beetBITE

Levity Beet and I have long been admirers of each other’s inventive musical material. With five awards for Best NZ Children’s Album between us, we decided to write and produce a new collaborative album called beetBITE.

We came up with an idea to use everyday sounds as the basis for 10 original songs. This was a lot of fun and involved a lot of experimentation.

For some songs, we used sound FX to create rhythm tracks:

• beetBITE beat (a techno dance track) was built around the percussive sound of a ping pong ball

• Truck in the Muck (acoustic country) features truck indicators, blaring horns, spinning wheels and starter motors from old trucks

• Seaweed (South Pacific ukulele) was based around drips and splashing water

• Making Friends uses digital video game sounds set against a syncopated bass line.

Sometimes we used sound FX to enhance characters in the songs:

• Meet the Squeakies is a bedtime story told to an audience of very vocal squeaky toys

• Bull in a China Shop (flamenco) is sung by a sensitive bull who can’t help smashing delicate crockery and glass

• The Whisperers is a mysterious tiptoe-ing track where the singers are terrified of noises in the night.

A couple of songs started life as instrumentals, and the lyrics came later:

• Spaceship to Mars is an otherworldly experiment of ‘spacey’ sounds that was overlaid with melody and lyrics

• Echo Locating Machine (rock’n’roll) is filled with sonar and a thrashy riff of bass and drums

Late addition Weedy (reggae) didn’t quite fit the ‘sound effect’ edict, but we liked its sunny singalong feel as a contrast to the other musical genres.

There was never any shortage of ideas, and we could easily have gone on to make 100 tracks. Maybe we will!!!

PS: Thanks to NZ on Air for supporting the beetBITE project.