​Music I did for a documentery…

   A couple of years ago, a friend of Jean’s, asked her to be a part of a documentary that she was putting together.
   Leah is an elementary school art teacher, and the documentary focuses on how art, and creating art, continues to impact us as adults.
   She was interviewing Jean on her photography, and jean may possibly end up in the film when it’s complete.
 
   She asked Jean if I would be interested in contributing some music for the soundtrack.
   I said sure, that sounds like fun!
   Well, I had about a month to put some stuff together. So in true SRT fashion, I waited until the last day. (I work well on a time crunch I guess)
 
   So Jean tells me, Leah is coming over today around two o’clock to pick up the music.
   That was about 10 am.
 
   Now, even though I had been procrastinating, I had been giving the project some thought. I had just got a 1937 Kalamazoo Archtop, and had made a brass slide, so I decided to see if I could come up with some dark Appalachian meets swampy blues stuff.
 
  I went down into the Flat Broke Subterranean Studio and flipped on the power to see what would come up. I set everything up and hit record and improvised a bunch of stuff for about 2 hours.
 
   Then… I started going through the entire session, and cutting out stuff that actually sounded like something.
   Since I wasn’t concerned with entire songs, I was able to in some cases, just pull out some minute long vamps and parts, and trim off the rough edges and call them “something”
 
   Since then, some of these parts have made there way into my set as actual songs, like “Smoky Mountain Encounter”, and “Motorhome Deluxe.”
 
   Well… I was still editing by the time Leah got to our place, but that gave her and Jean some time to visit.
   She had brought her son Alex along, who was probably around 8? years old at the time.
   He came down to see what was up and wanted to help, so I asked him if he wanted a job.
   He of course said yes, so I asked him if he wanted to lay down a track, and it was a YES! again.
   I have these little shakers lying around, so I set up a mic, slapped some headphones on him and told him to just shake the shakers in time with the song.
   I figured if it was out of time or whatever, I could edit them into some kind of part.
 
   Well, I hit record and he locked right in and laid down a solid part on one take!
   I just sort of edited out the some unnecessary noise at the beginning and end and called a song.
 
   That about wrapped my session, so I had the girls come down and take a listen, and when Leah heard her son playing the shakers on that one song, well she looked so happy I thought she might cry.
  
   She took a CD of the stuff with her, and I’ve seen a couple of preliminary drafts of the movie, and I think my stuff sounds pretty good in it.
 
   Now the movie is still not quite finished and ready for release, and who knows if my songs will make the final cut, but it was a fun project and a fun day anyway.
   When the film comes out, I’ll post some links to it, and until then, here are some links to the songs I made for it
 
   Until then, here’s a link to the tracks that I spontaneously created and recorded that day if you would like to check them out
 
 
Cheers and have a great day!
~ SRT

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