Pandemica Driveway Band started in late April, 2020 and played 60 shows from May through early October in Ann Arbor, Canton, and Belleville, Michigan. As the weather cooled off, we saw the end of the busy season and wondered what we could do next while we waited for the next outdoor performances in May 2021. We thought we had figured out how to rehearse indoors, using multiple air purifiers (basically just HEPA filters and fans), so we thought we'd put together a Christmas video.
Bill thought that a straightforward Christmas video might be made by taking a Christmas short story or poem, splitting it into segments, and interleaving short versions of Christmas songs in between readings of the segments. We tested this idea with some of our key supporters and they were enthusiastic, as were the musicians. We determined that we wanted to create a video that would be free of any intellectual property rights concerns, so the story or poem had to be written before 1925 as did all of the music. After some consultation with Bill's sister (and one of the catalog maintenance volunteers at the open source book publisher Project Gutenberg) we settled on the wonderful Christmas story "The Gift of the Magi", written by American short story author O. Henry (William Sydney Porter" and first published in 1905. We split "The Gift of the Magi" into 16 segments and assigned them to 18 volunteers (14 individuals and 2 couples) to read and record. In the meantime, Bill started arranging Christmas music for the Pandemica Driveway Band, arranging 17 pieces to wrap around the 16 reading segments.
Unfortunately, after we had rehearsed these 17 pieces once, we got spooked by the rapidly increasing COVID case count and decided we could no longer mix horns and vocalists indoors if they were from different households. We came close to giving up at that point, to the extent that we had crafted a message to the readers apologizing for not being able to complete the project and blaming it on the pandemic. After some internal discussions within the band, we decided that we could use smaller groups or individual musicians to record the music. We didn't know how well this would work, so Bill did another 27 more arrangements for various small groups (horn, tuba, and guitar; horn, tuba, and drum set; clarinet and guitar; and vocal and guitar) and the groups and individual musicians recorded their tracks.
By December 4 we had 16 workable reading recordings, 27 workable music recordings, and a plan for how to interleave them. All of this was turned over to our ace drummer and video editor, Jeff Middleton. Jeff stitched the videos together in 3 marathon days and the final 28:46 video was completed.
About 80% of the video recordings were made with Android or Apple smart phones. The remainder were done with laptop (Apple or Microsoft) computers with web cams.
The clarinet/guitar and vocal/guitar recordings are actually a real clarinet or vocalist performing with a computer-rendered guitar backing track.