Animal Crossing: K.K. Cruisin' Talkbox Funk / Go-Go Arrangement (feat. The Raindrops!)

When everybody's stuck indoors, what better thing to do to celebrate Animal Crossing: New Horizons (other than playing the game) than host a K.K. Slider dance party, along with over 250 dancing / singing / clapping Raindrops? I can't think of anything - let's groove! Insaneintherainmusic's jazz cover / remix of K.K. Cruisin' from Animal Crossing.

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🎵 This song will not be available for download or streaming due to copyright reasons.
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It FINALLY happened! Man, what a crazy past couple of weeks it's been. I was originally planning to release this cover around this time to coincide with the Animal Crossing New Horizons release date (which I have already played for several hours this morning lol), but then the world decided to get crazy, and now we're all doing this social distancing thing! I thought it'd be a great idea to bring the Raindrops together and do another Crowdsourced Collaboration, which I haven't done in almost 3 years! (Big Blue was my last video featuring the crowdsourced clappers). Because of this, this particular video is a bit more emotional than usual for me for several reasons. I've honestly been struggling quite a bit with the social distancing thing, but having this cover to work on has been such a nice escape. I think this is a time when online content creators have even more of a responsibility than usual to bring people together and provide entertainment to pass the time! I have to give a gigantic thanks to the 290ish Raindrops who submitted their recordings for this tune - the final result looks super super cool, and I'm so happy to have a community that isn't afraid to embarrass themselves a little bit on the internet to make a fun video!

Onto the music itself! I've wanted to cover K.K. Cruisin' for a long time after seeing The Consouls' version of it (the original upload of which is sadly no longer on YouTube, but has been since reuploaded!), but I've always struggled with how to do the song justice. In my mind, this tune is one of the biggest standards in the VGM repertoire, and is a go-to jam song for me. Because of this, it took me quite a while to figure out exactly how I wanted to go about covering it... and then, along came the talkbox. I picked up a talkbox in the Summer of 2019, and was playing around with it a little bit, and then realized it would be the PERFECT lead instrument for a K.K. Slider song. Because of copyright limitations with cover songs, I can't use samples from the original games in my work (which is fine, I usually don't anyway), but in this specific instance, it would have been nice to use K.K. Slider's original voice. So in this cover... I recreated it by transcribing the "words" that K.K. Slider sings in his live rendition of the tune, and performing them myself. It took a bit of practice to get it sounding good on the talkbox, but I am in love with the end result! For those who don't know, the talkbox is basically a box with an amplifier in it, that sends a signal through this long plastic tube. I'm sending a saw wave controlled by my MIDI keyboard out from my audio interface into the talkbox, and then into my mouth. From there, I basically mouth the words without generating any actual sound from my vocal cords, and then the microphone picks up the audio as it's modulated from my mouth! It's such a cool concept, and I would love to use it in future videos.

I was originally considering making a more laid-back chill version of this song, but when I was conceptualizing the song with the addition of claps and vocals from all the Raindrops, I thought that wouldn't make sense. Instead, I decided to go with a more big arena type sound, and draw from some traditions of Go -go music! I don't know too much about Go-go, but I learned about it here at Berklee. It's a subgenere of funk mostly associated with the Washington D.C. area, and has a big emphasis on live elements, like audience participation and call and response. This was the perfect opportunity to enlist the Raindrops to do some of this call and response as well.

♫ "K.K. Cruisin'" from "Animal Crossing" composed by Kazumi Totaka

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Видео Animal Crossing: K.K. Cruisin' Talkbox Funk / Go-Go Arrangement (feat. The Raindrops!) канала insaneintherainmusic