Brand New Key

Pam’s two granddaughters (6 years old and ~20 months old) have taken a liking to little arbitrary videos I’ve made over the past couple of years, so I decided I should make one specifically for them. This is that video.

Brand New Key

The original song was written, recorded, and released by the artist Melanie in 1971. I chose this because of its childlike nature, and also because it is one of Pam’s favorites. I actually own the 45 RPM record.

The sequence was this: Record the audio, record all the video segments, then edit it it all together.

I recorded the audio following my traditional process, but for the first time, I used GarageBand for MacOS on my new MacBook Air. GarageBand on a Mac is much more sophisticated and feature-rich than its iOS (iPad) counterpart, so I have “enjoyed” the corresponding learning curve.

The first project challenge: This song is in 4/4 time, but there are 2 measures of 2/4. GarageBand doesn’t natively support changing time signatures, but there are workarounds available. The best of the available options involves using an app for scoring/notating music, creating an empty score sheet that has nothing but the time signature changes, saving the score as a MIDI file, then importing it into a GarageBand project. For this, I used the free and open-source MuseScore suite.

Despite what you see in the video, I did not play the drums. Instead, I did what I typically do with my solo projects and created a drum track in GarageBand using its native drum sample options. I then added acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and bass guitar tracks. Next came the melodica. Only the second time I’ve had the opportunity to use that little baby in one of my projects, so that was cool. Finally, I recorded all the vocal tracks, then added a bit of percussion (bongos) to complete the tracking activities.

I mixed the audio on the Mac, but I still turned to my iPad for the mastering process. I’ve grown accustom to using a specific mastering app, Final Touch, which I have on my iPad. It’s an app that has been end-of-lifed by the company that created it, which is unfortunate because I really like it. I can continue to use it on my iPad for as long as it continues to work, but I’m always just 1 iOS version update away from losing it, and I don’t think there is a Mac version of it, either.

Once I had the audio recorded and mastered to my liking, it was time to record all the video segments, which I did on my iPad. The second project challenge: Synchronizing audio and video. I know there has to be a better way to do this (like using software that supports SMPTE timecodes), but I figured out an unsophisticated technique that got the job done. Each video segment was recorded with me singing or playing along with the “official” recording, which was playing live in the room over a Bluetooth speaker. Later, I detached and deleted the audio track from each of the video segments, so each one ended up being a silent miming of whatever section I was recording.

Lots of costume changes, takes, interruptions, and technical difficulties later, I had the raw video footage.

The final step in the process was also the third and final project challenge: Editing the video. I had hoped to use iMovie, which is Apple’s free video editing tool. I’ve used it before for some of the arbitrary videos I mentioned earlier, but I expected it would have limitations that would prevent me from realizing the vision for this that I had in my head.

I was correct.

Now I was faced with either scaling back on my vision or purchasing, downloading, and learning a whole new video editing tool. I chose the latter, and after a bit of research, I landed on Final Cut Pro, also an Apple product, and similar to iMovie in terms of its user interface, but WAY more advanced in terms of capability. Specifically, it was iMovie’s lack of support for multiple picture-in-picture frames that forced me to use a more sophisticated and professional tool. I like a challenge, and I like learning, and I got to experience both with this project.

The editing process took a full day, and then a few more hours in day 2, but I got everything looking exactly as I had envisioned.

Hope you enjoy it. I’m sure Eva and Romi will 🙂

Published
Categorized as Video

7 comments

  1. Roland sent this to me and it totally rocks! Fantastic! (And it’s going to be stuck in my head for at least a few hours…)

  2. Baby it’s the best! Thank you for putting so much time and effort into this song for the girls and me. I’m sure we will be listening to it over and over and over. We love you so much.

  3. Ok Rich you really out did yourself this time!!!
    Eva and Romi are so so lucky to have a song arrangement made just for them.
    As I was listening for the third time, my son came in and he liked it too.
    I was going to try to send it to his phone but I’m not sure if I can, and I don’t want to lose it.
    As in your previous songs this one is great . 👍

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