HIVESICIANS ( #hivesicians ) is a global community made by @ilazramusic for those creators that make musical content within HIVE. This new community's debut event is called: LET'S JAM!
Learning To Fly
An invitation to try new things with my music wings
I made an exciting breakthrough as a music creator, yay! Yesterday, I discovered a new way of making music that sounds pleasant and feels aligned with my values. I'm presenting the song here in a video—I'm really pleased with it. I hope you'll give it a look and listen.
I created this song for a Hive event launching this week: LET'S JAM!, presented by the HIVESICIANS community. The event host is @ilazramusic. I'm impressed with his talents as a musician and music producer, along with the fact he is a generous listener in the Hive Open Mic community, very encouraging to fellow artists.
In my understanding, LET'S JAM! is designed for music production, whereas the Hive Open Mic event is exclusively for live music. So this feels like an invitation to focus on audio production. This is new territory for me. I think of it as an opportunity to practice deep listening.
Learning To Fly
A cover song made on-the-fly
Although I didn't exactly have a vision when I started this project, I found inspiration in the song "Learning To Fly," by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Tom Petty was my favorite artist during my high school years, and this was one of the first songs I learned to play. The song is based on four simple chords: F, C, Am, and G.
Thursdays morning, I lit a fire outside for band practice. It was a lovely day with birds singing and smoky sun rays shining through the trees. Turns out, most of my bandmates couldn't join me this round, so I took the time to experiment. That's how I had the idea to record some basic percussion and a simple guitar riff, aiming to create a music-based mini-movie.
Learning To Fly
A lesson in audio/video production
My audio production process began with the video clips in Adobe Premiere. I had four clips to begin with: guitar, maraca, drum, and fire. In Premiere, started by looping the guitar track, serving as the basis for the rhythm, and then I assembled the other tracks on a single timeline.
I enhanced each video clip's audio component in Adobe Audition. Then I recorded the vocals, enhancing the vocals with a pitch correction tool called Melodyne. Now that I had all five tracks ready, I brought them into Adobe Audition for mixing as a multitrack recording.
After I completed the soundtrack, I had the pleasure of making my mini-movie. This part was smooth and easy—I just aligned the various parts and then transitioned between scenes, editing to the beat. The end result is beautiful to me—it gives me a pleasant feeling.
Some of you know I am a professional video producer—I'm the owner and director of ARISE Video Studio, in Austin, Texas. You might assume I know what I'm doing when it comes to audio production too, because the two fields go hand-in-hand, but they are very different. In fact, I've tried to produce my own music many times before, and in the end it has always sounded lo-fi to me. Thankfully, this one worked well.
Acknowledgements
LET'S JAM - Week 1 is underway right now. I am happy to participate in this initiative. It has proven to be a meaningful experience for me as a musician already. And, as a music fan, I look forward to listening to the other entries too. Thank you to the host: @ilazramusic, and supporter: @theycallmedan, for bringing the musicians and music fans together here on Hive.
Bio
I'm Cabe Lindsay, an ultra-fly guy making movies with ARISE and music with Cosmic Butterflies. Publications include films: Voices of the Grandmothers, Wild Family... books: Brave Spirit, Be Well Bee, WYLD, Big Idea Patterns... and songs: Brave Spirit, Home, Colors Flying... Most importantly, I'm a rad daddy making life with three kids and a wife: @wildfamily, delighted to thrive on Hive.