Psalm 121 Mash-Up
April 2, 2007
I write a lot of music for Transmission but we haven’t put any audio up on the site yet. I wrote this last week for our Bethesda service and thought you might enjoy hearing it.
Push play to listen:
[audio:asongforascents.mp3]
I frequently write antiphons for psalms when we use them in worship, but I don’t have a strong voice so if the crowd is small the singing can get iffy. Since hiring a cantor was out of the question, I figured that sampling Paul McCartney would make things a little easier (and more fun).
It actually worked really well – I recommend that any of you other small house churches look into sampling pop tunes for worship. If you want to know about the nuts and bolts of how I put this together, read on…
1) I started with the Psalm, meditated on it a bit, tried to think of a song, and finally settled on Help!
2) After loading the mp3 into Ableton Live, I fussed around with the metronome until I matched the tempo pretty closely. The original recording is somewhere between 94 and 95, so I just stretched it a little bit until it was exactly 95 bpm.
3) EQed the song to strip out as much of the bass as I could. Also, the original song has a lot of tambourine/high hat so I took out some of the top end, as well. Boosted the mids so that the vocals didn’t sound weak.
3) Threw together some ambient samples in B minor to add some flavor in the background.
4) At this point, the mash-up transitions were pretty weak, so I wrote a new bass line (following the original chords) and added a tambourine of my own to smooth them over. PS Most of these sounds are coming out of my Roland XV-2020, and I did the actual MIDI sequencing in Logic Audio.
5) Downloaded the Psalm in Hebrew from this site.
6) Recorded my own voice reading the psalm in English and added reverb, stereo spread, and a bunch of other stuff.
7) Spent some time tweaking the mix and bounced it to MP3.
The whole process took me about 3 hours. I’m using a lot of fancy software because I have them lying around, but this isn’t anything you couldn’t do in Garage Band. Best of luck!
(PS if you want to download this song for your own purposes, go ahead: http://www.transmissioning.org/audio/asongforascents.mp3).