100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki

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

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 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.

Day 82. Today I knew I wanted to start with the pulsing notes that got gradually faster. I jotted that down, then later decided to turn it into something that would be at the end of a scene of a TV show with a dramatic build-up and lack of resolution.

Day 81. Quick and easy one today. Piano, bass, french horns and percussion.

Day 80. This one is inspired by the style of Juno Reactor. There are a bunch of layers of percussion, all written manually. A light bongo track is on the 16th notes, with some accented beats. There's a simple synth bass+snare, plus a few other hits. This was a fun one! Tho it may have been fun just cause I wasn't trying to finish before going to bed like the last couple.

Day 79. I felt like going with a guitar+bass+drum track today. The middle section needed some filling out in the mid-range frequencies, so I added some faint horns and another guitar part in the middle. I think it could still sound warmer, but wasn't sure how to get there. I spent a while getting the drums right on this one, I felt like it needed a few more accents beyond what the Logic Drummers provided.

Day 78. A few weeks ago, I asked my friend Mike Merrill (the world's first publicly traded person) to send me some audio samples of him reading some money-related words. He sent back a 10-minute long file audio. I sliced it up into individual words, and created a Logic Pro instrument from it. (You can actually buy the 83 samples here: http://kmikeym.myshopify.com/products/audio-of-mike-merrill-speaking-financial-terms) It took a while, but I finally had some inspiration for what kind of song I wanted to make from these. So here you go!

Day 77. Just a quick mostly piano song, I feel a little bad that the other instruments feel kinda forced on top.

Day 76. This is an oddly detuned music box. I was actually trying to find a more gentle music box sound but this is all I could find. I tweaked the EQ a bit to remove some of the lower "boomier" part of the sound, but it's still not as gentle as I wanted. In addition to the music box shifting in and out of tune, the other parts intentionally don't quite line up on the beat, and the reverb on the piano and violin is cranked up really high, so this whole thing should end up feeling slightly unsettling.

Day 75. I used more complex samples than I normally like to, as a shortcut to build up this much sound. (I didn't get started until really late today and needed to do something quickly). I added a few of my own instruments on top though, and tried to give it some shape other than just what came with the original sounds. I kind of want this one to keep going for a while longer!

Day 74. I started with the piano and layered stuff over it until I felt "done". There's a 4-part choir, a solo violin, and 6 french horns. The video is me recording the piano track, I liked that the two parts overlapped but never actually hit any of the same notes.

Day 73. The piano track here goes a 1/4 step in and out of tune very slowly throughout the song. I wanted to try out a new instrument today, and I found the Dilruba, an Indian stringed instrument, which has some nice articulations in the samples.

Day 72. Enjoy a pile of poop emoji made out of music notes.  Inspired by Andrew Huang's GLORIOUS MIDI UNICORN, I thought I would give this MIDI art thing a try. If you're listening to this in the podcast feed, it might make more sense if you watch the video instead ;-)

Day 71. A quick sketch of a triumphant fanfare. Could probably use some more filling out in the lower end of the spectrum, but I'm trying to finish these quicker lately!

Day 70. This didn't quite come out the way I wanted, I think all the chord hits might need more filling out with additional instruments. I had fun piecing together video effects to go along with the music though!

Day 69. Today's song is basically in no time signature, and features the electric cello again. It's a simple theme that I developed by flipping the notes and playing through it in a few different chords. There's a faint harp sound that helps provide context, and there's a soft droning soundscape under everything.

Day 68. I was determined to do something in under 30 minutes today. Decided to do something ethereal and mostly on the same tone to help make that easier. As weird as this is, I actually kind of like it.

Day 67. I'm not super thrilled with this, but I have a bunch of other things I need to do today so I need to be finished. I like the opening bit with the filter that opens up for 2 bars, but I was having a hard time figuring out what else to do with this today.

Day 66. Tried two new things today. First time attempting something in the "electro swing" style. I have a long ways to go to even approach sounding like Parov Stelar though. I also learned how to make the sweep sound that is in a bunch of this as well as other style music. The sweep sound is a white noise generator run through a filter whose cutoff frequency changing creates the sweep effect.

Day 65. I decided to keep it simple with this one, only adding the little chimes on top of the piano and no other instruments. I used a strong wet reverb effect on the piano to give it a "distant" feeling.

Day 64. There was a brief moment of sun today, so I took the opportunity to go on a bike ride up and down the esplanade! This song has nothing to do with the ride, though. This song started with the bells you hear at the beginning, and I built it up from there. I actually wasn't planning on adding the drums and synth sound until I got half way through building up the strings, but I thought it would be an interesting way of quickly escalating it.

Day 63. Got a late start on this again today. I was going for another super short "audio logo" style thing today. I made a totally different style video to accompany this to hint at the kind of thing I imagine this would be used for. Also had fun finding a few string samples like some major scale runs to use at the end.

Day 62. I spent most of the day on other projects, so wanted to do a simple song today. The video is my other project I worked on! I ran all the tubing for the pumps for BarBot today, and got to try out pouring a drink!

Day 61. I wanted to try writing something really short that was still a distinctive sound that makes you feel like you're in a new place. I got the idea from watching White Collar, where they have about 6 seconds of music at the beginning of the episode, just enough to set the stage without being a "theme song". This music isn't really anything like the White Collar music, but it's the same idea. I found a few timelapse video clips of cities that I thought felt appropriate for the music.

Day 60. Did not have a goal in mind with this one. Decided to experiment with some of the new sounds I downloaded in the East/West "Goliath" pack. The piano in this is a new sound as well, much softer and more ethereal than the pianos I've been using before, I think I'll try it again in the future.

Day 59. This song was my mom's choice of instrumentation and style, Scottish Highlands with whistle, Bodhran drum, fiddle, and others. I listened to a few songs in this style to get a sense of the rhythm and structure, then tried to create something similar. Aside from the obvious bagpipe drone providing the underlying structure, I noticed the harmonies tended to resolve back to the dominant chord during the last bar rather than in the next phrase. For songs in a minor key, they typically use a minor scale with a major 6th. I also noticed that the 2nd note of the scale is rarely used, usually only during runs, but often the phrases jump from the 3rd to 1st. This was a fun chance to explore a very different style!

Day 58. It's a 1940s video of cats, but the music is scored like a dramatic scene from a TV show. This one probably won't make sense without the video, so if you're listening to this in podcast form, go check out my website where you can see the video version. The video here is straight out of a 1947 video called "The Private Life of a Cat", and I wanted to experiment with scoring the video without changing the video at all. The instrumentation and structure are loosely based off of the music from a short scene of a Star Trek episode.

Day 57. This is an experiment in holding a droning tone throughout the whole song, while also having some other harmonies.

Day 56. For today's song, my dad chose the instrumentation and style, and I had to see what I could come up with. He gave me "horns" and "concerto". So I started by studying the structure of concertos. A concerto typically features a single instrument soloist, with an orchestra or piano backing it up. They typically start out with an "exposition" from the instruments other than the featured instrument, introducing the theme. Then the second exposition features the soloist introducing the theme again. This is followed by a "development" section, featuring the soloist, usually in a different key, which ends by building up on the maj7th chord to a coda section which repeats the original theme in the tonic. My challenge was to fit all this in under a minute, so I basically have one phrase per section. I started by using the motif from Day 3 and building everything up around that. The very last phrase is basically the Day 3 song at the end.

Day 55. I liked the electric cello instrument I used yesterday and wanted to explore it more today. This one features the cello with just a few instruments to back it. The recordings are amazing, and the electric cello is a really interesting instrument that sounds quite different from a regular cello while still being pretty expressive. It's basically the electric guitar equivalent for something the size of a cello. No resonant body, just capturing the sounds from the vibrating strings.

Day 54. In this one, I wanted to play around with some new EastWest instruments I downloaded. The voice is from the "Voices of Passion" set, and the solo instrument is an electric cello. The drone background is four string instruments plus a faint synth sound to round things out. I like how ethereal this is, and how it lacks a beat.

Day 53. Epic trailer music! I had fun with layering a bunch of orchestra instruments with a choir and several kinds of drums and cymbals. This needed a video more fun than the FInal Cut animations so I found some creative commons drone footage on Vimeo by Stephane Ma. https://vimeo.com/133415675

Day 52. The goal of this one is background music for a trailer or at the end of a TV episode. The build-up and tension at the end is what I've been noticing TV music does, where it resolves but doesn't quite resolve. The video is from morrisey.com's drone footage of the Oregon Coast.

Day 51. After a full day of networking events and meetings, I didn't get started on this until I got home at 8:30pm. I wanted to do something short, so I figured I would do more of an "audio logo" rather than a full "song". It turns out that making a 15-second sound doesn't actually end up taking significantly less time than a minute-long more song-like song, I still spent an hour on this. It was an interesting experiment though!

Day 50. I'm officially half way done! This one is inspired by Loreena McKennitt's "The Mummers Dance". I used a few different samples of Bulgarian voices from the EastWest "Voices of Passion" set. You might also notice the reverse-piano sound a couple times. I used a mix of the drum track generator plus myself playing the bongo track on the keyboard to get a good mix of percussion.