Aaron Parecki

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!