04. the time we wrote 10mins of wedding music in 3 days.
Thanks largely to me being a musical hermit for most of lockdown, I am not often blessed with the wonders of a world turned upside down by the Coronapocalypse. A socially distanced wedding however - different story.
Two of my best friends (Matt) Dobie and Becky decided that instead of pushing their wedding back like most, why not pull it forward - and more power to them, because it was beautiful - which is kind of expected from the two most creative and resourceful humans I know.
In true Dobie (and Dobie-and-Chris) fashion, it went along with an extremely complicated camera/live-stream setup. Dobie was concerned about the stream being taken down for copyright on the music, and so he/we embarked on a mission to make it all ourselves.
In like, 3 days. Over Zoom. Gulp.
Off we go then. The focus of this is on the music played whilst they were signing the register… We didn’t know how long it was going to take for a procession of people to sign their names in a book in a Covid-secure manner (spoiler alert - a lot longer than you think). We decided that it couldn’t possibly take longer than 10mins, so that was the target - and it took every second of those 10 minutes. I was only very slightly terrified when we got half way through the song and the first set of book-signing peeps had only just finished disinfecting the fabled book-signing pen. So pro tip - going to sign a book any time soon? Take your own writing implement.
We based it off a cover of Heaven’s Knife by Josh Garrels - which is a lovely song albeit not nearly 10 mins long. Dobie sang and gave me the bass, drums and keys for the main section of the song. The rest was down to a good old bit of recycling, my friends copy and paste, and some “noodling.” Or at least, noodling was the brief.
Off on my merry, noodle’y adventure we go. If you’re one of those wonderful people that’s visited all corners of this little site of mine, you’ll know that I am currently in the midst of an epic battle with strings. This is some David and Goliath level shit and I am most certainly not Goliath, nor does my little pea-shooter thingy seemingly defy the laws of physics. Essentially, I have a lot of projects going on that all require strings, and strings appear to currently be my nemesis. To be specific, constructing string parts that sound like they’ve being played by actual real life strings (or just close to be honest) and not by dodgy free plugins and a man jabbing his finger about on a keyboard. This exercise was good, because there were a lot of strings, but at least had an existing part to copy from the song, so it was helpful to see how the layers were constructed. What did I learn? That I still hate strings. But they actually turned out ok. I could have made them a little cleaner, but time was not our friend.
For the most part, after the singing was over I used the verse and chorus structure and copied the basics of that across - so it goes through the verse and then into the chorus and back several times, to help keep it interesting. I didn’t really want it to be too obvious that I’d looped the same bit for 7 minutes so I added some guitar “noodles” over the top because I can noodle a guitar until the cows return to their little cow dwellings (if you didn’t get that it’s just going to look like the weirdest sentence ever and I apologise). Only real guitar keenos have a slide, so my slide guitar was done with an empty whisky bottle from the whisky tasting Zoom stag-do we’d had several days previously, and realistically how much more rock and roll can you get.
I’m gunna help you out because I know 10 mins is a chore even for the most Chris-music-keen amongst you - if you wanna get the flavour of the main song, listen up till 01:35 ish, the slide guitar I’ve been banging on about is at 04:55 - 05:50 and the “best bit” is from 06:15 - 07:40. The rest is up to you - and of course, if you’re that hardcore, I’ll love you to eternity.
The “best bit” really reminds me of a song but I don’t know what the song is… I thought it was Walking With Elephants but I checked and it very definitely isn’t. If it reminds you of anything let me know and we’ll see if it’s the song in my head. By the time I’d finished the “best bit,” it was quarter past 7 the night before the wedding… and I still needed two more minutes of music, and to mix and master it. Tense times. That’s why the end is significantly more simple than the rest - I literally ran out of time - but actually my desperation organ-noodles worked really nicely because it brought it back to a more church’y vibe, and it felt all reflective and almost like some artistic planning happened which I’m telling you right now it realllllyyyyy didn’t.
Sooo yeah - there we go. Dobie didn’t really want this out there in the big wide world but he very kindly said I could show you all what we’d done, so this SoundCloud link will be private and you’ll only be able to find it via this page - not on the SoundCloud itself.
Huge congratulations to the new and simply wonderful Mr and Mrs Dobie, it was a great honour to be there and to have done this.
Big love
CB x