Spent some quality time at Bondi Beach in Australia in October and spent the day taking photographs. This one added a soundtrack of me playing Satie (not very well) with the addition of various other sound effects to tie in with the action onscreen. I've done another one uploaded to Vimeo (vimeo.com/user1980254/)
which has a different soundtrack. Let me know which you prefer.
My sister Susan and I had fun collaborating on a number of fiddle tunes. Susan recorded them on her cello, and I added various digital tracks. This one called out for a video that featured dreamlike imagery with a bit of humor.
The older I get, the more I appreciate autumn. This video is a 2+ minute photo montage, with an original soundtrack featuring Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata theme (played and recorded by me using my Yamaha MX88), and some novel effects. With over 80 images, the video is a celebration of a beautiful time of year, as photographed in and around Marin County over several seasons.
My younger, super cellist sister, recently gave me our grandfather's violin. I recorded myself playing it and added some other musical elements. The sound made me think of the word Cacophony, ie "a harsh discordant mixture of sounds." That, in turn, reminded me of the mixture of experiences that make up life. In my case, the approximately 75% of allotted time already lived. Fortunately I have the thousands of photos my father took over the years, as well as a vast trove of other artworks and photos. Happy technology has advanced to the point where all of this can be easily put together. Here is one result.
After years of playing piano, by reading the notes but not understanding any of the basics, I've gotten interested in learning about music theory and composition. Fortunately, I located two very old music publications that my late, great, mother had in her music library (she was a superb pianist and composer) which are quite useful: Modern Styles and Harmonic Construction for Popular Piano Playing by Marvin Kahn and The Majors and Their Relatives by Eula Ashworth Lindfors. I'm also trying to wade through the Idiot's Guide to Music Composition and Music Theory for Dummies.
This new music interest was generated initially by a desire to clean up the poor recordings of much of my mother's music, which led to trying to learn both Cubase and Adobe Audition software. Playing with the new software enabled me to add musical elements to my mother's compositions (sound efx, loops, bird songs, etc.), which has led to a desire to try my hand at making my own original music.
Recently, I noticed a similarity between The Color Wheel (a circular guide to mixing color) and The Chord Wheel (a circular tool for composing one's own music). So I associated a different color to 8 chord tracks in a very simple scale exercise, then sought to create a video using those same colors synced up with the underlying chords. My late, great father's photography has also been accessed with an old photo of me filling in for Mary, in the tune Mary had a Little Lamb which appears towards the end of the video's soundtrack.
This short 55 second video is perhaps a bit too mathematical, the music too elementary and the whole not very artistic. But the new learning effort is taking my mind off of negative Corona Virus news and bad behavior societal displays. Escaping from time to time into nature, music and art are essential for trying to maintain some form of sanity in these trying times.
Playing with the adjustment brush in Lightroom, remembering one of my favorite bands, Cream. Just finished watching a documentary on drummer Ginger Baker, which brought back some happy memories of days filled with great music!