Honestly, I barely remember what possessed me to include the sections I ultimately did. There are two sections that irritate me every time I listen, which makes me wonder why I left them in. They’re bad. Really.
I realized that there was no way that I was going to be able to just add more Disney melodies to Baroque Hoedown. While it would have been possible, it would have also been really boring. Plus, I didn’t have the ability to change timbre enough, while staying true to the 1977 synthesizer feel. With no Minimoog, no ARP 2600, no Yamaha CS50, no EMS VCS3, and most importantly, no such thing as VST or softsynths, I didn’t even have the ability to make more than a few era-appropriate sounds.
Disneyland actually “updated” the original parade music at some point with a new arrangement. You can hear some FM synthesis (probably from a Yamaha DX7, placing the update sometime post-1983), and the result is poor. For the most part it’s new Disney songs played on 1980’s synthesizers over the top of the harpsichord part. For better or worse, I knew that I didn’t want to listen to 40 minutes of that.
So I was going to need to do something different. I did like the idea of sampling as much Disney stuff as possible, as well as things that were children’s songs, or felt like children’s songs. And for whatever reason, I wanted most of it to be at 130 BPM (a nice trance BPM), so I was going to need some beat loops. And for my own integrity, I was going to need to construct them myself.
So I went through pretty much everything I owned and started looking for loops. They couldn’t be too obvious (no sampling The Orb, Orbital or Underworld). I ended up with about 50, some of which turned out to be unusable when sped up or slowed down to 130 BPM (this is before Acid, and I didn’t have $250 for Recycle).
Um. Not sure that makes me think, “Parade!”
While digging for beats, I also came upon some totally absurd stuff that was begging to be used, including part of the Forbidden Zone soundtrack, a Ken Nordine spoken word piece, and a Penthouse Forum Live CD that came from a big box of discs from a friend’s dad who worked for a CD pressing company.
I wonder if I still have that…