#the song i'm covering is Panic Station btw

[taffywabbit]

for a while now i've had some kind of weird curse where the creative part of my brain just completely stops functioning if i try to arrange a cover/remix of an existing song. basically i'll say "i love this song! i wanna try putting my own spin on it!" and then i realize i have like, nothing to actually add to the conversation and also can't fully reverse-engineer the funky compositional tricks involved that helped make me so obsessed with it

it's happened with songs from games like 4 or 5 times in the past couple years (examples off the top of my head include BEAST BASH from SLARPG and, much more recently, Enemy Retreating from Undertale Yellow) and usually i'm having an ok time until i get stuck analyzing one specific chord or technique, overthink the progress i've already made, and inevitably give up with only a few bars of actual music once i realize my obsessive analysis has robbed the cover of anything interesting or unique compared to the original song

ANYWAYS i think i might have figured out a workaround and that's that i need to like... get crazier with it from the start? i need to change the overall beat/style, or at least make the song noticeably faster/slower and in a different key, to kinda switch off the part of my brain that's like "ok, the goal is to copy. i gotta be really accurate and scrutinize every note OR ELSE i will get a bad grade in Perfectly Replicating An Existing Song, because that is the objective now for some reason instead of having fun and getting silly with it". bonus points if i have the song stuck in my head thoroughly enough that i can do the bulk of the work without going back and comparing it to the original song. i THINK this might be the key. i'm not sure. i have no idea how people have entire youtube channels dedicated to doing like 95% faithful covers and rearrangements of songs because apparently i am just not wired that way, but i CAN do remixes if they're different enough for me to not get stuck in my own head about it

but yeah i realized this because i recently jumped back into working on a cover of a Muse song i started back in September, and it occurred to me that all of the above things definitely factor into why i'm having so much fun with this, yet struggled with those other abandoned projects. maybe eventually i will have a good idea for how to mix those up more thoroughly and do them justice too but for now i'm just glad to know i'm not ACTUALLY cursed lol