I posted this yesterday in my regular livejournal (ywingempress), and it was received well by the select audience there. And since I don't feel much more foolish than I did, I thought I'd take the leap and post this publicly.

Anyways. This relates to this entry at my Star Wars livejournal, which I didn't crosspost here because I have limited space here and it was sorta spam-ish at the time. (Yes, I am NOT lacking in online journals!) So it relates to Star Wars, the game Republic Commando, RepCom music, and... erm, sound recording.

Ok, first of all, if you haven't heard Republic Commando music, download this MP3 and listen. If you don't, you won't understand. It's short and small (453 KB) so do it! That's part of one of the songs in the game - the songs were written specially for the game and the words are in the Mandalorian language Mando'a (which I've been learning too!).

Anyways, so I found a sound file of that part of the song, without singing. ... You see where this is going now, eh? Yep, I recorded myself singing - in two-part harmony - and mixed it all together to make... THIS! (MP3, 409 KB) There's actually four Amys singing in that - two on the 'top' part and two on the 'bottom' part (I'm not leet enough to be able to do three part harmony) - because only two made it sound too duet-y and not choral-y enough. Yeah, it's not perfect... you have no idea the hoops I had to jump through to get my microphone (which is a tiny one on a headset) to record without excessive hissing and stuff... but I think it's ok. Oh... well, except for the part where my voice lacks certain manly qualities... me not being a man and all. So the original is much cooler. But there's only so much I can do about that. My brother suggested I modify the pitch of my voice but I thought that was a step over the line.

You can hear the song without singing here (MP3, 453 KB). Feel free to record yourself.

I am a huge huge geek. Who else on this planet would even consider recording themselves singing along to these songs? LOL! They're not even in English! And I'm far from an amazing singer, haha. And I'm so shy I don't even like posting on forums, yet I'll let the world hear me sing a song in Mando'a. I make no sense.

Try not to laugh too much, ok?

Here's the lyrics for the part I recorded:

Bal kote, darasuum kote,
Jorso'ran kando a tome
Sa kyr'am nau tracyn kad, vode an

Which translated into Basic (aka English) means:

And glory, eternal glory
We shall bear its weight together
Forged like the saber in the fires of death, brothers all

It's rather scary how many Mando'a words I know now. I haven't really tried writing my own sentences, but I see vocab everywhere and go "ooo, I know that!" So when I was just typing up those lyrics above, I realised I could probably independently translate a lot of them myself now! Cool! Though when I translate the last line literally according to the words in my Mando'a spreadsheet, I get "Like [the] death forged fire saber, brothers all" ... which is rather amusing. There's something to be said for poeticism that doesn't translate literally.

I love Mando'a so far... it's so simple. There's not a bazillion verb and noun endings to learn. No crazy case system - had enough of that in my one semester of Greek, lol. Tenses are simple - one word acts as a 'flag' to set the tense. Very cool. Me likey.

Well, now that I've thoroughly embarrassed myself, I think that's it for now.

EDIT: W00t!! So I'm not quite so weird!