We are often commissioned by acclaimed wedding cinematography company York Place Films to write a complete bespoke soundtrack to their cinematic wedding videos. This one was in the Canary Islands on Las Palmas so we were very excited to get stuck into a spanishy vibe on the music. The opening scenery on the film is stunning and I wanted to hit something between Kill Bill (although that reference seems a bit lost in the result now, it’s interesting what goes into to initial thoughts!) and Fleet Foxes. Big ‘oooh’ vocals coupled with a flute melody matched the scenery really well. And when all the epicness died down to just the groom padding about in his flip flops on his balcony I opted for a verging on comical french / spanish clown sort of sound with the accordion. The accordion and acoustic guitar make up a lot of the soundscape for this piece of music. And it’s important to note that these videos we do are a piece of music and not many pieces of music. We try to change with the images on the film without seams showing, so even though the music does drastically change, you don’t really notice it at the time!

We used a lot of percussion and ‘palmas’ – the spanish hand claps, it is in Las Palmas after all! It’s nice how much applause you actually see in the film which really fits with the palmas we recorded very well. Even the scene where the lady is playing high-five / patticake with the baby fits perfectly with the clapping and shaker only soundtrack at that point.

 

For the middle reception section we went for a sort of ‘Stand By Me’ chord sequence with the accordion and acoustic guitar providing most of instrumentation. The sequence seems to automatically evoke a sort of nostalgic quality which I think the edit and style of the film as in abundance at this point too. It could almost be filmed on a Super 8.

Some wild jazz accordion too! And this then starts to build up into when you see the band start to play (who by the way look super cool), we add in the electric guitar and full drum kit.

 

The end section of dancing brings back in the main melody theme from the beginning on the flute and vocals only this time in the major key which gives a nice circular feel as even if you don’t conciously notice it, you’ll know you’ve heard that melody somewhere before!

We end on the classic spanish open guitar chords as the bride blows us a kiss and waves goodbye with full tableau of spanish poses!

It was really nice to get to play so many real instruments on this piece – in fact all of them we played ourselves. Instead of having to rely on samples for instruments we don’t play ourselves. I love the acoustic guitar sound, it has a earthy quality which I think suits this wedding really well – there’s nothing grand or pretentious about it, it looks like really fun and given that it took place during a freak tropical storm that made the news – it’s pretty earthy and gritty too! 🙂