It all started a little more than a week ago when my old friend Dennis emailed me ith an interesting proposition. His latest obsession has been flying drones and making videos of his aerial adventures. His latest video had a soundtrack that wasn’t working for him and he asked if I could come up with something. I had never done anything like that before but I was immediately interested. Dennis gave me a wide latitude to come up with something since the video was still just a rough cut. The only instruction was to have it between 2:15 and 2:45 minutes long.
I watched the video repeatedly with the sound off while I would play musical ideas on the guitar. My initial attempts were basically pathetic imitations of the Pat Metheny tune “New Chautauqua”. After a while, I simplified what was a overly busy acoustic guitar rhythm part to just outlining the basic chord progression and a simple drum track from my library of drum loops. After that things came together pretty quickly. The opening melody is played on a six string bass, followed by sections where I use some of my favorite tricks: open string chords up the neck (which produce a slightly off “jangle”), slide guitar and guitar harmony lines a la Allman Brothers. I sent off the results off to Dennis who, after re-editing, produced with the video below.
Lake Lanier 2 –
I must say that I’m pleased with the result and I am definitely looking forward to doing something like this again.
RoyMusicUSA 
Wow, that was pro. Timing must have been a challenge esp. the progressive snaps of the beach people. I was gonna ask for a thermal shirt this xmas but now I’m thinking drone – sound track to follow.
The rhythmic editing cuts were part of the first version of the video so I did had the music provide for that visual effect but the syncing of the two was done by Dennis who re-edited the video after I gave him the music. The credit goes to him