Janelle, my Belle

I have collected data over a half-century of being the youngest sister on which I have performed a statistical analysis measuring the net gain in approval by the oldest for each act of kindness by the youngest. 

Faithful readers will remember that I honored my sister Janelle on her birthday with my post, How to cook scrapple like my sister.  It was an effective post, judging by the number of people who have told me they will never eat scrapple because of it but, as the youngest sister, I knew I needed to do more. I had given her a pair of sandals as a birthday gift, along with a cool tote bag that says "Scout" on it, since her dog's name is Scout, and I had her and a bunch of other family members to my house for a birthday dinner on Sunday night. But experience tells me that 4 suck ups only earn me a 40% approval rating (see graph). As the graph clearly demonstrates, the maximum approval a youngest sister can ever earn with an oldest sister is 50% and I was determined to hit that number. I was a little worried that, since I had won the Scout bag as a part of a silent auction, it could technically be considered a regift, and that could push me back to an embarrassing 30% approval on a big birthday weekend. I knew a song would give me the push I needed to top out at 50% and hold the position for as long as a week.

How I made it

The iTube Studio interface is easy except it is a little bit hard to find your download.

I went to see the new Disney live-action Beauty and the Beast on the weekend it opened and had left the theater knowing that I had to write a parody for Janelle using the opening song. The Belle-Janelle rhyme was just so in-your-face I couldn't ignore it. This is another song that would not lend itself to guitar accompaniment, so I went looking for a karaoke version to sing to. I'm sure you recall from yesterday's post, My rapping debut, that it can be challenging finding a karaoke version that has absolutely no background vocals. I listened to one after another on iTunes and kept hearing the dreaded, "Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour!" at the beginning. There's no way in hell anyone was going to be saying, "Bonjour!" in Janelle's song. I finally found an instrumental-only version on YouTube that I was really happy with, but it took me a while to figure out how to download it. If my friend Cary had been trying to do it, this is where she would have called me to ask how to download a song from YouTube. But if you don't have a friend like me to call when you can't figure out how to do something on the computer, I'm about to enlighten you. Go to Google and type, "how to download music from youtube." That search yielded a number of software applications that help you to download audio or video from YouTube, and the one I chose is iTube Studio. It was easy enough to choose what I wanted to download and in what format, but it took me a while to find where the download was, and that made me feel a little bit stupid because it's the kind of thing my sister Norah does that makes me roll my eyes - download a file then not be able to find it. I had to go to the Preferences (sometimes called Settings) for the application to find the location they had created. Sure enough, there it was in a folder they had created at C:\iTube Studio\Downloaded.

This is the pitch shifter process in Adobe Audition. It worked like a charm.

The next problem I encountered was that the song is really long. You might recall that Belle stops and chats with townspeople throughout the song, and then Gaston comes in at the end. It goes on for close to 6 minutes, so it was clear I needed to cut it. First I whacked off a chunk of the beginning so I wouldn't have to be standing there waiting for my cue to sing while everyone stared at me blankly. I know what this feels like and I didn't want to do it. Next I wanted to cut a big chunk out of the middle and then rejoin the beginning part with the ending where there is a big finish. But guess what? There were various key changes that took place in the part I had taken out so that the ending was a half-step lower than where I started. I knew I had seen a feature in Adobe Audition called Time and Pitch > Pitch Shifter so I thought I might as well give it a try. I selected the section I wanted to raise, told it to go up one semi-tone and clicked Apply. It was AMAZING. So amazing that, after I had glued everything back together, I decided to lower the whole thing a half step because I found it a teensy bit high for my vocal range. I also copied a section and inserted it so that I could have an extra verse and I defy you to identify the four places I engineered this song to make it the length and formation that I wanted.

I think Janelle liked it but it's always hard to tell with the oldest because they have a badass reputation to maintain. And I respect that because, as the youngest, I have a dumbass reputation to maintain. That's just how we roll. 

Listen to the finished product below, and click here to read the words. Note: This recording should be labeled "Explicit" because it contains a curseword. So if your kids have never heard the word shit, don't play it in front of them. Oh yeah, and I also made a freaky composite photo for Janelle, to go with the lyrics, replacing Emma Watson's face with hers.