Aaron Parecki

Day 58. It's a 1940s video of cats, but the music is scored like a dramatic scene from a TV show. This one probably won't make sense without the video, so if you're listening to this in podcast form, go check out my website where you can see the video version. The video here is straight out of a 1947 video called "The Private Life of a Cat", and I wanted to experiment with scoring the video without changing the video at all. The instrumentation and structure are loosely based off of the music from a short scene of a Star Trek episode.

Day 57. This is an experiment in holding a droning tone throughout the whole song, while also having some other harmonies.

Day 56. For today's song, my dad chose the instrumentation and style, and I had to see what I could come up with. He gave me "horns" and "concerto". So I started by studying the structure of concertos. A concerto typically features a single instrument soloist, with an orchestra or piano backing it up. They typically start out with an "exposition" from the instruments other than the featured instrument, introducing the theme. Then the second exposition features the soloist introducing the theme again. This is followed by a "development" section, featuring the soloist, usually in a different key, which ends by building up on the maj7th chord to a coda section which repeats the original theme in the tonic. My challenge was to fit all this in under a minute, so I basically have one phrase per section. I started by using the motif from Day 3 and building everything up around that. The very last phrase is basically the Day 3 song at the end.

Day 55. I liked the electric cello instrument I used yesterday and wanted to explore it more today. This one features the cello with just a few instruments to back it. The recordings are amazing, and the electric cello is a really interesting instrument that sounds quite different from a regular cello while still being pretty expressive. It's basically the electric guitar equivalent for something the size of a cello. No resonant body, just capturing the sounds from the vibrating strings.

Day 54. In this one, I wanted to play around with some new EastWest instruments I downloaded. The voice is from the "Voices of Passion" set, and the solo instrument is an electric cello. The drone background is four string instruments plus a faint synth sound to round things out. I like how ethereal this is, and how it lacks a beat.

Day 53. Epic trailer music! I had fun with layering a bunch of orchestra instruments with a choir and several kinds of drums and cymbals. This needed a video more fun than the FInal Cut animations so I found some creative commons drone footage on Vimeo by Stephane Ma. https://vimeo.com/133415675

Day 51. After a full day of networking events and meetings, I didn't get started on this until I got home at 8:30pm. I wanted to do something short, so I figured I would do more of an "audio logo" rather than a full "song". It turns out that making a 15-second sound doesn't actually end up taking significantly less time than a minute-long more song-like song, I still spent an hour on this. It was an interesting experiment though!

Day 50. I'm officially half way done! This one is inspired by Loreena McKennitt's "The Mummers Dance". I used a few different samples of Bulgarian voices from the EastWest "Voices of Passion" set. You might also notice the reverse-piano sound a couple times. I used a mix of the drum track generator plus myself playing the bongo track on the keyboard to get a good mix of percussion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.