First Takes-Beautiful Girl

This week's video was quite a lesson.

See, I had this idea.

I wanted to take a song from my first album, change the key and time signature, and do this cool kinda classical guitar bit.

But my classical guitar (my dad's really) has this buzz that I can't seem to fix, which means that the close miking technique I wanted to use wasn't going to work for this particular song.

Boo.

Then it got late, so I thought it would be fun to take a very old recording, something not released in this century and do a fun flashback video for it.

I don't know how much you all remember about the beginning of iTunes, but there was this amazingly stoney feature where you could watch this psychedelic light show screen saver while your music played.

The feature still exists, its called the visualizer, if you want to try it out, but we don't really listen to music much when we're not doing something else, so I wonder if the teens of today even know about it at all.

However, in my day, I remember scouring Radio Shack for a stereo phone jack splitter and extension cord so that me girl friend and I could lay, very chastely, side by side on the bed and watch my enormous 15" screen and like totally zone out to the new Concrete Blonde compilation.

Then we discovered shuffle, and suddenly never needed pot again.

It was like the rave culture was suddenly available in my living room.

Now kids spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars to go to weekend long festivals for what is essentially elevator music with glow in the dark hula hoops.

Suckers.

Anyway, so I figured out how to capture a video of my screen (Thanks Google and QuickTime) and thought it would be awesome to just play the Visualizer over a song I recorded way back in the way back.

Alas, just like a Julie Taymor production, it was awesome for about a minute thirty and then boring.

"But" I thought, now that I know how to capture video from the screen "How cool would it be to type the lyrics of the song in real time, using a fun font?"

Answer: Very Cool.

Application: I can't type that fast.

Two hours killed trying.

Carriage return, stare at the ceiling.

I had another idea, which I won't share yet, cause I may end up doing it somewhere down the line, but in it's current form, didn't work either.

Three hours down.

Oh, look, pizza for dinner.

Then screw it. Put up a single mic. Put up a single camera. Hit record.

Same song as the first idea, but the raw punk acoustic version I do in my live show.

Sounds thin and terrible, but after taking the single track and passing it through several different amp filters and panning them a little to the left and a little to the right, now we've got something that sounds a bit more full and immediate.

Kay cool.

But the look is too static.

Hmm?

What if we go back to the typing idea, but not worry so much about capturing it in real time and just cutting it up in the editing room?

Totally should have thought of that before.

But, me, kinda stupid.

Or, you know, an untrained dilettante with something to prove.

So, five hours in total, when adding up the earlier cutting room floor pieces and we're done.

Time for pizza.