Chris and music

When it comes to music, Chris only gives a shit about stuff he's heard from Guitar Hero.

Musical tastes

Chris has often cited that he likes "All popular music". While it's possible that he's just giving that answer to appear cool and easygoing, he really does seem to try to listen to whatever popular opinion tells him is good. Almost every song on either of his two horrible albums was a top 40 hit at one point or another.

The only artist Chris seems to really idolize is Britney Spears. There is virtually no doubt that this is more because she's hot than because he appreciates her musical talent. Recent videos have had Chris playing Aerosmith in the background, possibly in a sad attempt to appear intimidating and hardcore.

Singing

It is impossible to overstate how terrible of a singer Chris is. It's also impossible to overstate how deluded Chris is about his ability to sing.

“	...and when singing I can have a Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby flavor.	”
Chris, being sadly mistaken.

Chris's voice is unusually high-pitched, and often louder than appropriate. He also tends to speak in an odd monotone that can best be described as "emotionless". These issues are all present when he tries to sing. In both his Christian and the Hedgehog Boys albums, he doesn't actually "sing" so much as desperately yell over the track in an attempt to drown out the actually words of the song. When he does try to actually vary his voice away from the standard monotone, it becomes very obvious that Chris is completely tone-deaf. His voice goes up and down with little regard to the background music, or even the original artist he's shouting over.

Chis also has a lot of trouble with timing. While the songs he's written usually do a pretty good job matching the originals, Chris often falls behind or rushes ahead of the music he's chosen. This could probably be avoided if he took the time to practice the songs he wants to sing, but practice would be work, and work is something Chris just doesn't do.

A capella

In the Official Videobooks, Chris will occasionally break out into a capella renditions of what we can only assume is supposed to be Sonichu's theme music. These bizarre freestyle musical interludes drive home exactly how childish Chris is. There's something uniquely terrifying about a 27 year old man (who looks 45) showing us his Sonic/Pokémon crossover and shouting "dun dun dun".

Chris also occasionally does this in his normal videos. Most recently he performed a poor rendition of "The Final Countdown" while showing us that he can still pick up a chair.

Rap

With the success of artists such as Eminem and Jedi Mind Tricks, plus the odd continued existence of nerdcore, white guys rapping on Youtube is not unheard of. Some of these individuals demonstrate an impressive deal of talent in their ability to flow on a beat. Christian is not among them.

Chris's most notable foray into rap is, of course, his entry for the PaRappa Contest. While his motivations and the drama they caused are covered extensively in their own article, the video itself is characterized by a complete lack of rhythm or flow. The end result sounds sort of like a Muppet slurring his words together and randomly shouting.

Before he starts the song in earnest, Chris does a little bit of freestyling in the beginning. Needless to say, it's not promising.

“	I have a PSP and she don't/So give me the PSP, unwrap the wrapper/So I can give one to her, and then we can play together!	”
Chris, almost rhyming.

This was nothing compared to his most recent foray into the genre. Playing Areosmith in the background instead of a breakbeat, Chris basically just shouts a lot of random short sentences with no regard as to how they flow, or if they even rhyme at all.

“	You just a dang dummy!/And you still chicken you's a dang coward!/You wanna come fight me/Come fight me in person/Come out from behind the camera you fool	”
Chris, "rapping"

Recording tech

Chris's idea of accompaniment is putting the original song playing on the background using el cheapo MP3 player and most expensive speakers his boat could tug in, while he sings with his unique voice. The singing, of course, is dutifully recorded with some sort of a cheap microphone by some sort of a software. The implications are staggering:

• There's always a huge quality loss when music is played on speaker and then re-recorded from a distance. Especially if you don't make sure the resulting music sounds tolerably good. Chris, of course, believes everything is perfect on the first try.
• The original lyrics are still on the song. At least on one occasion, Chris even screwed up harder than this, and got a cover of "Never Gonna Give You Up" from Family Guy - clobbered by dialogue and other sounds. While lyrics often can't always be removed from a mixed song entirely, it's at least worth a shot trying the lyrics removal software. Or, it might pay to look for an instrumental version or an instrumental cover. (For example, Ed Starink made a crapton of decent-to-awesome synthetiser covers of pop songs. Yes, even "Never Gonna Give You Up". I'm not kidding, he really did.)
• When you have one go and one microphone to record everything, there's no way to correct the errors if you flub anything. The end result is either perfect or it's awful and needs to be redone ...who are we kidding.

Chris is, of course, unaware of the incredible leaps and bounds that music recording has advanced in recent years, and hasn't noticed there's plenty of good multitrack sound editors available for free. Many come with lyrics removal plugins.

External links

• http://www.mediafire.com/?j3wnmyzctwn