Musical Monkey

Scamp, over at, well, Scamp, wrote that he doesn’t enjoy sourcing music.

Me, I like it. For me, finding cool tracks has always been one of the really fun parts of any broadcast assignment.

I’ve got an absolutely massive music collection of stuff from all over the world. My iTunes is sitting at the 9,000-track mark at the moment and I’ve probably got another 35,000 tracks backed up on CD-ROM (yeah, I rip every CD I own). The more quirky and obscure the track, the more I like it.

My favorite record store is Hollywood’s Amoeba Music, and I’ll rarely buy anything new. I will, however, spend three hours going through their used CD stacks and walk out with $200 in gently owned, $3 discs (the She Monkey hates it when I do that).

Having an ass-load of music helps when it comes to creating original music, too.

I created a radio campaign once upon a time (and many, many moons ago) and used the fine folks at Austin’s Tequila Mockingbird to bring the project through to reality.

The experience was quite a thrill for me. The composer, Danny Levin played fiddle in Asleep At The Wheel and his partner, Wally Williams, is a personal advertising superhero of mine.

Long story short, because I have that aforementioned ass-load of music, I was able to talk about the sound I was after like I might actually know what I was talking about, and could toss out ideas like making the guitar sound like, oh, Don Rich.

If you don’t get music you just won’t get what I’m saying (and that’s ok), but to me it was a little like walking into the New York Yankees dugout, requesting they play ball a certain way, and having the team go “Oooooooh…. cool!”

You can’t beat that with a stick, even if it’s a bat.

And that brings me to today’s track, one that’s been created for an internal interactive assignment (DHP’s podcast will soon have a permanent home). It was created by The Listening Chair and I thought they did such a good job with it I’d add it to the Music for Monkeys playlist (track #34).

You’ll be hearing it soon on a website to be named later.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in hearing what Don Rich-style guitar sounds like in the context of a quirky radio campaign, take a listen. The spots turn ten years old this summer, so happy birthday to them. You tell me– how well do they hold up? If you think they do, it’s not the writing, it’s the Don Rich influence.

Sorry Scamp, but if you don’t like sourcing music, you’re missing out on half the fun of being a writer.

Email Article Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 09:09pm Mack Simpson

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