As promised — the ad music!

A few weeks ago, I posted about a great opportunity I got here in Albuquerque to create the music for a new ad campaign by the New Mexico Lottery, celebrating their contribution of $500M to allow students statewide to attend any of our state universities tuition-free (given a minimum GPA).

A still from one of the six ads in the campaign.

I promised that once the ads were finalized, up and running, I’d post some of the music so you could hear a little of how the process worked (I got permission to do this written into my license agreements).

So here you go (192kbps mp3s): This is a collage of four of the five drafts I did, taking anywhere from 3 to 6 hours each to produce — not quite broadcast ready but offering different possible directions. The basic guidance I’d gotten was no straightforward guitar or piano, an organic/natural sound, an uncluttered arrangement (just a few instruments), and something cool and edgy.

Of the drafts in that collage, the ad agency and Lottery commission chose the last one. You might remember from that earlier post that I liked the last one best, but neither the production house nor I expected the ad agency and the client to go for it. Backward ukulele, sampled ukulele, and backward piano over a mellow but swaggering hip-hop beat. Who knew!

Over that foundation, I then created five different melodies in different voices; they chose one using kalimba (an African thumb piano). Awesome. Then I did two choices of endings for them. In short, I worked hard to provide something they’d like.

Here is the final version of the music, and here’s an example of the videos (beautifully shot/produced by halflife* digital). The excellent ad agency supervising the entire thing was Kilmer | Kilmer | Marshall | Duran.

What a great way to wrap up 2011 and begin 2012! Oh, and I got paid for a Breaking Bad webisode placement this week, too. Very cool. Not every week will be quite this much fun, but weeks like this make the hard work worth it.