is less of an issue in, for example, the smaller space where a stronger feedback loop towards good singing is created, but my experience of it was that people were struggling with the melody, hitting notes at the right time, and generally not stumbling over the words.
For example, I experience “Brighter Than Today” has having some weird timing change ups in the chorus where syllables suddenly and unexpectedly get shortened to stay within meter. I heard this most strongly around the second line of the chorus, “although the night is cold”, where it seems like people start tripping over themselves to keep up. I noticed other places in this song and other songs having similar effects. Maybe something else is going on musically, but that’s how my semi-trained ear perceives it.
I think I ignored this in the past because of some combination of the songs being new, everyone being new to Solstice, there being different levels of emphasis on singalong in the past, and factors like those you mentioned that made the singing of the songs at different venues different. But this year we are not so new to Solstice, the songs are not so new, and there was a stronger effort to make singalong an important component of the event.
It made me yearn for more simpler and familiar songs that fit with the theme generally and less songs that were crafted to fit Solstice tightly but that are more complex and less familiar.
Nod. Fwiw I’m still open to suggestions on improving Brighter Than Today. It’s already been through 3-4 rounds of edits intended to make it easier, and it may be that it needs more. (although by now it’s got a fair amount of critical mass so making changes is more costly)
I think the current level of difficulty of it is obviously harder than many super-simple-folk songs, but not harder than median pop songs, which I think is a reasonable difficulty setting for songs in mid-solstice. (Recording of the most recent version is here. By this point I don’t expect radical rewrites of the song to happen, since it’s the most popular song* and pretty well known, but if you have specific notes on which bits felt most unintuitive that’d be helpful)
So I noticed this year that in particular songs like “Brighter Than Today” are musically complicated in ways that made them harder to sing along to than some of the others. Maybe this problem is less of an issue in, for example, the smaller space where a stronger feedback loop towards good singing is created, but my experience of it was that people were struggling with the melody, hitting notes at the right time, and generally not stumbling over the words.
For example, I experience “Brighter Than Today” has having some weird timing change ups in the chorus where syllables suddenly and unexpectedly get shortened to stay within meter. I heard this most strongly around the second line of the chorus, “although the night is cold”, where it seems like people start tripping over themselves to keep up. I noticed other places in this song and other songs having similar effects. Maybe something else is going on musically, but that’s how my semi-trained ear perceives it.
I think I ignored this in the past because of some combination of the songs being new, everyone being new to Solstice, there being different levels of emphasis on singalong in the past, and factors like those you mentioned that made the singing of the songs at different venues different. But this year we are not so new to Solstice, the songs are not so new, and there was a stronger effort to make singalong an important component of the event.
It made me yearn for more simpler and familiar songs that fit with the theme generally and less songs that were crafted to fit Solstice tightly but that are more complex and less familiar.
Nod. Fwiw I’m still open to suggestions on improving Brighter Than Today. It’s already been through 3-4 rounds of edits intended to make it easier, and it may be that it needs more. (although by now it’s got a fair amount of critical mass so making changes is more costly)
I think the current level of difficulty of it is obviously harder than many super-simple-folk songs, but not harder than median pop songs, which I think is a reasonable difficulty setting for songs in mid-solstice. (Recording of the most recent version is here. By this point I don’t expect radical rewrites of the song to happen, since it’s the most popular song* and pretty well known, but if you have specific notes on which bits felt most unintuitive that’d be helpful)