In the past year, I started a new day job in the Office of Advancement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Shortly after I joined the team, we had the public launch of our "With Illinois" campaign, a $2.25 billion effort. To celebrate the support we've received since then, my office put together this video for donors and alumni. The animation is by Brad Olson (a great musician in his own right- he plays in Champaign's Neoga Blacksmith,) and I did the music, a medley of Illinois songs- Alma Mater, Illinois Loyalty, the Illinois State Song, and a smidge of Oskee Wow Wow at the end.

Brad said he wanted "upbeat and fun" music to match the animation, and I immediately thought of the short recipe videos that are popular on Facebook, from which I took a lot of inspiration both in style and instrumentation. I was originally asked for a minute of music, and ended up landing at about 1:15. The video almost doubled in length, however, so Brad did some clever looping to fill everything out. I think it works wonderfully!

I recorded each segment separately, setting up the drum track first and then playing celeste on top. I then added bass for each section, and recorded the whole ukulele track after everything else was finished. The celeste, electric piano (only used for the brief Hail to the Orange and Oskee Wow Wow quotes in the last section), and bass are all stock Logic instruments, the ukulele is a Lanikai LU-11 recorded with an SM-58 going into the Focusrite Scarlett 6i6, and the drums are a Logic drummer.