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Three golem songs!
Feb. 7th, 2021 09:48 pmMy friend Amalia and I have just shot three — count 'em — three (!) music videos about golems. In one gorram day!
If you're unfamiliar with them (except possibly from D&D), note that golems originally come from ancient Jewish tales of rabbis creating them from clay using Kabbalah magic. They were automata (unthinking artificial people) that never spoke but that could do heavy work. A word inscribed on the forehead (or sometimes on paper inserted in the mouth) would activate them, and the word could be removed to deactivate them for the Sabbath (which Rabbi Loew forgot to do one week). One tale involved a golem defending a Jewish ghetto from the army of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II. That should be most of what you need to know to enjoy these videos.
I Had a Little Golem
Do You Wanna Build a Golem (horizontal format)
Do You Wanna Build a Golem (vertical format)
Frosty The Golem
We recorded the audio recently at a great studio (with Scott Petito, sound technician extraordinaire), and shot the videos today.
This all started two years ago, when Amalia told me, "I'm giving you a homework assignment. I have one line of a song: 'Golem, golem, golem, I made it out of clay.' Write it." So I did! We collaborated to refine it. (If it looks and sounds like a cheesy 70's children's show, that's intentional. Amalia gave me the stage direction, "Imagine you always wanted to be a serious musician, but instead here you are on this lousy show." I'm no actor, but I got the empty smile by thinking, "My life is meaningless.")
I sounded out the chords to "Do You Wanna Build a Golem," but it just didn't sound right on guitar. So I got my MIDI setup (from 30 years ago) working for the first time in twelve years, then figured out and reproduced every note of the original. We brought my recording of that to the studio, so Amalia could add her vocals.
"Frosty The Golem" had some more involved recording. My garage sale bass, that I had never touched since I had bought it and replaced the missing string, turned out to have a rattle that we couldn't trivially fix. Scott lent me a bass guitar with flatwound strings, which I didn't even know were a thing. I had literally never figured out, let alone practiced, a bass line for the song before I started recording. So I had a crap first run, but got it okay for the second and third takes. We lucked out for percussion: Amalia wanted something that sounded like a sleigh bell, and unbeknownst to her, I had a sleigh bell!
I've done my own sound editing, but I'm far from a sound engineer. Scott was playing back the mostly completed Frosty as he made some minute changes. I commented, "I kinda want some dynamic range compression on the bass."
He replied, "That's what I'm doing right now." Vibe! So that felt good.
After we shot these videos, Amalia did the editing for all three on the same evening!
(If it looks like we're not being pandemic-safe, don't worry: We're in a social bubble. We take safety seriously.)
If you're unfamiliar with them (except possibly from D&D), note that golems originally come from ancient Jewish tales of rabbis creating them from clay using Kabbalah magic. They were automata (unthinking artificial people) that never spoke but that could do heavy work. A word inscribed on the forehead (or sometimes on paper inserted in the mouth) would activate them, and the word could be removed to deactivate them for the Sabbath (which Rabbi Loew forgot to do one week). One tale involved a golem defending a Jewish ghetto from the army of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II. That should be most of what you need to know to enjoy these videos.
I Had a Little Golem
Do You Wanna Build a Golem (horizontal format)
Do You Wanna Build a Golem (vertical format)
Frosty The Golem
We recorded the audio recently at a great studio (with Scott Petito, sound technician extraordinaire), and shot the videos today.
This all started two years ago, when Amalia told me, "I'm giving you a homework assignment. I have one line of a song: 'Golem, golem, golem, I made it out of clay.' Write it." So I did! We collaborated to refine it. (If it looks and sounds like a cheesy 70's children's show, that's intentional. Amalia gave me the stage direction, "Imagine you always wanted to be a serious musician, but instead here you are on this lousy show." I'm no actor, but I got the empty smile by thinking, "My life is meaningless.")
I sounded out the chords to "Do You Wanna Build a Golem," but it just didn't sound right on guitar. So I got my MIDI setup (from 30 years ago) working for the first time in twelve years, then figured out and reproduced every note of the original. We brought my recording of that to the studio, so Amalia could add her vocals.
"Frosty The Golem" had some more involved recording. My garage sale bass, that I had never touched since I had bought it and replaced the missing string, turned out to have a rattle that we couldn't trivially fix. Scott lent me a bass guitar with flatwound strings, which I didn't even know were a thing. I had literally never figured out, let alone practiced, a bass line for the song before I started recording. So I had a crap first run, but got it okay for the second and third takes. We lucked out for percussion: Amalia wanted something that sounded like a sleigh bell, and unbeknownst to her, I had a sleigh bell!
I've done my own sound editing, but I'm far from a sound engineer. Scott was playing back the mostly completed Frosty as he made some minute changes. I commented, "I kinda want some dynamic range compression on the bass."
He replied, "That's what I'm doing right now." Vibe! So that felt good.
After we shot these videos, Amalia did the editing for all three on the same evening!
(If it looks like we're not being pandemic-safe, don't worry: We're in a social bubble. We take safety seriously.)
