Music

I arranged to record the music with Katie on a Saturday afternoon with the basic microphone build into my camera- it hadn’t let me down before so why not? We’d already decided we wanted all the music to be light acoustic sounds so she brought her acoustic guitar and ukulele.

We started by recording a few songs she knew that we could add in as incidental music including ‘Blackbird’ which she knew very well and I felt would make a great closing track and ‘Norwegian Wood’ as I really liked the idea of using it as a transition into the party scenes, the opening lyric is ‘I once met a girl or should I say she once met me’ which I hoped anyone who recognised the song would subconsciously hear in their mind and would connect well with the visuals. We also recorded a piece called simply ‘Spanish Ballad’ which would match up with what Katie had been playing at the beginning of her scene as Sarah but I wanted a recording on guitar as the sound better reflected the hopeful, vaguely romantic mood of the scene.

We then recorded a song called ‘Yes It Is’ I’d requested Katie learned as I’d been listening to it and thinking about the climax scene in the past and I felt it really worked with putting the audience in Michael’s position.

Then there was the original music. This was purely for the opening scene, I wanted something bright that sounded vaguely improvised to really set the tone for the film but acknowledge the differation between the white on black titles and the dark shots in-between. I asked Katie if she could switch between finger-picking and strumming chords and what she came up with was pretty much everything I asked. We ran it a couple of times until we’d perfected it and then I recorded it. In the end all the runs we did had something wrong with them so I had to subtly mix a few versions but it worked. We played the muted visuals while Katie played to ensure it would match up as well as a possible.

I then recorded a few sounds from the guitar I could use as incidental music, a friendly chord and then a mysterious apprehensive one. I also asked for a couple of high pings I wasn’t sure I would use but I wanted to be on the safe side.

Finally I needed to record something on the ukulele for the montage, Katie looked up a few tunes but nothing seemed to fit. We gave it some thought then Katie mentioned that she could play the song having seen Paul McCartney play it as a tribute to George Harrison she had learnt to play ‘Something’ on the ukulele (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b_kvE_DsCU). Since the montage had been inspired by ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ it seemed only appropriate that it ought to be a Beatles song. We played it thought a couple of times then we recorded the famous refrain separately and called it a day for the music.