Watch Paul McCartney Record Funky Grooves for Skype Project
Paul McCartney has recorded some funky instrumentals for “Love Mojis,” a new Valentine’s Day project with Skype featuring 10 swappable animated designs set to music. The rock legend recorded the compositions over one week at Hog Hill Mill, his Sussex studio, and the above clip finds McCartney exploring a wide range of instruments – including vibraphone, drums, piano, guitars and his most crucial piece of gear, the Moog synthesizer.
“I wanted it to sound sort of electronic, so I wanted the signature to sound electronic rather than acoustic guitar, for instance,” the former Beatle said in a statement. “So I got the overall signature on the Moog in order to give it a modern flavor.”
McCartney has written everything from two-minute rock staples to video game scores to classical pieces. But he faced a new challenge in writing tunes that last only a few seconds each. “It turned out to be a great laugh at the same time as challenging because you suddenly realize you’ve got to compress a musical interpretation of an expression into less than five seconds,” he explained. “It was like doing a huge crossword puzzle and coming up with all these solutions. And at the same time, it was musical so it was great practice for me in the studio.”
In the below clip, the former Beatle discusses his initial reluctance at working in this unexpected new medium. “At first I thought, ‘Hmm, a strange proposition – is this for me?’ And then I thought, ‘Yeah, you know, why not? Something fun, something nice and new,'” he says. “So I did it. I put music to these things. It was really challenging to do. It was good fun.”