Rev Gav
The Greatest Gift
Podcast Transcript
On December the 18th, 2024, I woke from a dream in which I was playing the piano for a folk concert where I was asked to play Number 49 in a book of folk songs. It had the title, ‘Tina’, and as I couldn’t sight-read music, I read the score slowly and picked out the melody, and by the time the concert had finished I had finally worked out the tune! In my dream I decided I needed to remember the music, and so took the book of folk tunes away with me. When I woke in the early hours, feeling rather groggy, I stumbled out of bed and into the living room where I recorded a voice note. Here is the original voice note from that night.
[Voice Note]
I then went back to bed, and as I lay there, the rest of the tune came to me. I grabbed the laptop and quickly recorded an instrumental piano version of the song, calling it ‘Ditty’. Yep, an original name huh? I put the song out far and wide to see if anyone recognised it, and lots of people said, “Yes!” but had no idea from where. Here is Ditty, since renamed!
[Ditty]
A very busy Christmas came and went, and my wife Helen and I were gifted a wonderful three nights break from Boxing Day at a local resort. During our stay, again, as I lay in bed, rather than the formal piano tune, I began to swing the tune in my head and decided it would make a wonderful Christmas song, and so I began to pen some Christmas lyrics, and by the end of the stay they were pretty much finished! The title was ‘The Greatest Gift of All’ which has since been shortened to ‘The Greatest Gift’.
Once home, I made a start on programming the backing music in Logic Pro and once this was done, thought it would be great to make a Christmas video, and as all the Christmas decorations were still up in the church, decided that this would make a wonderful location.
On the backing track was a simple bell part. It went like this:
[Bell part]
The local church had a set of bell chimes and I thought it would work well in the video for some members of the church to mime the bell part using the chimes. I scored up the bell part, found some volunteers, and on Thursday 2nd January we rehearsed, playing along with the track. The chimes sounded really great, and so decided to replace my synth bell part with the real thing, however, the chimes were old, and some didn’t play well, and others rang for shorter or longer lengths of time, and so I set about sampling the chimes, and including them in the track.
[Chimes]
We set the video recording date for the evening of 5th January and put a shout out for volunteers to come along. I invited a cellist, violinist, and a trombonist. I finished recording and editing the vocal line that afternoon, just in time for me to sing along with at the filming!
At 6pm that night, the volunteers gathered in St. Mark’s Church and we spent an hour allocating roles, working out who would do what, and rehearsing the choreography. We then filmed the whole thing in under an hour! Not quite a flash mob but pretty close!
Once I knew who in the cast was singing, on Thursday 9th January, I recorded each singer individually for the coda. I then spent hours editing their vocal lines to time and tune with my own vocal, and also edited the video, adding the lyrics produced using Affinity photo editing software — a very time consuming task! The final audio and video was released on Monday 13th January! Here is the final version.
