Playing songs and singing isn’t necessarily hard, but the thing about it is, it’s easy to play bits of songs or just kind wander away when you get stuck or bored. But with posting your recordings somewhere, like TikTok (as I do), you have to figure out the song pretty well, at least the part you want to play, and then rehearse it enough that you don’t screw it up too badly.

There are two ways to come at this (I’ve done both): play the song live and record yourself, or record music via DAW and edit it. With the former, you have to get it right in a go while recording yourself with your phone or some other camera setup. With the latter, though, you can take your time and record different tracks, layer things a bit, add some effects and even auto-tune your vocals… and then do the MTV thing: play along to your own song, record it with video, and then edit the video so that it syncs up with the audio track you exported from your DAW. It’s embarassing on a number of fronts for the bashful.

And it’s way more work than you think it is.

It’s easy to see posting oneself doing something creative as trying to grab attention. And sure, it’s a little bit of that. But it’s really about making something. It’s about creating something, however deriviative, and putting it out into the world. Some people never do anything like that. Tiktok is probably the most face-forward, self-expressive thing I”ve ever done (and potentially the most embarrassing), but it’s just more of the same of what I’ve been doing since there was an internet to post things to. Uncorrected is just the latest incarnation of me writing on the internet, preceded by my Tumblr page https://nonjo.com and even LiveJournal back in the day.

I would always hear harmonies in my head and appreciated them in songs I liked. So I get to try that, singing high and low parts. It’s fun just to make the songs at home and hear the results, but I get a kick out of posting the final product. I also wince when I do it. But I do it.