In my day job, I work in advancement at the University of Illinois. Last summer, I scored a video celebrating the success to date of our current campaign, With Illinois (see my post about that here). Yesterday, we published a story about the changing face of Campustown at the U of I, including a side-by-side video of footage from 1994 and 2019 (edited by Katie Miller). Abigail Bobrow, our Assistant Director for Storytelling, asked me to write a piece of music to accompany the video, and wanted it to sound like 1994.

Given that I was only a year old in 1994 and don’t have a strong memory of what was playing on the radio, I crowd sourced some music recommendations on Facebook, and put together a playlist based on those recommendations and the Billboard Top 100 list from that year (at right). “She Drives Me Crazy,” while predating 1994, provided my initial inspiration for the snare sound off of which I built the track. From there, I set up the drum track and added synths on top. In typical fashion, the high sine wave-based line quotes “Hail to the Orange,” the university’s alma mater. You can hear the end result in the video above, and read Abby’s three-part story here.

I began work on this at my office, with the CME XKey controlling GarageBand on my iPad. I then took that draft (which you can listen to in the player below,) and imported it into Logic to rerecord, expand, and generally clean up the track. The final video ended up being a little shorter than we originally planned, so the full version runs about 45 seconds longer (again, below).