Aaron Parecki

This is not what I intended to do for Maniac Mornings, but I had already been booked to record the talks at CSVConf before I started this project, so I'm posting this anyway. I spent the whole day Tuesday and Wednesday at the conference filming up in the balcony.

This morning I worked on the websub.rocks test suite, and wrote a helper library for creating a WebSub client.

Day 100. As you can probably imagine, I was spending a lot of energy trying to figure out what to do for my 100th day. I had considered a few options, like "33 seconds of silence", or a bizarre mashup of the previous 99 songs. In the end, I decided to make the final song be just one note, a massive orchestra hit. It turns out it takes a surprising number of instruments to make this sound like anything still. Several layers of strings, various percussion instruments, a large piano chord, and I even snuck in a subtle hint of the electronic cello that's been featured in a few of my songs. And with that, I am done! I've published all the songs and videos on a web page if you want to browse through the archives! https://100.aaronparecki.com

Day 99. Almost done. I had fun with the pizzicato strings in this one. The pizzicato cello and the snare drum hold down the rhythm, and I have a few different violins and violas playing the melody.

Day 98. Another multiple-layer piano track. Each piano has a different effect applied. Echo, reverbs, EQ to emphasize specific frequencies.

Day 97. Further proving the theory that when I don't have a plan for the day, I end up finishing way sooner than I thought, today's song took less than an hour. As usual, I started this with the piano intro, and built it up from there. I considered using a drum set, but then opted for a light bongo track instead. The piano part is actually two overlaid tracks in the same range, which for some reason ends up working nicely together. I think the middle section could use a little more buildup, but the flute does an okay job at denoting the middle section.

Day 96. I always seem to spend a lot more time on these when there's a specific sound I'm going for. This one turned out to take way more layers than I expected. I'm still a little confused why I couldn't quite get the string section to sound correctly "on" the beat. I tried snapping it exactly to the beat, and that sounded too lagging in some cases, so I tried moving up a few of the notes in some cases. It's not quite right, but it's about as close as I can get it.

Day 95. I wanted to try something in a medieval style, so this is a quick sketch mostly experimenting with the instrumentation of it.

Day 94. I didn't have a great plan for this today. There's a lot of sounds going on here, but I tried to make a few of the highlights stand out. I think also after a few days in a row of doing piano-centric songs, I tend to try something in a totally different direction just to make sure I'm not getting stuck.

Day 93. I didn't end up finishing today's song before going to the studio for my last class, so I had to finish it here. I ended up doing something pretty simple just cause I didn't have much time. The video is some test footage we shot on the green screen earlier today.

Day 92. This is maybe a little more wander-y than I wanted, I wasn't expecting to bring in the orchestra in the middle until after I had started. I originally thought it would be just piano again. There's a couple little nods to some other songs in here if you listen closely.

Day 91. I don't know why I'm on such a piano kick lately. This one was kind of fun because it's more notes than can be played with two hands, but doesn't totally sound like it.

Day 90. The final stretch! Didn't know what I was going to do today, so again I started by playing around on the piano until I hit something that I could use to build off of. After I recorded the piano track, I added a few other instruments on top. The drum track is a mix of my own tracks plus the Logic Pro drummer.

Day 89. This is all one take on the piano, with only a little tweaking of the timing and loudness of some notes. I was planning on adding some other instruments to it, but nothing seemed to fit quite right. I ended up adding an echo to the piano with an 1/8 note delay. I only added the echo to the notes on the beat, not on the little runs, because that muddied it up too much.

Day 88. Another fun five-part piano piece. Each piano is panned slightly off-center. Some of them are a 2 bar loop, others do slight variations of their theme for each phrase. I decided to let this one fade out rather than do a build-out, since it would have ended up too long otherwise.

Day 87. Today was the first day in a while that I started a song by playing the piano for an hour before writing anything down. Once I knew what I was going for, I recorded the piano track. I added the other two instruments, a Duduk and Electric Cello, mostly following existing aspects of the piano melody.

Day 86. I'm not sure a major key was right for this one or if I should have done it in a minor key instead. I mostly wanted to work on getting the orchestra to accent certain beats. The horn melody fills in the rest.

Day 85. This went in a whole different direction than I thought it would when I started. I originally started with the first piano notes, and then somehow ended up building it up to a jazzy rhythm. It's not perfect, I think the velocities of the trumpet part could be tweaked some more, but you get the idea. I do like how the piano solo is joined by the drum fill at the end.

Day 84. This is a fun horn fanfare that resolves with a full orchestra. It took a while to get the horn accents right. During the last phrase I had to slow down the middle of it slightly for it to sound right. I also like the solo violin part that peeks out of the sound.

Day 83. I think this accurately reflects my mood today. This actually started with me accidentally hitting a few notes on the piano, and I just went from there. This is one of the few times that I can't actually tell you what all the chords and harmonies are, because I just kept layering things on top that sounded good. This one also needed some percussion beyond the Logic Pro drummers. It's a combination of some manual drum track entry plus the Logic drummer.