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Aaron Parecki

#100daysofmusic

  • Day 49 - Floating

    Day 49. The opening sound is a reversed piano chord that starts with a tight EQ in the middle and opens up as it builds. I used that sound a couple more times in the song. After getting the piano chords down, I layered a few strange sounds on top for effect.
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  • Day 48 - Glitch

    Day 48. This morning, my friend @KmikeyM asked if he could make the video for today's song! Since I hadn't started yet, I though that would be a fun collaboration. I decided to experiment with adding a bunch of industrial glitch sounds in the background of this one.
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  • Day 47 - Launch

    Day 47. Today I wanted to use a bunch of samples from NASA shuttle launches. I started by finding a countdown I liked, and then grabbed samples from a bunch of different NASA launches to overlay them. I retimed the countown to fit the beat, and took some liberties with the order of some of the sounds, like adding the mic chirp in places it wouldn't normally exist. I used a recording of a shuttle launch as the foundation. The video is an assortment of clips I found on the Internet Archive from various NASA missions.
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  • Aaron Parecki
    Day 46. The time signature of this one is 15/8. Basically each phrase has a half beat less than what you'd expect from 4/4, or a half-beat more than 7/4. I did a lot of EQ separation on each instrument to really isolate each from each other.
    Portland, Oregon
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  • Day 45 - Teaspoons

    Day 45. This is the first time I've recorded my own audio for a song, and only the third time I've used audio samples at all. The clinking glass sound I recorded on the kitchen counter. It's me hitting two pint glasses with the handle of a tea spoon. I recorded about 8 takes of 16 bars of the rhythm. I used the best five 4-bar phrases in the final song. It was an interesting experiment cleaning up the audio so that it worked well with the rest of the song. I first used a high pass filter to remove all the low frequencies which cut out the "thumping" sound and the sound of the glass slowly sliding on the table every time I hit it. I discovered that Logic Pro has a "quantize" function that works on audio, not just midi! I used that to get the glass hits better synced up with the beat. I used a pitch adjustment filter to drop the pitch about a quarter tone at the end of the first and third bars of each phrase. I liked the way this detuning sounded, so I echoed that in some of the other instruments as well. The on-the-beat high tone is detuned a step mostly at the end of the phrase, but there's a whole phrase I left it detuned the whole time. I included a brief snippet of video of me recording the clinking sounds just for fun.
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  • Aaron Parecki
    Trying something new #100daysofmusic
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  • Day 44 - Pianos

    Day 44 - Another attempt at using different kinds of pianos. The first one you hear is doubled, with the second track moving in and out of tune over the phrase. It's EQ'd to only hear high frequencies, making it sound sort of "tinny". The second one that comes in is actually two different pianos, panned hard right and hard left. They are adjusted to sound "warm". Finally the bass piano comes in which is restricted tightly to the low frequencies, with a peak at a frequency matching a low C which gives it a sort of resonance.
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  • Day 43 - Darkness

    Day 43. This one kind of just meanders for a while without a lot of resolution. It seemed appropriate today for some reason.
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  • Day 42 - Sprinkles

    Day 42. I'm heading to DonutJS tonight to film the evening's talks. I threw this together to use as the intro/outro music after I publish them. It's a re-creation in a similar style to the stock music I've used on those videos before, so nothing fancy. The video is the background of the donutjs.club website.
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  • Day 41 - Anticipation

    Day 41. I originally thought I would use a clean pulse synth sound for this one, but then decided it sounded better as a piano sound instead. I also added a bass line that mirrors the piano's low notes to fill out the sound. The bass line has an EQ filter that moves around during the sustained parts in order to give it a sense of motion until the next phrase comes in. I have a whole second part I want to add to this, but this was getting long and I was getting tired, so I stopped there. At the end, I added a very subtle crackling filter that fades in and out during the middle.
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  • Day 40 - Melancholy

    Day 40. This is mostly me playing the piano live. In a few places I adjusted the timing, and I added a couple notes that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to reach. I doubled the piano with two slightly different piano sounds, and they are panned hard left and hard right. This adds a bit of depth to it. I added the drum track at a relatively low volume to kind of keep things moving a bit more than it would without the drums. This one came out a lot more melancholy than I thought it was going to despite it being in a major key.
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  • Aaron Parecki
    If you haven't figured out what all these videos I've been posting are, I figured I'd give a quick update.

    Starting at the end of December, I've been writing and publishing one short song per day. They usually end up being a brief sketch, but the goal is to publish something "finished" enough that it could be used in a podcast, TV show, background music, or something similar.

    I'm now 40 days into the project, just under half way done! It's been a really interesting experiment so far. Not that these can all be considered complete, but I've now written more songs in the last 40 days than I have ever before, so I'd already consider this a success. The pressure to start and finish something each day is pretty intense. I'm not always happy with each one I publish, but this is more about exercising my ability to come up with something new every day than it is about making something "perfect".

    If you want to catch up on the 40 things I've published so far, I've been publishing them to a bunch of different platforms so you have no excuse not to listen to them ;-)

    • Podcast available on iTunes and Google Play (search "100 Days of Music")
    • Podcast feed: http://podcasts.aaronparecki.com/100daysofmusic/feed.xml
    • Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/aaronpk/sets/100-days-of-music
    • Add to your Amazon Alexa flash briefing: https://www.amazon.com/Aaron-Parecki-100-Days-Music/dp/B01N1YPGPX/
    • And of course my website: https://aaronparecki.com/tag/100daysofmusic
    Portland, Oregon, USA
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  • Day 39 - Escalation

    Day 39. I don't know if you can really call this one a "song". This is an attempt at making something that could be used in a trailer or as the end of an episode of a TV show. There is a base track of a few layers of string instruments, and then I layered a whole bunch of other sounds to build up to the big "boom" at the end. I reversed a couple of the sounds so that they build up instead of taper off. There's also a heart beat at the super low frequencies that doesn't actually follow the rhythm of the rest of the piece, which I think gives it a nice bit of dramatic effect. This time, I was mixing it while listening on both headphones and my desk speakers to make sure it comes across okay without headphones.
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  • Aaron Parecki
    Day 38. I wanted this one to be mostly piano, with just a hint of some other sounds. You might want to listen to this one with headphones for the full effect. The atonal sounds you hear are sampled from a gong. I like how some of them sound like muffled speech.
    Portland, Oregon
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  • Aaron Parecki
    Day 37. I liked the way the maj9 chord resolved in this synth patch, so I built up the rest of the song around that. The background piano is doubled at a 1/8 step out of tune. I used the same compressor trick to help add rhythm to the background tracks too. I'm starting to run out of new video filters to use for these, I wonder how I'm going to make it to 100.
    Portland, Oregon
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  • Day 36 - Flying

    Day 36. This one's short and sweet. When I replay this in my head I keep thinking about other embellishments I could add. I think if I later expand this I might try some of those ideas, but I didn't want to complicate this version of it. The video is from my flight from Oakland to Portland this morning.
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  • Day 35 - Oak

    Day 35. I'm not super happy with this one. I originally had something else in mind, but didn't have the energy tonight to properly get it out of my head. So instead, you get this, which is a strange combination of sounds. You may recognize the pulsing synth sound from yesterday's song as well.
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  • Day 34 - Texture

    Day 34. I started this one by listening to a Logic Pro loop that I liked. I tried to recreate parts of it as an experiment to see what it would take. I started with two synths playing the chord progression in two different octaves. I added a clip distortion filter to make them sound more dirty. I wanted them to sound like they were pulsing on the beat, except I wanted the volume to drop on the beat to punctuate the sound instead of having them get louder on the beat. To do that, I added a silent drum track that just hits a bass drum every beat, and used this as the input to a compressor so that the compressor would think there was sound on the beat and clamp down on the synth tracks. This results in the tracks getting quiet on the beat, and coming back up again on the off-beats.
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  • Day 33 - Up and Down

    Day 33. I didn't really know what to expect going into this today. I started with the piano, then added the first violins that you hear. At some point I realized this sounded familiar, and then found out that it's the same chord progression I used on Day 7. Not that it's particularly unique. I then decided to stick with only orchestral instruments, and that I wanted to try a large buildup and taper it off to a slow resolution without doing a fade-out. I think that aspect worked!
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  • Aaron Parecki
    Day 32. I decided to go somewhat simple for this one. I used a delay effect to get the piano and snare drum to echo. I added the vocals last to fill out the sound some more. The vocals are a mix of a full choir singing "ah" and tenors singing "oo", and they fade in and out mixing between different intensities of singing. If this were used as background music in a TV show I probably wouldn't have used as strong of a hit at the end, and just left the cymbal build-up hanging and probably not resolved the chord either.
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