Fantastic Songs and Where to Find Them

[violet_skies]

 

I grew up helping my dad with his small business. He was a live sound engineer (now mostly retired), so from my pre-teen years well into college, I would spend the occasional evening or weekend setting up and tearing down sound equipment for shows and concerts. My dad encouraged my love of live music, taking me to see the Mighty Mighty Bosstones at age 10, buying me The Smashing Pumpkins tickets for Christmas at the age of 14, and getting us tickets to see The Black Watch bagpipes and marching band troupe at 17. Music is still important to me, with LoFi beats helping me be productive during the work day and personalized radio stations accompanying every car trip.

Song choice is critical to a compelling AMV, both for me to watch and for me to want to edit. Songs that have weird flow, are too repetitive, or just not my taste make editing with them really challenging. When I first started editing (just last summer, mind you), I only had two ideas. One was to the song “Count Those Freaks” by Whitey. I consider electroswing to be my favorite genre of music, and this song (which is about zombies) I wanted to pair with High School of the Dead. My spouse, Tyken, who I had spent the last few months pitching AMV ideas at, was completely disinterested. I got the song, the source, and went to work. Well, by the time I finally finished it, the video was OK I guess, but High School of the Dead, which I hadn’t seen in many years, was not quite what I had remembered. First of all, I remembered actually liking the show, and it did not hold up on rewatch. Second, I had some ideas to do neat text effects, but between my skills and Vegas’s text editor both being somewhat lacking, the text mostly fell flat. I will probably try to remake it some day when my skills have improved. Source selection is a whole different ball game.

Electroswing, however, doesn’t generally make good AMVs. They can be repetitive, have nonsensical lyrics, and generally have a very different “vibe”. I personally lean heavily on lyric sync, so if the words of the song don’t work for my source, I won’t use it. Lyric sync is also the primary motivator of the car game (well, maybe more thought experiment) that my husband and I play in the car. We listen to every song and try to name a source that would pair well with that song. The pairings aren’t always fantastic, and they aren’t typically videos that we want to make, but it helps our brains think through the process of finding source and song pairings. 

I drastically prefer to start song first when coming up with AMV ideas. I can only think of one instance where I started source first, and that was with my Bluey AMV (It's Good to Be Curious). I need to feel inspired by the song I’m using. Finally, I get to the title of the blog entry–where do I find my songs? This next part will sound like a commercial. I get most of my songs from Pandora Internet Radio. If you aren’t familiar with the platform, you make a personalized radio station with a band or even just a song that you like, and Pandora will find you similar-sounding material. You refine the station by giving songs you like a thumbs up and songs you don’t like thumbs down. The individual stations can also be adjusted on the fly to different levels of obscurity. There’s “Crowd Faves” which are the most popular song, “Discovery” is somewhat obscure, “Deep Cuts” are really obscure, and there’s also “Newly Released.” I don’t use Crowd Faves, but the other three are common choices for me. I like “Newly Released” for AMV songs because I have a weird personal bias against using popular songs for AMVs. If a good AMV has been made to a song before, I probably won’t want to edit with it. But I probably have enough preconceived notions about AMV editing that it could be its own blo

I also keep a list of AMV ideas in a note app on my phone. Usually I try to come up with pairings immediately, but sometimes I hear a really cool song and want to use it eventually. During Project Org Editor last year, three of my seven videos used songs that I had on my list without a source. After 9 months of video editing, my list is up to 30 ideas… And sometimes when I start an AMV idea immediately, they don’t go on the list–the one I’m working on right now isn’t from there.

I think my next blog entry might be about sync. And I feel like one blog post a week is probably a good pace. We'll see how this pans out long-term.

Comments

[katranat]

If a good AMV has been made to a song before, I probably won’t want to edit with it.

I feel you on this. Oftentimes, I simply have an urge to see a particular song with visuals so before using a song I almost always search and see if there are any AMV's that already exist with it which I enjoy. If so, then a lot of the time I don't feel I need to edit with it myself as the desire has been fulfilled.

After 9 months of video editing, my list is up to 30 ideas

Oh wow, that's impressive! Never doubt you're fully fledged AMV editor, I swear we all have too many ideas.

[violet_skies]

Oftentimes, I simply have an urge to see a particular song with visuals so before using a song I almost always search and see if there are any AMV's that already exist with it which I enjoy.
Usually for me it's a particular pairing. If the specific pairing hasn't been done that's the priority. If any AMV has been really successful, though, I try not to reuse the song.

And thanks for your kindness. I feel pretty great about my contribution to the hobby do far and look forward to being part of it for many years to come!