Welcome to D&D 

A Welcome to the Internet (Bo Burnham) Parody

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I decided to get onto the Welcome to the Internet Parody bandwagon with a rendition of another love of mine, Dungeon's & Dragons. If you haven't seen Bo Burnham's Inside on Netflix I highly recommend doing so. It's fantastic.

An image from the Inside Netflix special

I do enjoy writing lyrics for songs. I don't know why I don't do it more often. Either as parodies of other songs or my own. Another one of those things where if I just had more time, and skill, and... I think a large part of it, at least on the original content side of things, is I would have to make my own music too...and that is a bit of a leap for things to learn how to do.

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Basically my process went as follows :

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1. Listen to the song more than a healthy amount (I did this anyway, it's a great song!)

2. Find the lyrics online and copy them into a text doc

3. Rewrite the lyrics as best you can to the syllables or beat of each sentence
   Note that you can fudge quite a bit with this such as double speed, half speed, or pauses. As long as the last note hits at the right time. I did quite a few pauses in my rendition
   Another thing I tried to do was keep in mind lots of quirky references in your lyrics. I wanted to reference Critical Role, Rangers are considered a bad class, no one buys only one dice set, and of course failing is a significant part of the D&D experience. Find ways to slice in the stuff that would be fun for people.

4. Run it by a friend, feedback is always useful

5. Find an instrumental version of the song in question. In my case, RandoSchmando had managed a great edit of the original. I'm hoping the extremely faint vocals are drowned out by my own voice.

6. Practice singing aloud along with the instrumental/original song. Things in your head don't necessarily work the same as when you actually have to sing it.
   At this stage I also found that some words that fit the beat of the song just didn't work. Either the words weren't very compatible to sounding 'good' next to each other. And you only find this out when you start actually singing it. I felt pretty stupid doing this at home to be honest. But we shouldn't allow that to dissuade from greatness!
   Another useful technique I found was to sing against the original song. I made quite a few changes based on this in regards to refining the language to fit a little closer to the original, or more on the beat, or better spacing for example.

7. Set your audio out to headphones so you can listen to the song while singing

8. Find an audio app, I use Adobe Audition. But there are others such as Cakewalk that are cheap or free.

9. Play the song and record!

10. Mix the instrumental and your voice in the Audio App.

11. Profit!