O Viens Bientôt, Emmanuel

This is one of the songs we sang for our little mini concert. However, because the vocal parts were so tricky, our directrice just split us into two groups. The tenors sang with the sopranos, one octave down, and most of the basses sang with the altos one octave down.
I wanted to know what the song would sound like with all of the parts. So, after a whole lot of work and learning quite a bit about music (like primarily that I am really bad at it), I got myself a general idea of what it is supposed to sound like. Unfortunately, I had to once again create a movie so I could trick blogger into playing it, and I forgot that my movie software doesn't like MP3s. So there are some pops and such. But then, it wasn't that great to start with!


Here are the words:

O Viens, Bientôt, Emmanuel.
Nous délivrer du joug cruel
Et du péché briser la loi
Ton peuple entier s'attend à toi

Joyeux, levez les yeux aux ciels
Voici venir Emmanuel.

translation:

Oh come soon, Emmanuel
Deliver us from the cruel yoke
and from the sin that breaks the law
Your entire people waits for you

Joyful, lift your eyes to the heavens
Here comes Emmanuel

And, of course, it is a French remake of Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel.

To create this, I had to play each of the four parts separately on the piano, using a metronome to hopefully keep myself on the same tempo. That didn't work perfectly, as you can tell from the final product. I then had to edit the four clips separately in Garageband and get them to line up as well as I could. The final result sounded less then great. I was hoping that if I sang slow enough it wouldn't be so noticeable. I quickly realized that my goofed-up tempos on the piano pieces were going to wreck this if I actually sang along with the music I had. So I memorized each piece, got the starting note, and then for half of them muted my piano track and just sang from memory, at least for the first couple lines, again using the metronome to try to get my pace to match. This was especially difficult because I lost my sheet of music and I was doing all of this by ear. I feel like I'm half tone deaf, so I really depend on being able to look at the paper and say "Oh hey, it's going up a note!"
Anyway, it was kind of fun to play around with 4 part harmony. I hopefully won't have to do it again between here and Africa, at least not when MY voice is being recorded.