Aaron Parecki

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!