FredMcKinnon.Com

Hey Everybody -

One of my favorite things to do in music is creating original soundtracks to video clips.  In my role as the Worship Director here at SSCC I get lots of opportunities to do that.  Our Tech Dept is amazing, and huge kudos to Travis Paulding for leading it.

Though our videos are pretty short, it’s often necessary to score original music with them.  Sure, we can find “canned music” online, but it’s much more meaningful to me when I can feel the vibe of the video and relate it musically.

This past week was no different – only the “vibe” was amusing … my challenge was to create a spoof on the “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” Apple commercials.  The music needed to be similar enough so that people could get the parody, yet different enough to prevent infringing on their copyrighted composition.  This video is being used to setup the sermon on the last two weeks of our “Ignite” series on Sex, Dating, and Marriage.  Special thanks to John and Missy Weaver for the acting!

You can read more of the technical details of how the video was shot on Travis’ blog, but for the music, here are all the recording/tech details for those who are interested.  But first, the video:

Ignite – Marriage Intro – Man vs. Woman from Travis Paulding on Vimeo.

1.  Travis edited the video and once the timing was established, I received a QuickTime Movie.  It was still raw, the green screen was in the video and hadn’t been keyed out, etc., but the timing was there, which was all I needed.

2.  I imported the video into ProTools, and created several new tracks:
a.  Midi Track for the Shaker
*I used the Stylus RMX plugin to get the Shaker sound.  It’s an awesome plugin by Spectrasonics and it allows me to copy/paste a MIDI segment that I can alter and arrange.  Most importantly, I can control it with tempo changes, since it’s really a simple MIDI file.

b.  Midi Track for the Marimba
*I used my Yamaha S80 for the Marimba sound.

c.  Midi Track for the Piano
*Again, I used my Yamaha S80 for the piano.

3.  After tracking everything, I used ProTools’ Tempo controls to insert a gradual ritardando (slow down, for you non-music folk) over the last couple of measures, to give it that same feel as the Apple commercials.

4.  I bounced a stereo .wav file, but after getting it back to Travis, the mix wasn’t nearly the same.  Although I have great studio reference monitors (Event 20/20 biamps), it simply sounded vastly different on Travis’ monitors.  The marimba was way back in the mix, and the shaker was way too hot.  So, I went back to ProTools and created 3 new AUDIO TRACKS.  I bussed the output of the existing AUX INPUTS from Stylus and the S80 to the inputs of the Audio Tracks, named those tracks with the respective instrument, and recorded them.  Now, I had individual .wav files in my Audio folder for each instrument.

5.  I brought the invidiual .wav files back to Travis who was able to mix them appropriately in Final Cut.

Voila – what do you think?