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Aaron Parecki

#100daysofmusic

  • Day 31 - Seven Grands

    Day 31. This one is composed of seven tracks of the same piano sound, all with slightly different EQ and effects. One has a strong low-pass filter to make it sound percussive and not interfere with the rest, some have delay effects, etc. I wanted to see what I could do with only piano and no other instruments this time!
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  • Day 30 - On the Train

    Day 30. I can't believe it's already been a month I've been doing this project! I hope this one isn't too obvious what I was going for. I wrote most of this on the train from Eugene to Portland today. I added a 1/8 note pulse to the main synth track, which is supposed to be a nod to the rhythmic sounds the wheels make on the tracks. The slow pitch bend down one step is the doppler effect of passing another train and the bells at the train crossings. The piano chord accents are supposed to be the train horn. Get it? Is this too much of a musical pun?
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  • Day 29 - Tuned

    Day 29. I started this one with the synth chord track. They go in and out of tune across the phrases, only plus or minus half a half-step so it's barely audible but should come across as something being slightly off. The bongo drums were fun to add, that's mostly me playing the piano notes live, and there are a few different kinds of hits in the samples to make it sound less mechanical.
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  • Day 28 - Waiting

    Day 28. Waiting for the snow to melt. I started this one from the chord progression in the middle, and then built up to and out of it.
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  • Day 27 - Echoes

    Day 27. Solo piano again. There's a half-measure delay added to the piano. The track that plays the delay is adjusted to make it sound far away, by boosting the high EQ and dropping the low frequencies, and adding a "stereo spread" effect to make it sound like it's coming from both sides. This sounds way more interesting with headphones so you can hear that effect better.
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  • Day 26 - Sherlock at Dawn

    Day 26. Time for another mashup! This is the Sherlock opening theme orchestrated and arranged like Nina Simone's "Feeling Good." These are always fun to do because I get to deconstruct two different songs and then put them back together. I also included the audio from the original Nina Simone track since she does a solo introduction in the song, and it lined up pretty well without a lot of cuts! The video is the Sherlock intro sequence mixed with some video of a Nina Simone concert.
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  • Day 25 - The Archives

    Day 25. I got started much earlier today, and appreciated having the extra time to work on this! I'm reasonably happy with it, although I think the last phrase could use some more build-up, to emphasize the hesitation and quiet ending even more. The video is from my visit to the Internet Archive in San Francisco yesterday. The Internet Archive main office is in an old church. These are just two of the racks of live servers that power archive.org.
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  • Day 24 - The Cheat

    Day 24. I was out and about in San Francisco most of the day, so didn't get started on this until I was finally in the MAX on the ride home from the Portland airport. I started this on my phone, which meant I was relatively limited in what I could do, so I started putting some loops from Garage Band on the iPhone together. I never made it an explicit rule not to use loops, but I've always felt bad about doing that. This one is almost entirely just various loops assembled together. But it was more important to me to get something done than to not use loops, so here we are.
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  • Day 23 - Absinthe

    Day 23. Back at my hotel in the evening, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get started tonight. Lily suggested that I call her and she could sing something to me over the phone. So we chatted on Facetime for a few minutes, and she sang some random words that she read from around the apartment, in something resembling a tune. I took a tiny slice of the call, pitch corrected and retimed it like crazy, and then built up some other instruments around it. This was an interesting exercise in learning the pitch correction and retiming tools in Logic, and I also learned a great way to record Facetime calls from my phone in high quality. I'm not thrilled with the end result, and am kind of frustrated that I couldn't seem to get motivated tonight, but I guess it's okay to have an off night now and then. Oh and I shot this video while waiting for my Lyft back to my hotel.
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  • Day 22 - In-Flight Entertainment

    Day 22. I wrote this on the short flight from PDX to SFO. When I first played it out, I couldn't decide what instrument to use for the lead-in. When I got to my hotel room, it finally dawned on me that it should be this percussive bell thing to round out the "circus" vibe that the rest of the track already had!
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  • Day 21 - Snow Day

    Day 21. This evening, a snow storm hit Portland. It went from "oh look at the cute snowflakes" to 5 inches of snow in about 2 hours. I originally shot a bunch more b-roll for this video, but then decided I liked this shot enough to use it for the whole clip. With some more time, there's a bunch more I want to do with this song. I might try to expand on it later, because I keep having ideas for how to make this sound more like I'm imagining it.
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  • Day 20 - Vieux Carré

    Day 20. This was the first time I started and finished a song in a bar! I wrote this between my dentist appointment and seeing a movie downtown. The Vieux Carré is a $5 on-tap cocktail at Imperial in Downtown Portland. I will admit it was a bit of a challenge working on this with other music playing in the bar, but my noise cancelling headphones helped a lot.
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  • Aaron Parecki
    Day 19. Just to make sure I wasn't getting stuck attempting to make fake instruments sound real, today's song is super ethereal and lacking most things resembling instruments and rhythm. I have no idea what I might use this for in the future, but it was an interesting exploration of making a soundscape.
    Portland, Oregon
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  • Day 18 - Maple and Spruce

    Day 18. I wasn't sure where to start today, but I remembered that it was my friend Barnaby's birthday! I first met Barnaby on the Internet, and later met him in person at an IndieWebCamp. In addition to being a prolific contributor to many IndieWeb projects, he also plays *and makes* Hurdy-Gurdys! What's a Hurdy Gurdy? It's a very cool instrument that is kind of like a key-fretted violin played with a circular bow. I went to his website http://waterpigs.co.uk to see what sorts of musical things he's been up to lately, and found a neat melody called "Maple and Spruce" written out. I decided to use this as the basis for today's song. Oh and I should mention that this arrangement is not actually trying to sound like a Hurdy-Gurdy, although I imagine it would sound great played on it too. So happy birthday Barnaby!
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    waterpigs.co.uk
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  • Aaron Parecki
    Day 17. This is a piano solo I recorded in only a couple takes. After recording, I added some chorus, delay, EQ filters, and a phaser effect to make it sound like it was sort of out of tune and far away. I guess I was going for the "something is slightly off" vibe. I considered adding some other instruments but ended up sticking with a piano solo for this one.
    Portland, Oregon
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  • Aaron Parecki
    If you have an Amazon Echo, you can hear a new song by me every day with your #FlashBriefing! Add my #100DaysOfMusic skill in the app!
    Portland, Oregon, USA
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  • Day 16 - Woodbury

    Day 16. I dug up an old radio show called Mr. and Mrs. North, and the opening had a fantastic ad for Woodbury Cold Cream with a little acapella jingle. I decided that it would be a great bit to sample for the basis of today's song. I also incorporated some parts of the narrator's voice into the track. The video that goes along with this is snippets from the Mr. and Mrs. North TV show.
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  • Aaron Parecki
    Day 15. I have no explanation for this. I didn't start this until 7pm after grocery shopping, was determined to knock something out within an hour, and didn't have any ideas coming into it. I walked into my office and sat down, and somehow the intro piano popped into my head. I just ran with it, played another piano track on top, then layered the rest of the instruments to accompany it. Not bad for 30 minutes!
    Portland, Oregon
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  • Day 14: Slow-Scan TV #100DaysOfMusic

    Day 14. Tonight I tuned in to an amateur radio meetup where people shared images over the radio. Slow-scan TV is a way of transmitting images by converting them to sound, where various frequencies and timings correspond to colors and brightness. I used the image I tried to send tonight as the base of today's song. If you play this song in front of an SSTV decoder application, you will see the image it represents! There's only a little noise added to the image from the rest of the instruments.
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    #100daysofmusic #hamradio

  • Day 13: Daft Punk vs The Office #100DaysOfMusic

    Day 13. Daft Punk vs The Office. I had fun with this one! This is the chords and melody from Daft Punk's Get Lucky, but instrumented and arranged the same as the theme from The Office. It's also my first time using a vocoder on my own voice!
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    #100daysofmusic #daftpunk #theoffice #mashup