I added some “train beat” to this driving tune by Mumford & Sons.  Enjoy!

Hello, and welcome to somewhere other than Facebook!

I just completed my first “One Take” piece of music.  This is an idea I’ve had for a while, and I’m finally getting around to it.  The idea is simply that I sit down, and record a short video of me playing drums, once.  No double takes, no second chances-  I get an idea of what might be a nice musical idea, and some sort of structure, turn on the cameras, and whatever comes out it is.   I leave it at that.

Then I take the audio from that recording, and add to it-  I don’t play any stringed instruments, so no guitar, no bass, but I roughly play some keyboards.  So most of the stuff I’m going to be doing will be keyboard based, but I can get a lot of fun sounds out of keyboards, so I’ll compose like that.  Because I’m not a professional keyboard player, I take a little more time to come up with the actual parts for this side of it- so the keyboard parts are not first takes, but I still try to play them straight through as a performance, and not use cutting and pasting.  For example, on this song, the bass line took me six times through to get what I wanted.  The first time through, I was just poking around, trying to find something that sounded good.  I would get bits of ideas each time, and just keep adding.  I forgot to video myself playing the keyboard parts, and wasn’t even sure how I would work that into the video, but I plan on perhaps adding some of that in future videos.

The video editing is pretty new for me as well.  I have a pretty good understanding of Adobe Photoshop, so I understand a lot about what the color corrections, etc do, and I’ve messed around with some video editing before, but I’m now learning Final Cut Pro, which is a whole other thing.  But it’s a learning process, and if I want my stuff to get better, I have to start somewhere.

So here’s the first of hopefully many installments to my project: One Take