Anytime, Anywhere

Well, I went and did it. I published something on YouTube.

As of this writing, the song is barely 24 hours old, and I already have it published and getting feedback. It did not exist 26 hours ago, but it's already out of my hands.

That's quite a turn around from my last post, don't you think?

"Anytime, Anywhere" is an anthem for the Anytime, Anywhere Messenger Service (Derscha's guild.) It's a happy little song about how they'll deliver packages, or translate languages, any place, any time. And they'll always stay neutral.

I was driving home from work last night, when I suddenly thought to myself, ''I should write a song about AAMS."  The song was galway written by the time I pulled in my driveway.  A few hours later I had sheet music.  Then I ported it to Garagaband, and tried to record vocals for fun.

And then I thought,


 Man, I'm still horrible!

After a few seconds, though, I realized that if anyone sang this song, it would be Derscha, my gnome.  So I tried a pitch shift.  It made it a little distorted and auto-tunish, but hey, it's a fun and silly song. I could live with it.

Then I thought, 'This should be a video."

Did I mention I had left work at 9:30 pm?  What is with me coming home from work and staying up all night working on music??

So, anyway, I had to figure out how to use iMovie, which I've only opened a few times.  Let me tell you, it's not easy nor intuitive.  My horrible music tech class taught me how to use iMovie HD, the old version, and it was so simple and easy to use I didn't have to pay attention in class at all.  This new fangled (five year old) version of iMovie was pain to figure out.

I spent fifteen minutes just trying to figure out how to have a silent title card before giving up and re-rendering the song with 5 seconds of silence at the beginning.  In the old iMovie HD, it was as simple as sliding the start time of the sound track over 5 seconds.

Then I had to open Photoshop elements to make the "cards" for the on-screen text.  It turns out iMovie only recognizes a few formats, and they HAVE to be iPhoto.  So there was the very annoying extra step of saving every file, importing them into iPhoto, moving them all to one album so I could find them, and THEN using them in iMOvie.  That's so.... not intuitive.  Whatever happened to just plain old '"import photo"?

(And please, please, please.... stop applying a Ken Burns affect to every photo...!!!)

So, a few hours later (have you been keeping track of the time? It's past 2 am now) I try to upload it to YouTube. Luckily, I had happened to set up a YouTube account a while back, so I didn't have to go through that process.

Then I found out that I had exported the file in too small a resolution.  You see, when you have a five year old version of iMovie, it doesn't support all the wonderful 1080 resolutions.  So I had to re-export it via Quicktime.  At least YouTube and very easy to follow instructions on how to set up Quicktime.  I have no idea what half those options were, but I least I know I had them set correctly!

Approx. 3 am now.

I figure, might as well post it to the guild website! Got that posted at 3:21 am.  Finally went to be, didn't really settle in until 4 am in the morning.  I had to be up this morning at 7:30.  I'm very much an idiot, I tell you, but at least I did something in those hours I should have been sleeping.

Well, I definitely met my music quota for the month.  I think I'm out of my funk now.  I still hate my voice, but I'm feeling more charitable for it.  And a day of positive feedback from guildies and fellow RPers has a way of lifting my spirits. Even having my own song stuck in my head all day has been all right.

Let's keep this ball rollin.'