There’s nothing like a music project to suck up time during a COVID pandemic unless it’s both a music combined with video project!
I was trying to brainstorm music ideas when I Need A Dollar came up on the list. Its instrumentals are fairly basic which made it ideal for the beginner bass and drums player like myself. The bass really drives the song forward, and while quite repetitive, was fun. This was the main attraction for me since I’ve been trying to learn the bass. The drums are very easy too with the exception of the bridge section where I had to rewire my limbs to move in separately coordinated fashions. Keys were… boring.
I tried to get the kids to sing the chorus, but while they like watching videos, they don’t like making them.
I recorded myself playing the parts back in January and solicited friends to add parts to attempt a collab video, like a drummer and horn player, but none came through so I just went ahead and mixed the tracks and set it to video.
I picked up a few basic techniques in Ableton such as using equalizers to bring out my instruments from the backing original and compression, especially to smooth out my bass track.
For this project, I used the Video Collage feature new to Davinci Resolve 17. While yes it is a time saver to piecing together a collage, there are creative constraints. Half way through the project, I had some ideas that could not be done with the Video Collage effect, and ended up going into Fusion to create custom effects. These include the scrolling carousels and custom motion paths.
