Commercials 30
getting the music right
From bespoke music or sound design to existing commercial or libary music that already hits the spot, there are many options open to agencies when sourcing music for ads. Jake Bickerton reveals the decision making process behind five of 2010’s music-driven spots
greggs the home of fresh baking agency GRATTERPALM production THE MOB FILM COMPANY music FELT MUSIC Felt came up with the idea of using ‘If I Knew You Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake’, made famous by Gracie Fields, for a re-branding campaign for Greggs. The campaign kicked off with The Home of Fresh Baking, centred on an assortment of Greggs bakers going about their business while singing and dancing to a very authentic sounding re-recording of the tune. “Three out of the seven-strong Felt team doing searches came up with the same track. It’s the one that makes the most sense, and it has a very happy vibe,” explains Felt’s Toby Slade-Baker Slade-Baker explains why Felt opted to re-record the tune rather than use the original: “It was an arrangement thing. You can’t get an instrumental version of the original and we needed extended instrumental sections and very different arrangements. We chopped out bars, rearranged vocals, the chorus and the bridges to fit and so the vocals come in at exactly the right point. We took out the lyrics we didn’t need and did lots of rearranging.” Prior to the shoot, Felt created a mock-up of the newly arranged version. “We had a storyboard and scripts and, before the shoot, did a crude edit with the original master track – we used botched, horrible edits as a reference to what to record in the studio and they shot to these edits,” says Slade-Baker.
The re-recording took two days of studio time, with a great deal of care taken to replicate an authentic 1940s sound. “The sound of the audio had to be the same as the 1940s recordings. So we got the same horns as back then and the same ribbon mics, and we used musicians specialising in that sound. We recorded digitally but we did it the way big bands were recorded at that time, recording as an ensemble, not individually. We also added tape saturation and vintage compression. The vocalist, Denise Roberts, is a jazz/blues singer on the circuit. She’s often asked to do Gracie Fields and was an obvious choice.”
November 10 I
www.televisual.com 37
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