南山南

Original by 马頔, Cover by Brian the Amateur

(Listen at the bottom of the page)

As I sit here, April 12, 2025, this is the first time I am writing about this song that I released in 2024, a year from today. I just forgot to update it on this website lol.

I wanted to record this song ever since I was in high school, listening to this song for the first time. This is how much I liked this song back then. Unfortunately I didn’t know how to play guitar then. Fortunately, I do know how to play now and I am quite good at it on an amateurish level. When I first started to learn this song, I was using the basic chords, Em, C, G, and D, and just strumming them based on rhythm. At one point, I wasn’t satisfied with just simple using the simplest strumming patterns, and that’s when I sat down on my ass and actually learned how to play each individual note. It wasn’t very hard if you already know what the chords are, each individual note are just slight deviations of the chords.

Once I got that down, the rest was pretty easy. I first recorded the guitar, and right after I recorded the guitar, I lost my voice. Ironic huh. It’s been almost two years from now, so I don’t exactly remember what I contracted; it wasn’t covid tho. Anyways, I lost my voice for quite a while and couldn’t record. I kept listening to the guitar recording that I had with me repeatedly, and thought about how I should sing.

Once I gained back my voice a little bit, I started to record. In fact, the version you hear right now, is me just starting to recover. Quite a soldier I am. After I got my voice recorded, it was just time spent on fixing it on Logic Pro.

The original song, at the very end, had a little girl sing (not sure if it was a girl or boy, but the name suggested that she was a girl). That was the best part of the song. Of course, I needed a kid to do that. I am, still young in my time, do not have children under my knees. But, my sister has a kid in China that just has the purest kid voice. My nephew, Laughing, since he has to listen to me (lol not really), helped me in recording the kid part.

After I went back to China, I’ve postponed, or rather, procrastinated on ever recording it, because the last time I returned to China, I stayed there for almost a year. It’s only towards the end of my stay in China that I actually dragged him down to the theater room in the basement and recorded his part. Even though he has the best voice possible for a kid, but BOY, that boy cannot sing in just one tune. I don’t remember if I sang as bad as when I was a kid, but there’s clearly room for growth. I took that voice sample back with me to America, and once I fixed his voice through Flex, the song was up and running.

The original song also had piano and string accompaniment. I decided against adding piano to my version of the song after my friend Ailin suggested that my voice + the nylon guitar is good enough. Even though I had basic knowledge of violins, I didn’t have an actual violin with me in America, so I just used Logic Pro’s included synth. It sounded way too fake for some reason, and I spent a couple of days just fixing the strings synth.

But yeah, the final product that was released, was perfect. The original song by itself was just perfect, and my rendition of it didn’t do it any injustice. I thoroughly enjoyed my singing and everything that went with it. Everybody liked it, my friend Qianqian especially. She really liked it.

Don’t want to brag, but my good friend Kihyun, who has helped me countless times with my past releases, said that my singing is better than the original. A cover song can never compete with the original in terms of merit, but singing, yeah, I have him beat.

Album Cover