Aaron Parecki

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.