Aaron Parecki

Day 65. I decided to keep it simple with this one, only adding the little chimes on top of the piano and no other instruments. I used a strong wet reverb effect on the piano to give it a "distant" feeling.

Day 64. There was a brief moment of sun today, so I took the opportunity to go on a bike ride up and down the esplanade! This song has nothing to do with the ride, though. This song started with the bells you hear at the beginning, and I built it up from there. I actually wasn't planning on adding the drums and synth sound until I got half way through building up the strings, but I thought it would be an interesting way of quickly escalating it.

Day 63. Got a late start on this again today. I was going for another super short "audio logo" style thing today. I made a totally different style video to accompany this to hint at the kind of thing I imagine this would be used for. Also had fun finding a few string samples like some major scale runs to use at the end.

Day 62. I spent most of the day on other projects, so wanted to do a simple song today. The video is my other project I worked on! I ran all the tubing for the pumps for BarBot today, and got to try out pouring a drink!

Day 61. I wanted to try writing something really short that was still a distinctive sound that makes you feel like you're in a new place. I got the idea from watching White Collar, where they have about 6 seconds of music at the beginning of the episode, just enough to set the stage without being a "theme song". This music isn't really anything like the White Collar music, but it's the same idea. I found a few timelapse video clips of cities that I thought felt appropriate for the music.

Day 60. Did not have a goal in mind with this one. Decided to experiment with some of the new sounds I downloaded in the East/West "Goliath" pack. The piano in this is a new sound as well, much softer and more ethereal than the pianos I've been using before, I think I'll try it again in the future.

Day 59. This song was my mom's choice of instrumentation and style, Scottish Highlands with whistle, Bodhran drum, fiddle, and others. I listened to a few songs in this style to get a sense of the rhythm and structure, then tried to create something similar. Aside from the obvious bagpipe drone providing the underlying structure, I noticed the harmonies tended to resolve back to the dominant chord during the last bar rather than in the next phrase. For songs in a minor key, they typically use a minor scale with a major 6th. I also noticed that the 2nd note of the scale is rarely used, usually only during runs, but often the phrases jump from the 3rd to 1st. This was a fun chance to explore a very different style!

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.