My entry for the Worst Song Competition 2020. Blues is always a solid choice. ALWAYS. I mean, check it out. It's got blues and all. Like, blues, man. Blueueueues.

Blueueueueueueueues.

Just. Blues.

Alright, so by the time I found out about this contest I only had about 4 hours of spare time left before the deadline. So I dove into my archive of miscellaneous semi-constructed song and immediately ran into this one, preliminarily called 'Not A Test' - a bluesy chord progression and the seeds of a guitar solo, recorded hastily so I'd know what I had in mind when I got around to actual production. Recorded nearly 10 years ago, so guess how well that went.

Because of the really terrible lead guitar, I felt confident I was on the right track. I edited the acoustic guitar - a single direct mic take which I duplicated and nudged the duplicate forward 20ms for that more spacious sound with a hard L/hard R pan between them. Removed a couple of repeated sections as the original recording ran between 5 and 6 minutes.

The solo possibly didn't even require any work, but just to be safe, I moved some of the sections around to sound even less sensible. Drown in the most '15-year-old-in-a-Metallica-cover-band' distortion imaginable, et voilà.

Percussion was obviously needed: a kick and a tambourine would do most of the trick. Added in a wonky cymbal, and because they were done in Renoise in a 12/8 where the song is in 9/8 (I think), it sounds especially confusing when hit on the second eighth. Some quick copy/pasting into ProTools, in which I made a mistake that I decided to leave in... Masterful.

Vocals? Yeah, baby! I went for the Singer Who Not Only Can Not Sing But Has Serious Mental And Professionality Issues To Boot. Recorded the sections before and after the solo each in one take and nearly peed myself upon completion. I'm blessed with the gift of always thoroughly appreciating my own jokes.

And there you have it. Probably not a winner, but I know for a fact that the judges had at least as good a laugh about it as I did. Mission accomplished!