Busy, busy weekend. Perhaps I'll post about my weekend adventures later, but here's the quick version: yarbiedoll and I went to the Washington, DC area to visit my parents and ccohoon, my brother. While up there, we went to a museum, ate at a barbecue joint, hunted pandas, and visited sethcohen, estherchaya, bodnej, and Mrs. bodnej.

We also made a music video.

It's not a particularly great music video, but it was lots of fun. It started on Saturday, when yarbiedoll and I went to visit ccohoon. ccohoon and I were planning on recording some bluegrass, but he couldn't get his recording equipment working, so we just played around on Cripple Creek. ccohoon taught yarbiedoll how to play the song's power chords on guitar, so we ended up working out a pretty decent version of Cripple Creek with me on Loretta, my mandolin, ccohoon on banjo, and yarbiedoll on guitar. We took turns on the breaks. We mixed it up on one of the breaks and played antiphonally. It was all sorts of fun. It was just too bad that we couldn't record it.

Sunday, after church, we all gathered again -- this time at my parents' house. ccohoon brought his video camera, so we could record our song on it since we weren't able to get the recoding set up the day before. So we went through the song about six or seven times, videotaping it each time. I just finished splicing clips from the various takes together in what resembles a poor attempt at making a music video. It's far from a professional effort -- we're definitely talking hobby effort here. Here are some of the flaws I know about. The sound is iffy -- it was all captured from the camera's built-in mic, so it's not the greatest. Since the mandolin and banjo are loud, you can really hear them. The guitar is hard to hear, but it's in there. The quality of the playing is OK, but not great. I took the best audio clip and inserted footage (without sound) from other takes to get the close-ups. The audio/video synchronization is terrible in a few places. The more we played the song, the faster we played it. What started out as an almost 3 minute song on the first take was sped up to about 2 minutes and 40 seconds by the last take. The audio is from an early take, so a lot of the close-up shots don't match up well. The up-side is that it's kinda funny -- like watching a poorly dubbed movie, you'll hear the notes played before you see the fingers move on the frets. *shrug* Oh, well. It was really just for fun. The "music video" text is extremely difficult to read on this web version of the movie -- trust me, at least that looks better on a real TV. It says:

Gasoline Mousetrap
"Cripple Creek"
Live From The Den

That's right, we named ourselves Gasoline Mousetrap and we're the wackiest family bluegrass band simultaneously based in North Carolina and Maryland.

Anyway, with all those caveats out of the way, feel free to watch the Gasoline Mousetrap music video. It's about 5.4 MB and 2 minutes, 50 seconds long. It requires QuickTime to view.

After spending all that time "polishing" that arrangement of Cripple Creek, we then decided to have some fun and switched instruments. Hilarity ensued, but that's the topic of another post entirely.