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Aaron Parecki
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Changelog Interviews
OAuth, "It's complicated."
Today we’re joined by Aaron Parecki, co-founder of IndieWebCamp and maintainer of OAuth.net, for a deep dive on the state of OAuth 2.0 and what’s next in OAuth 2.1. We cover the complications of OAuth, RFCs like Proof Key for Code Exchange, also known as PKCE, OAuth for browser-based apps, and next generation specs like the Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol, also known as GNAP. The conversation begins with how Aaron experiements with the IndieWeb as a showcase of what’s possible. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made t...
2021-08-23
1h 10
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
OAuth, "It's complicated." (Interview)
Today we’re joined by Aaron Parecki, co-founder of IndieWebCamp and maintainer of OAuth.net, for a deep dive on the state of OAuth 2.0 and what’s next in OAuth 2.1. We cover the complications of OAuth, RFCs like Proof Key for Code Exchange, also known as PKCE, OAuth for browser-based apps, and next generation specs like the Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol, also known as GNAP. The conversation begins with how Aaron experiements with the IndieWeb as a showcase of what’s possible. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made t...
2021-08-23
1h 10
Changelog Master Feed
OAuth, "It's complicated." (The Changelog #456)
Today we’re joined by Aaron Parecki, co-founder of IndieWebCamp and maintainer of OAuth.net, for a deep dive on the state of OAuth 2.0 and what’s next in OAuth 2.1. We cover the complications of OAuth, RFCs like Proof Key for Code Exchange, also known as PKCE, OAuth for browser-based apps, and next generation specs like the Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol, also known as GNAP. The conversation begins with how Aaron experiements with the IndieWeb as a showcase of what’s possible.
2021-08-23
1h 10
GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech
The Secrets of Advanced OAuth 2.0 • Aaron Parecki & Eric Johnson
This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club.http://gotopia.tech/bookclubAaron Parecki - Author of "OAuth 2.0 Simplified"Eric Johnson - Senior Developer Advocate at AWS ServerlessDESCRIPTIONThe OAuth 2.0 authorization framework has become the industry standard in providing secure access to web APIs. It allows users to grant external applications access to their data, such as profile data, photos, and email, without compromising security. OAuth 2.0 Simplified is a guide to building an OAuth 2.0 server. Through high-level overviews, step-by-step instructions, and real-world examples, you will learn how to take advantage...
2021-03-25
46 min
Identity, Unlocked.
What's new with OAuth2.1 with Aaron Parecki
In this episode of Identity. Unlocked, principal architect at Auth0 and podcast host, Vittorio Bertocci, speaks with Aaron Parecki about the latest project he’s been working on: the development of the OAuth 2.1 specification. Like this episode? Be sure to leave a five-star review and share Identity, Unlocked with your community! You can connect with Vittorio on Twitter at @vibronet, Aaron at @aaronpk, or Auth0 at @auth0.
2020-09-27
38 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 100 - Century
Day 100. As you can probably imagine, I was spending a lot of energy trying to figure out what to do for my 100th day. I had considered a few options, like "33 seconds of silence", or a bizarre mashup of the previous 99 songs. In the end, I decided to make the final song be just one note, a massive orchestra hit. It turns out it takes a surprising number of instruments to make this sound like anything still. Several layers of strings, various percussion instruments, a large piano chord, and I even snuck in a subtle hint of the electronic cello...
2017-03-30
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 99 - Penultimate
Day 99. Almost done. I had fun with the pizzicato strings in this one. The pizzicato cello and the snare drum hold down the rhythm, and I have a few different violins and violas playing the melody.
2017-03-29
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 98 - Mushrooms
Day 98. Another multiple-layer piano track. Each piano has a different effect applied. Echo, reverbs, EQ to emphasize specific frequencies.
2017-03-28
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 97 - Unknown
Day 97. Further proving the theory that when I don't have a plan for the day, I end up finishing way sooner than I thought, today's song took less than an hour. As usual, I started this with the piano intro, and built it up from there. I considered using a drum set, but then opted for a light bongo track instead. The piano part is actually two overlaid tracks in the same range, which for some reason ends up working nicely together. I think the middle section could use a little more buildup, but the flute does an okay job...
2017-03-27
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 96 - Sunrise
Day 96. I always seem to spend a lot more time on these when there's a specific sound I'm going for. This one turned out to take way more layers than I expected. I'm still a little confused why I couldn't quite get the string section to sound correctly "on" the beat. I tried snapping it exactly to the beat, and that sounded too lagging in some cases, so I tried moving up a few of the notes in some cases. It's not quite right, but it's about as close as I can get it.
2017-03-26
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 95 - Travel
Day 95. I wanted to try something in a medieval style, so this is a quick sketch mostly experimenting with the instrumentation of it.
2017-03-25
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 94 - Windows
Day 94. I didn't have a great plan for this today. There's a lot of sounds going on here, but I tried to make a few of the highlights stand out. I think also after a few days in a row of doing piano-centric songs, I tend to try something in a totally different direction just to make sure I'm not getting stuck.
2017-03-24
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 93 - Signal
Day 93. I didn't end up finishing today's song before going to the studio for my last class, so I had to finish it here. I ended up doing something pretty simple just cause I didn't have much time. The video is some test footage we shot on the green screen earlier today.
2017-03-23
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 92 - Bloom
Day 92. This is maybe a little more wander-y than I wanted, I wasn't expecting to bring in the orchestra in the middle until after I had started. I originally thought it would be just piano again. There's a couple little nods to some other songs in here if you listen closely.
2017-03-22
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 91 - Green
Day 91. I don't know why I'm on such a piano kick lately. This one was kind of fun because it's more notes than can be played with two hands, but doesn't totally sound like it.
2017-03-21
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 90 - Sixpence
Day 90. The final stretch! Didn't know what I was going to do today, so again I started by playing around on the piano until I hit something that I could use to build off of. After I recorded the piano track, I added a few other instruments on top. The drum track is a mix of my own tracks plus the Logic Pro drummer.
2017-03-20
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 89 - Double
Day 89. This is all one take on the piano, with only a little tweaking of the timing and loudness of some notes. I was planning on adding some other instruments to it, but nothing seemed to fit quite right. I ended up adding an echo to the piano with an 1/8 note delay. I only added the echo to the notes on the beat, not on the little runs, because that muddied it up too much.
2017-03-19
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 88 - Reunion
Day 88. Another fun five-part piano piece. Each piano is panned slightly off-center. Some of them are a 2 bar loop, others do slight variations of their theme for each phrase. I decided to let this one fade out rather than do a build-out, since it would have ended up too long otherwise.
2017-03-18
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 87 - Tryst
Day 87. Today was the first day in a while that I started a song by playing the piano for an hour before writing anything down. Once I knew what I was going for, I recorded the piano track. I added the other two instruments, a Duduk and Electric Cello, mostly following existing aspects of the piano melody.
2017-03-17
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 86 - Imperial
Day 86. I'm not sure a major key was right for this one or if I should have done it in a minor key instead. I mostly wanted to work on getting the orchestra to accent certain beats. The horn melody fills in the rest.
2017-03-16
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 85 - Suit
Day 85. This went in a whole different direction than I thought it would when I started. I originally started with the first piano notes, and then somehow ended up building it up to a jazzy rhythm. It's not perfect, I think the velocities of the trumpet part could be tweaked some more, but you get the idea. I do like how the piano solo is joined by the drum fill at the end.
2017-03-15
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 84 - Winning
Day 84. This is a fun horn fanfare that resolves with a full orchestra. It took a while to get the horn accents right. During the last phrase I had to slow down the middle of it slightly for it to sound right. I also like the solo violin part that peeks out of the sound.
2017-03-14
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 83 - Inspection
Day 83. I think this accurately reflects my mood today. This actually started with me accidentally hitting a few notes on the piano, and I just went from there. This is one of the few times that I can't actually tell you what all the chords and harmonies are, because I just kept layering things on top that sounded good. This one also needed some percussion beyond the Logic Pro drummers. It's a combination of some manual drum track entry plus the Logic drummer.
2017-03-13
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 82 - Tense
Day 82. Today I knew I wanted to start with the pulsing notes that got gradually faster. I jotted that down, then later decided to turn it into something that would be at the end of a scene of a TV show with a dramatic build-up and lack of resolution.
2017-03-12
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 81 - Daylight
Day 81. Quick and easy one today. Piano, bass, french horns and percussion.
2017-03-11
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 80 - Jupiter
Day 80. This one is inspired by the style of Juno Reactor. There are a bunch of layers of percussion, all written manually. A light bongo track is on the 16th notes, with some accented beats. There's a simple synth bass+snare, plus a few other hits. This was a fun one! Tho it may have been fun just cause I wasn't trying to finish before going to bed like the last couple.
2017-03-10
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 79 - Faders
Day 79. I felt like going with a guitar+bass+drum track today. The middle section needed some filling out in the mid-range frequencies, so I added some faint horns and another guitar part in the middle. I think it could still sound warmer, but wasn't sure how to get there. I spent a while getting the drums right on this one, I felt like it needed a few more accents beyond what the Logic Drummers provided.
2017-03-09
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 78 - Why Markets Matter
Day 78. A few weeks ago, I asked my friend Mike Merrill (the world's first publicly traded person) to send me some audio samples of him reading some money-related words. He sent back a 10-minute long file audio. I sliced it up into individual words, and created a Logic Pro instrument from it. (You can actually buy the 83 samples here: http://kmikeym.myshopify.com/products/audio-of-mike-merrill-speaking-financial-terms) It took a while, but I finally had some inspiration for what kind of song I wanted to make from these. So here you go!
2017-03-08
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 77 - Wind
Day 77. Just a quick mostly piano song, I feel a little bad that the other instruments feel kinda forced on top.
2017-03-07
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 76 - Music Box
Day 76. This is an oddly detuned music box. I was actually trying to find a more gentle music box sound but this is all I could find. I tweaked the EQ a bit to remove some of the lower "boomier" part of the sound, but it's still not as gentle as I wanted. In addition to the music box shifting in and out of tune, the other parts intentionally don't quite line up on the beat, and the reverb on the piano and violin is cranked up really high, so this whole thing should end up feeling slightly unsettling.
2017-03-06
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 75 - Dark
Day 75. I used more complex samples than I normally like to, as a shortcut to build up this much sound. (I didn't get started until really late today and needed to do something quickly). I added a few of my own instruments on top though, and tried to give it some shape other than just what came with the original sounds. I kind of want this one to keep going for a while longer!
2017-03-05
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 74 - Amaretto
Day 74. I started with the piano and layered stuff over it until I felt "done". There's a 4-part choir, a solo violin, and 6 french horns. The video is me recording the piano track, I liked that the two parts overlapped but never actually hit any of the same notes.
2017-03-04
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 73 - Detuned
Day 73. The piano track here goes a 1/4 step in and out of tune very slowly throughout the song. I wanted to try out a new instrument today, and I found the Dilruba, an Indian stringed instrument, which has some nice articulations in the samples.
2017-03-03
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 72 - GLORIOUS MIDI POOP
Day 72. Enjoy a pile of poop emoji made out of music notes. Inspired by Andrew Huang's GLORIOUS MIDI UNICORN, I thought I would give this MIDI art thing a try. If you're listening to this in the podcast feed, it might make more sense if you watch the video instead ;-)
2017-03-02
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 71 - Fanfare
Day 71. A quick sketch of a triumphant fanfare. Could probably use some more filling out in the lower end of the spectrum, but I'm trying to finish these quicker lately!
2017-03-01
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 70 - Finale
Day 70. This didn't quite come out the way I wanted, I think all the chord hits might need more filling out with additional instruments. I had fun piecing together video effects to go along with the music though!
2017-02-28
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 69 - Timeless
Day 69. Today's song is basically in no time signature, and features the electric cello again. It's a simple theme that I developed by flipping the notes and playing through it in a few different chords. There's a faint harp sound that helps provide context, and there's a soft droning soundscape under everything.
2017-02-27
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 68 - Bulletproof
Day 68. I was determined to do something in under 30 minutes today. Decided to do something ethereal and mostly on the same tone to help make that easier. As weird as this is, I actually kind of like it.
2017-02-26
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 67 - Whine
Day 67. I'm not super thrilled with this, but I have a bunch of other things I need to do today so I need to be finished. I like the opening bit with the filter that opens up for 2 bars, but I was having a hard time figuring out what else to do with this today.
2017-02-25
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 66 - Sweep
Day 66. Tried two new things today. First time attempting something in the "electro swing" style. I have a long ways to go to even approach sounding like Parov Stelar though. I also learned how to make the sweep sound that is in a bunch of this as well as other style music. The sweep sound is a white noise generator run through a filter whose cutoff frequency changing creates the sweep effect.
2017-02-24
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 65 - Distance
Day 65. I decided to keep it simple with this one, only adding the little chimes on top of the piano and no other instruments. I used a strong wet reverb effect on the piano to give it a "distant" feeling.
2017-02-23
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 64 - Esplanade
Day 64. There was a brief moment of sun today, so I took the opportunity to go on a bike ride up and down the esplanade! This song has nothing to do with the ride, though. This song started with the bells you hear at the beginning, and I built it up from there. I actually wasn't planning on adding the drums and synth sound until I got half way through building up the strings, but I thought it would be an interesting way of quickly escalating it.
2017-02-22
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 63 - Build
Day 63. Got a late start on this again today. I was going for another super short "audio logo" style thing today. I made a totally different style video to accompany this to hint at the kind of thing I imagine this would be used for. Also had fun finding a few string samples like some major scale runs to use at the end.
2017-02-21
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 62 - Pipes
Day 62. I spent most of the day on other projects, so wanted to do a simple song today. The video is my other project I worked on! I ran all the tubing for the pumps for BarBot today, and got to try out pouring a drink!
2017-02-20
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 61 - Rush
Day 61. I wanted to try writing something really short that was still a distinctive sound that makes you feel like you're in a new place. I got the idea from watching White Collar, where they have about 6 seconds of music at the beginning of the episode, just enough to set the stage without being a "theme song". This music isn't really anything like the White Collar music, but it's the same idea. I found a few timelapse video clips of cities that I thought felt appropriate for the music.
2017-02-19
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 60 - Distortions
Day 60. Did not have a goal in mind with this one. Decided to experiment with some of the new sounds I downloaded in the East/West "Goliath" pack. The piano in this is a new sound as well, much softer and more ethereal than the pianos I've been using before, I think I'll try it again in the future.
2017-02-18
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 59 - Highlands
Day 59. This song was my mom's choice of instrumentation and style, Scottish Highlands with whistle, Bodhran drum, fiddle, and others. I listened to a few songs in this style to get a sense of the rhythm and structure, then tried to create something similar. Aside from the obvious bagpipe drone providing the underlying structure, I noticed the harmonies tended to resolve back to the dominant chord during the last bar rather than in the next phrase. For songs in a minor key, they typically use a minor scale with a major 6th. I also noticed that the 2nd note of...
2017-02-17
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 58 - Cats
Day 58. It's a 1940s video of cats, but the music is scored like a dramatic scene from a TV show. This one probably won't make sense without the video, so if you're listening to this in podcast form, go check out my website where you can see the video version. The video here is straight out of a 1947 video called "The Private Life of a Cat", and I wanted to experiment with scoring the video without changing the video at all. The instrumentation and structure are loosely based off of the music from a short scene of a Star Trek...
2017-02-16
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 57 - Drone
Day 57. This is an experiment in holding a droning tone throughout the whole song, while also having some other harmonies.
2017-02-15
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 56 - Concerto No. 56 in Cm
Day 56. For today's song, my dad chose the instrumentation and style, and I had to see what I could come up with. He gave me "horns" and "concerto". So I started by studying the structure of concertos. A concerto typically features a single instrument soloist, with an orchestra or piano backing it up. They typically start out with an "exposition" from the instruments other than the featured instrument, introducing the theme. Then the second exposition features the soloist introducing the theme again. This is followed by a "development" section, featuring the soloist, usually in a different key, which ends by...
2017-02-14
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 55 - Cello
Day 55. I liked the electric cello instrument I used yesterday and wanted to explore it more today. This one features the cello with just a few instruments to back it. The recordings are amazing, and the electric cello is a really interesting instrument that sounds quite different from a regular cello while still being pretty expressive. It's basically the electric guitar equivalent for something the size of a cello. No resonant body, just capturing the sounds from the vibrating strings.
2017-02-13
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 54 - Stars
Day 54. In this one, I wanted to play around with some new EastWest instruments I downloaded. The voice is from the "Voices of Passion" set, and the solo instrument is an electric cello. The drone background is four string instruments plus a faint synth sound to round things out. I like how ethereal this is, and how it lacks a beat.
2017-02-12
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 53 - Epic Trailer
Day 53. Epic trailer music! I had fun with layering a bunch of orchestra instruments with a choir and several kinds of drums and cymbals. This needed a video more fun than the FInal Cut animations so I found some creative commons drone footage on Vimeo by Stephane Ma. https://vimeo.com/133415675
2017-02-11
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 52 - Ocean
Day 52. The goal of this one is background music for a trailer or at the end of a TV episode. The build-up and tension at the end is what I've been noticing TV music does, where it resolves but doesn't quite resolve. The video is from morrisey.com's drone footage of the Oregon Coast.
2017-02-10
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 51 - Logo
Day 51. After a full day of networking events and meetings, I didn't get started on this until I got home at 8:30pm. I wanted to do something short, so I figured I would do more of an "audio logo" rather than a full "song". It turns out that making a 15-second sound doesn't actually end up taking significantly less time than a minute-long more song-like song, I still spent an hour on this. It was an interesting experiment though!
2017-02-09
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 50 - Voices
Day 50. I'm officially half way done! This one is inspired by Loreena McKennitt's "The Mummers Dance". I used a few different samples of Bulgarian voices from the EastWest "Voices of Passion" set. You might also notice the reverse-piano sound a couple times. I used a mix of the drum track generator plus myself playing the bongo track on the keyboard to get a good mix of percussion.
2017-02-08
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 49 - Floating
Day 49. The opening sound is a reversed piano chord that starts with a tight EQ in the middle and opens up as it builds. I used that sound a couple more times in the song. After getting the piano chords down, I layered a few strange sounds on top for effect.
2017-02-07
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 48 - Glitch
Day 48. This morning, my friend @KmikeyM asked if he could make the video for today's song! Since I hadn't started yet, I though that would be a fun collaboration. I decided to experiment with adding a bunch of industrial glitch sounds in the background of this one.
2017-02-06
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 47 - Launch
Day 47. Today I wanted to use a bunch of samples from NASA shuttle launches. I started by finding a countdown I liked, and then grabbed samples from a bunch of different NASA launches to overlay them. I retimed the countown to fit the beat, and took some liberties with the order of some of the sounds, like adding the mic chirp in places it wouldn't normally exist. I used a recording of a shuttle launch as the foundation. The video is an assortment of clips I found on the Internet Archive from various NASA missions.
2017-02-05
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 46 - Half Off
Day 46. The time signature of this one is 15/8. Basically each phrase has a half beat less than what you'd expect from 4/4, or a half-beat more than 7/4. I did a lot of EQ separation on each instrument to really isolate each from each other.
2017-02-04
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 45 - Teaspoons
Day 45. This is the first time I've recorded my own audio for a song, and only the third time I've used audio samples at all. The clinking glass sound I recorded on the kitchen counter. It's me hitting two pint glasses with the handle of a tea spoon. I recorded about 8 takes of 16 bars of the rhythm. I used the best five 4-bar phrases in the final song. It was an interesting experiment cleaning up the audio so that it worked well with the rest of the song. I first used a high pass filter to remove all the low...
2017-02-03
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 44 - Pianos
Day 44 - Another attempt at using different kinds of pianos. The first one you hear is doubled, with the second track moving in and out of tune over the phrase. It's EQ'd to only hear high frequencies, making it sound sort of "tinny". The second one that comes in is actually two different pianos, panned hard right and hard left. They are adjusted to sound "warm". Finally the bass piano comes in which is restricted tightly to the low frequencies, with a peak at a frequency matching a low C which gives it a sort of resonance.
2017-02-02
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 43 - Darkness
Day 43. This one kind of just meanders for a while without a lot of resolution. It seemed appropriate today for some reason.
2017-02-01
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 42 - Sprinkles
Day 42. I'm heading to DonutJS tonight to film the evening's talks. I threw this together to use as the intro/outro music after I publish them. It's a re-creation in a similar style to the stock music I've used on those videos before, so nothing fancy. The video is the background of the donutjs.club website.
2017-01-31
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 41 - Anticipation
Day 41. I originally thought I would use a clean pulse synth sound for this one, but then decided it sounded better as a piano sound instead. I also added a bass line that mirrors the piano's low notes to fill out the sound. The bass line has an EQ filter that moves around during the sustained parts in order to give it a sense of motion until the next phrase comes in. I have a whole second part I want to add to this, but this was getting long and I was getting tired, so I stopped there. At the...
2017-01-30
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 40 - Melancholy
Day 40. This is mostly me playing the piano live. In a few places I adjusted the timing, and I added a couple notes that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to reach. I doubled the piano with two slightly different piano sounds, and they are panned hard left and hard right. This adds a bit of depth to it. I added the drum track at a relatively low volume to kind of keep things moving a bit more than it would without the drums. This one came out a lot more melancholy than I thought it was going to despite...
2017-01-29
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 39 - Escalation
Day 39. I don't know if you can really call this one a "song". This is an attempt at making something that could be used in a trailer or as the end of an episode of a TV show. There is a base track of a few layers of string instruments, and then I layered a whole bunch of other sounds to build up to the big "boom" at the end. I reversed a couple of the sounds so that they build up instead of taper off. There's also a heart beat at the super low frequencies that doesn't actually follow...
2017-01-28
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 38 - Underground
Day 38. I wanted this one to be mostly piano, with just a hint of some other sounds. You might want to listen to this one with headphones for the full effect. The atonal sounds you hear are sampled from a gong. I like how some of them sound like muffled speech.
2017-01-27
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 37 - Fields
Day 37. I liked the way the maj9 chord resolved in this synth patch, so I built up the rest of the song around that. The background piano is doubled at a 1/8 step out of tune. I used the same compressor trick to help add rhythm to the background tracks too. I'm starting to run out of new video filters to use for these, I wonder how I'm going to make it to 100.
2017-01-26
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 36 - Flying
Day 36. This one's short and sweet. When I replay this in my head I keep thinking about other embellishments I could add. I think if I later expand this I might try some of those ideas, but I didn't want to complicate this version of it. The video is from my flight from Oakland to Portland this morning.
2017-01-25
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 35 - Oak
Day 35. I'm not super happy with this one. I originally had something else in mind, but didn't have the energy tonight to properly get it out of my head. So instead, you get this, which is a strange combination of sounds. You may recognize the pulsing synth sound from yesterday's song as well.
2017-01-24
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 34 - Texture
Day 34. I started this one by listening to a Logic Pro loop that I liked. I tried to recreate parts of it as an experiment to see what it would take. I started with two synths playing the chord progression in two different octaves. I added a clip distortion filter to make them sound more dirty. I wanted them to sound like they were pulsing on the beat, except I wanted the volume to drop on the beat to punctuate the sound instead of having them get louder on the beat. To do that, I added a silent drum track...
2017-01-23
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 33 - Up and Down
Day 33. I didn't really know what to expect going into this today. I started with the piano, then added the first violins that you hear. At some point I realized this sounded familiar, and then found out that it's the same chord progression I used on Day 7. Not that it's particularly unique. I then decided to stick with only orchestral instruments, and that I wanted to try a large buildup and taper it off to a slow resolution without doing a fade-out. I think that aspect worked!
2017-01-22
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 32 - Ghosts
Day 32. I decided to go somewhat simple for this one. I used a delay effect to get the piano and snare drum to echo. I added the vocals last to fill out the sound some more. The vocals are a mix of a full choir singing "ah" and tenors singing "oo", and they fade in and out mixing between different intensities of singing. If this were used as background music in a TV show I probably wouldn't have used as strong of a hit at the end, and just left the cymbal build-up hanging and probably not resolved the chord...
2017-01-21
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 31 - Seven Grands
Day 31. This one is composed of seven tracks of the same piano sound, all with slightly different EQ and effects. One has a strong low-pass filter to make it sound percussive and not interfere with the rest, some have delay effects, etc. I wanted to see what I could do with only piano and no other instruments this time!
2017-01-20
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 30 - On the Train
Day 30. I can't believe it's already been a month I've been doing this project! I hope this one isn't too obvious what I was going for. I wrote most of this on the train from Eugene to Portland today. I added a 1/8 note pulse to the main synth track, which is supposed to be a nod to the rhythmic sounds the wheels make on the tracks. The slow pitch bend down one step is the doppler effect of passing another train and the bells at the train crossings. The piano chord accents are supposed to be the train horn. Get...
2017-01-19
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 29 - Tuned
Day 29. I started this one with the synth chord track. They go in and out of tune across the phrases, only plus or minus half a half-step so it's barely audible but should come across as something being slightly off. The bongo drums were fun to add, that's mostly me playing the piano notes live, and there are a few different kinds of hits in the samples to make it sound less mechanical.
2017-01-18
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 28 - Waiting
Day 28. Waiting for the snow to melt. I started this one from the chord progression in the middle, and then built up to and out of it.
2017-01-17
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 27 - Echoes
Day 27. Solo piano again. There's a half-measure delay added to the piano. The track that plays the delay is adjusted to make it sound far away, by boosting the high EQ and dropping the low frequencies, and adding a "stereo spread" effect to make it sound like it's coming from both sides. This sounds way more interesting with headphones so you can hear that effect better.
2017-01-16
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 26 - Sherlock at Dawn
Day 26. Time for another mashup! This is the Sherlock opening theme orchestrated and arranged like Nina Simone's "Feeling Good." These are always fun to do because I get to deconstruct two different songs and then put them back together. I also included the audio from the original Nina Simone track since she does a solo introduction in the song, and it lined up pretty well without a lot of cuts! The video is the Sherlock intro sequence mixed with some video of a Nina Simone concert.
2017-01-15
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 25 - The Archives
Day 25. I got started much earlier today, and appreciated having the extra time to work on this! I'm reasonably happy with it, although I think the last phrase could use some more build-up, to emphasize the hesitation and quiet ending even more. The video is from my visit to the Internet Archive in San Francisco yesterday. The Internet Archive main office is in an old church. These are just two of the racks of live servers that power archive.org.
2017-01-14
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 24 - The Cheat
Day 24. I was out and about in San Francisco most of the day, so didn't get started on this until I was finally in the MAX on the ride home from the Portland airport. I started this on my phone, which meant I was relatively limited in what I could do, so I started putting some loops from Garage Band on the iPhone together. I never made it an explicit rule not to use loops, but I've always felt bad about doing that. This one is almost entirely just various loops assembled together. But it was more important to me...
2017-01-13
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 23 - Absinthe
Day 23. Back at my hotel in the evening, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get started tonight. Lily suggested that I call her and she could sing something to me over the phone. So we chatted on Facetime for a few minutes, and she sang some random words that she read around the apartment, in something resembling a tune. I took a tiny slice of the call, pitch corrected and retimed it like crazy, and then built up some other instruments around it. This was an interesting exercise in learning the pitch correction and retiming...
2017-01-12
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 22 - In-Flight Entertainment
Day 22. I wrote this on the short flight from PDX to SFO. When I first played it out, I couldn't decide what instrument to use for the lead-in. When I got to my hotel room, it finally dawned on me that it should be this percussive bell thing to round out the "circus" vibe that the rest of the track already had!
2017-01-11
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 21 - Snow Day
Day 21. This evening, a snow storm hit Portland. It went from "oh look at the cute snowflakes" to 5 inches of snow in about 2 hours. I originally shot a bunch more b-roll for this video, but then decided I liked this shot enough to use it for the whole clip. With some more time, there's a bunch more I want to do with this song. I might try to expand on it later, because I keep having ideas for how to make this sound more like I'm imagining it.
2017-01-10
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 20 - Vieux Carré
Day 20. This was the first time I started and finished a song in a bar! I wrote this between my dentist appointment and seeing a movie downtown. The Vieux Carré is a $5 on-tap cocktail at Imperial in Downtown Portland. I will admit it was a bit of a challenge working on this with other music playing in the bar, but my noise cancelling headphones helped a lot.
2017-01-09
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 19 - Popcorn
Day 19. Just to make sure I wasn't getting stuck attempting to make fake instruments sound real, today's song is super ethereal and lacking most things resembling instruments and rhythm. I have no idea what I might use this for in the future, but it was an interesting exploration of making a soundscape.
2017-01-08
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 18 - Maple and Spruce
Day 18. I wasn't sure where to start today, but I remembered that it was my friend Barnaby's birthday! I first met Barnaby on the Internet, and later met him in person at an IndieWebCamp. In addition to being a prolific contributor to many IndieWeb projects, he also plays *and makes* Hurdy-Gurdys! What's a Hurdy Gurdy? It's a very cool instrument that is kind of like a key-fretted violin played with a circular bow. I went to his website http://waterpigs.co.uk to see what sorts of musical things he's been up to lately, and found a neat melody called "...
2017-01-07
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 17 - Gateway
Day 17. This is a piano solo I recorded in only a couple takes. After recording, I added some chorus, delay, EQ filters, and a phaser effect to make it sound like it was sort of out of tune and far away. I guess I was going for the "something is slightly off" vibe. I considered adding some other instruments but ended up sticking with a piano solo for this one.
2017-01-06
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 16 - Woodbury
Day 16. I dug up an old radio show called Mr. and Mrs. North, and the opening had a fantastic ad for Woodbury Cold Cream with a little acapella jingle. I decided that it would be a great bit to sample for the basis of today's song. I also incorporated some parts of the narrator's voice into the track. The video that goes along with this is snippets from the Mr. and Mrs. North TV show.
2017-01-05
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 15 - Crunchy
Day 15. I have no explanation for this. I didn't start this until 7pm after grocery shopping, was determined to knock something out within an hour, and didn't have any ideas coming into it. I walked into my office and sat down, and somehow the intro piano popped into my head. I just ran with it, played another piano track on top, then layered the rest of the instruments to accompany it. Not bad for 30 minutes!
2017-01-04
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 14 - Slow-Scan
Day 14. Tonight I tuned in to an amateur radio meetup where people shared images over the radio. Slow-scan TV is a way of transmitting images by converting them to sound, where various frequencies and timings correspond to colors and brightness. I used the image I tried to send tonight as the base of today's song. If you play this song in front of an SSTV decoder application, you will see the image it represents! There's only a little noise added to the image from the rest of the instruments.
2017-01-03
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 13 - Daft Punk vs The Office
Day 13. Daft Punk vs The Office. I had fun with this one! This is the chords and melody from Daft Punk's Get Lucky, but instrumented and arranged the same as the theme from The Office. It's also my first time using a vocoder on my own voice!
2017-01-02
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 12 - New Year
Day 12. This started out as a totally unrelated riff, and by the time I was done adding to it, the original riff didn't make any sense so I deleted it. There are actually 4 different kinds of trumpet tracks in this in order to achieve this semi-realistic result. I was on the fence about adding a faint string section in the background and decided against it in the end. I enjoyed playing with the drum section in this one, using silence to emphasize the trumpet solos.
2017-01-01
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 11 - Swell
Day 11. I'm definitely less happy with this one than any others so far, but hey that's what this project is about. Putting stuff out there and not worrying too much about it.
2016-12-31
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 10 - Lacrimosa
Day 10. Mozart is probably rolling in his grave. I took the beginning of Lacrimosa, changed it to 4/4, and added drums and some other non orchestral instruments. This was my first time playing with the East/West Choir "Word Builder" which is a tool where you can type phonetically what you want the choir to sing and it puts it together. This rendition is by no means perfect, but I could get it a lot closer with more time, tuning the precise timings of moving from each consonant to vowel and back. The instrumentals I added are inspired by E.S...
2016-12-30
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 9 - Pumpkin
Day 9. I don't really know what I was going for here. I had this tune in my head on the bike ride home from downtown this evening. This one only took an hour or so to jot down, since I wasn't going for any particular sound. The animation kind of sums it up.
2016-12-29
00 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 8 - Pulse
Day 8. Today's song is an experiment in not using any percussion and trying to create the sense of rhythm other ways. A lot of this was inspired by one of @adamsinger's Creative Commons tracks. I wanted to see what it would take to create something with a similar feel. There's also a hint of Royksopp in here.
2016-12-28
01 min
100 Days of Music by Aaron Parecki
Day 3 - Breaking News
Day 3. Today's theme is "breaking news intro song", and also "Aaron attempts to spend less than 5 hours on this today unlike yesterday". I think I accomplished both!
2016-12-23
00 min
Web Directions Podcast
Aaron Parecki - Geolocation
While location-based mobile apps are becoming increasingly popular, they are still relatively new. Special considerations need to be made for battery life and handling large data sets of geolocated data. The good news is there are many services and technologies you can use to assist you in building mobile location-based apps. In this session, Aaron Parecki, co-founder of Geoloqi.com, shows you services you can leverage to do things like nearby business lookups, location-based triggers, nearest intersection queries, and more. Aaron also covers the location services available on the various mobile platforms as well as in HTML 5, and shares...
2011-05-29
00 min