Full Animated Video! The Police cover "Feelings"

Watch the YouTube video!
"Like" and Share it if you enjoy it! Thanks! :)

Back when I was at Nike, we challenged each other to record a song in the style of a band that would NEVER play that song. I chose "Feelings" and decided to do my version of what I thought The Police would sound like if they had written it.

Ever since I did this recording, I've had this idea for an animation to go with it. Now that I have NCH Software's VideoPad, I can finally put together a real animation. I learned that YouTube's frame rate doesn't exactly match with the song's tempo, so some bits are a little off after the upload, but I sure had fun doing it!

Please share this if you enjoy it. :)

Full Video: "Back In The USSR"

We've had the snippet of this piece loaded up on Picosongs for awhile. Now here's the full length version of my cover of The Beatles' "Back In The USSR" on our YouTube channel.

View the video on YouTube!
See "Illustrating The Beatles" on the Art blog.

For more recording details, read on!

Not A Perfect Girl

"Not A Perfect Girl" on Amazon.com
Full video on YouTube
Back in 2009, I wrote this piece for Ping. The images are from some of the wonderful places we've been together. The little clip of Ping at the end is from a place called Hites Cove, near Yosemite. We hiked there when the wildflowers were at their peak. I am so blessed to know this imperfect girl.
Click on the link to watch the video! "Like" this song! Thanks! --Mark

Glass Slipper

"Glass Slipper" on Amazon.com
Full video on YouTube

This piece is based on the Cinderella story from the prince's perspective. It's also a perfect metaphor for what it felt like when I met and fell in love with my wife. Lyrics are included on the video. Enjoy!

Clear Blue Sky

"Clear Blue Sky" on Amazon.com

Full video on YouTube
What would it be like if we could just clear the air and open our eyes. Lyrics are included on the video. Enjoy!

A Taste of Heaven

"A Taste of Heaven" on Amazon.com
This song was written for my wife, Ping, while she was on a business trip some years back. I emailed a rough mix to her while she was in her hotel. :)

"When We Go Away"

Listen to sample of "When We Go Away"

I wrote this piece back in 1985 when some very good friends were moving out of state. For decades, I've wanted to hear this with a decent piano and the full orchestration I've had in my head. Thanks to Cubase and E/W Gold, I get to! This is the rough arrangement. I'm sure it will morph some more. It's taken 25 years just to get it to this stage...

Vocal Experiment 1, or Self-evolving Portrait

Listen to sample of "Vocal Experiment 1"

YouTube video of "Self-evolving Portrait" has the longer version

I spent several days with my mp3 player set on Bobby McFerrin's "Vocabularies," playing it over and over again. Incredible. I'm also a big fan of Bruno Coulais' soundtrack for the movie "Himalaya." So one night, I just started recording improvised vocal lines and putting them together to see what would happen. I pitch-shifted some drones and other lines down low, and then added several tracks of different pitches held steady on one note. With the automation, I adjusted the volume up and down on each vocal line, pretty much randomly at first, and then tweaked a bit when things started to take shape. After listening to that for a few days, I recorded some new improvised vocal lines and remixed. The sample is a bit of the rough mix. The video uses a much longer segment of the recording. I still don't know what this will turn into, but it's fun to do!

The Creek

Listen to sample of "The Creek"

This was one of those pieces where the sound inspired the composition. Proteus X has a patch called "Mozambique" which I modified a bit to get the main sound for "The Creek." The other instruments are from the E/W Gold Orchestra. I love this harp! How cool that a guitarist like myself can actually create harp music because of these amazing tools!

Sequoia Sunrise

Listen to sample of "Sequoia Sunrise"

I love my East/West Gold Orchestra! It's great to have a 70 piece ensemble a mouse click away! I composed this one in the Cubase Key Editor with the orchestra first and then added this fantastic "Mini DiZi" (thanks to KVR Audio!) as the melody line. Once I had the drums programmed, I had to play bass on it. Somewhere in the middle of the project, Ping and I spent three days in Sequoia National Park which is only a few hours from where we live. As soon as I came back, I knew exactly what the title of the piece should be. Now it just needs that view I had of the misty light passing between the massive trunks of the Sequoias. If anyone owns a helicopter, I'd love to get a shot flying eastward over the General's Highway at dawn with the snowy crest of the Western Divide back-lit and gilt-edged as the valley drops away into the vast shadows below!

Pícaro

Listen to sample of "Pícaro"

I started this piece by opening up Cubase's Key Editor with a pizzicato strings patch selected on the E-MU Proteus X. I then started the clock and did some mostly random clicking on the keys with a mouse as the time scrolled by, leaving bits of MIDI triggers all over the page. After that, I looped a basic drum beat underneath it with ezDrummer and played with the pizzicato note timing and pitch to make a composition that I liked. Next, I programmed the drums start to finish, putting in fills and taking out unnecessary hits. But it wasn't until I started adding sound effects--stuff that I found royalty-free on the web (amazing!)--that the piece really started to take shape. Pícaro means "rogue" in Spanish. I see this little gremlin breaking into the house and quietly (or not so quietly) wreaking havoc.

Cakeman

Listen to sample of "Cakeman"

Did you ever notice how one person always seems to be the designated cake procurer whenever there's a celebration at work? In our case, it was Dennis McMinn. Why? We have no idea. "Dennis! It's So and So's birthday! We need a cake!" Off he goes to get one. Again. So John Pedersen thought we should memorialize this in song. I ripped off Bad Company and came up with "Cakeman."John wrote the rap in the middle, which I performed incredibly lamely. Could I play that guitar solo again? Not without a lot of practice and a lot of caffeine. A tip of the hat to John Lennon at the very end there.

Break It Down

Listen to sample of "Break It Down"

This piece started out as a series of stock drum loops I put together in Cubase. I got out the bass and jammed with it until I came up with a usable riff. After that, it was just one guitar on top of another until I came to the break (in the snippet) which has the only "vocals" in the whole thing. Though it's more of a funk composition, I kind of hear that Randy Meissner/Joe Walsh/Glenn Frey guitar trio happening...but I flatter myself.

Barrel of the Kells

Listen to sample of "Barrel of the Kells"
Sometime in mid-November, I dreamed up another Nike musicians' challenge that we called "Raid Santa's Refrigerator." Everyone contributed 3-5 short wav files which were then stored on a shared drive (the "refrigerator").

The challenge was to raid that stash, take as many of those files as you liked, process them any way you wanted, and then use them in some composition that was "holiday related." We left that door wide open; if you could even vaguely relate it to the holidays in your own mind, we deemed it acceptable. Greg Lawrence, a South African/Londoner, came up with a composition he named "Wet Duck," and stumped all of us U.S.-born people. "Duck!" he insisted. "It's the traditional Christmas dish!" We chalked it up to him being from the other side of the pond.

I contributed the sounds of M&Ms being poured into a bowl, tearing wrapping paper, snorts, laughs, shouts, and various squishy mouth noises. Greg processed my tearing paper until it became crackling thunder! Awesome.

This piece needed several tracks for the Chapman Stick Touchboard. The melody line is just a single-note wav that's been pitch-shifted various ways to make the melody work.

Back In The USSR

Listen to sample of "Back In The USSR"

UPDATE: See the full-length version on YouTube with a rapid sketching video.

Back when I worked as a Business Systems Analyst at Nike, there was a cadre of musicians in the IT department who were all doing digital recording on their own. So we instituted a monthly/quarterly challenge to ourselves. This particular challenge was to "cover a song from the '60s."

Hmmm...during most of the '60s, I was in South America listening to classical music and a little Tijuana Brass... What to do? Lucky for me, every Beatles song ever recorded was from the '60s, so I recorded my version of their classic Beach Boys tribute.

It was recorded on my old Korg D1600 16-track digital workstation, with me doing all the parts. I had a good time with that 1960s energy while putting an updated spin on some of the sounds. I actually whistled/hissed into the microphone to make that sound of the jet flying overhead. The drums were courtesy of a set pattern from Alesis drum machine and me pounding on the little rubber touch pads over top of it to make some of the fills.


(Kevin Laurila's "stalker version" of "Suzi-Q" was spooky and brilliant! I'll post it here later if he'll let me.)