I guess all of us in this video are millennials, so is this song like... a 6/8 throwback party anthem for millennial? No? Okay. Insaneintherainmusic's jazz cover / remix of Millennial Fair from Chrono Trigger, featuring Ocabanda (the United States' only ocarina septet!)
This was such a fun video to make to close out Year 7! Year 7 has definitely been a strange / difficult / awesome year for me, and Im glad to be putting it in the books with this video. More on that to come in the Year 7 reflection video before launching into the Year of Sinnoh!
Im from the Seattle area originally, and Im fortunate enough to be close to the US Ocarina Festival! This festival happens once a year, and this year was its second edition. Ocabanda was in town, and I thought itd be really really cool to make some sort of video together! Ive worked before with David Ramos as an ocarina soloist, but I thought it would be so cool and interesting to have an entire ocarina ensemble take part in a video... since ocarina ensembles are very rare, and ocarina ensembles in a jazz context are even more rare! I wanted to pick a tune that wouldnt be too complex to pull off, fit the timbre of the ocarina, and also had a lot of potential for a fun video. I settled on this fun tune Millennial Fair from Chrono Trigger, one of my favorite RPGs! This song has such a fun melody, and lots of fun little bits like the claps and the ha! section that just give it so much life and energy. I think those feelings translated into our performance of the song as well!
One of the most fun parts about recording this collaboration was figuring out how wed efficiently record each ocarina player in an isolate environment! My bedroom studio (not really a bedroom anymore since the bed has been moved out, but whatever) only has so much space, so I had to figure out how to efficiently make space for these other instrumentalists to record in my house! What I ended up doing was running an XLR cable and headphone cable under the door to my room to my parents bedroom, which was like an isolated booth, and I did the same thing through a hole in the wall that I drilled (lol) into my moms office. We made it work! Using SM57s on the ocarinas provided enough isolation that the resulting product was pretty clean, even with the sound of ocarina players practicing in other rooms of the house, haha! This was a lot of fun to put together. Year 7 reflection video / Year of Sinnoh announcement coming soon :)
\"Millennial Fair\" from \"Chrono Trigger\" composed by Yasunori Mitsuda
