Mother

It was 2020, the Year of the Plague, and I was participating in many a video call, unsurprisingly.

I worked in the room that I also used as my studio, and it became a thing during work calls for people to notice the instruments and ask me to play them something.

Live music through the computer microphone over a Teams call was not something I could stomach, so I always declined.

However, the lock down thing to do for musicians was to make a video of a song that combined either videos of all the people playing their individual parts in their home, or with videos of a single person playing all the parts themselves.

I decided to make a “single person playing all the parts themselves” video, since performing and recording all the parts of a song is something I have done many times (and still do, for that matter). But just audio, never a video. But of course there were many, many of these videos out there so I had plenty of inspiration to draw from. Including Roger Waters and his band, who released a video of this very song. Call that the direct inspiration

As I recorded the parts I also recorded video of me doing so on my phone. I never really thought about how many takes a particular part might require before I was happy with it. That is until I also had to video each one as well. Damn. After I mixed the final audio, I threw that and the phone videos into Premier and learned how to make a video on the fly.

The whole process took about a month since it was slow going as I was learning (and tweaking the final mix a few times). But I am quite satisfied with the final result.