Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Vittorio Viarengo who has more than 30 years of experience in building and leading world-class product management, engineering and marketing teams tuned to succeed in fast growing markets. Vittorio currently serves as the Vice President of Cloud Marketing at VMware where he drives the go to market, thought leadership and demand generation activities for the fast-growing VMware cloud business.
He has many passions - including one as a master baker. Here he focuses on one of his other passions - helping amateur musicians produce professional quality music. More specifically he describes the production of this ensemble which brought together 30 VMware employees playing and singing virtually across 10 countries. The final product presented here looks so easy, but Vittorio describes the effort and passion that he and the team put into producing this inspiring video:
"I am originally from Genoa in Italy and while I got a degree in music from the local conservatory, I ended up with a career in a completely different field - technology. However, music has always remained a passion of mine. I sang in the VMware band, Elastic Sky, in my first stint here from 2009-2012. I returned to the company this April and Sanjay Poonen, the Chief Operating Officer approached me about an idea to inspire, unite and motivate employees during the pandemic quarantine. He plays the piano, he has a huge passion for blues music and wanted to record a soulful version of “This little light of mine” using a virtual band of employees. He wrote the lyrics and recommended the names of the musicians around the world. He knew many of them, and others heard of the project and asked to join us. At the end of the video you see credit to each contributor.
Knowing my musical background, he asked me to coordinate the production. I call it "il mio primo progetto", my first deliverable in my second time back at VMware. This is what he gave me to start (click on the image to enlarge font)
He thought we could do it using a popular mobile app but I knew that would not scale beyond 9 musicians. As I describe to Vinnie in the video below, I ended up using SoundTrap.com for distributed audio recording, Apple Logic Pro for audio post-production and Adobe Premier for video editing.
For the audio recording we used SoundTrap.com, which is a simple cloud-based recording service. To prepare everyone, I wrote instructions and recorded a couple of video tutorials. That's all the prep they had - we did not do any rehearsals.
I put the original song in the top track, which I lowered from the original key. I brought it down to G from B flat. Then each musician and singer added their track and sang/played over it. SoundTrap took care of keeping it all together in one place so that I could monitor progress from afar and download the various tracks for post-production at the end.
For the audio post-production I used Apple Logic Pro, a very powerful professional sound editing tool.
I downloaded the individual tracks that these 30 amateur musicians recorded around the world using their laptop microphone on SoundTrap.com and uploaded them into Logic Pro. Then, I cleaned up the background noises and took some of the voices to create additional third and fifth harmonies. There were multiple people who played the same instrument, so I had to make some choices and tradeoffs, while being fair in terms of exposure for everybody. Finally, I adjusted the various volumes and remixed the whole thing.
I ended up with 47 tracks!! Definitely the biggest music project I have ever produced.
For the video production, I used Adobe Premier.
I had the 30 videos of my colleagues singing and playing instruments recorded with their mobile phones. I used Premier to sync them. Next I followed Sanjay's vision to structure the video, starting with acapella solos, then the band, male voices, female voices, the guitar solos and the final ensemble that features 25 employees all on screen at the same time. I used a fake Zoom screen background to give the whole thing a Zoom call feel.
It was great to see our CEO Pat Geisinger sing the first verse. He works nonstop - wakes up at 4 am and I was so pleased and inspired he made time for this. Sanjay, of course,was very involved as producer, musician and singer, contributing, reviewing, providing feedback throughout the process. All the singers and musician enthusiastically embraced this project and given we were all amateur musicians, distributed across the world, using nonprofessional recording gear, the end result is pretty remarkable.
The passion and participation in this project reflects well on the internal culture of VMware. We launched the video at an all-hands virtual meeting we have been holding as everyone works from home. The video has had thousands of views and we have received a number of complimentary notes. People within and outside the company were touched, inspired, motivated by the team spirit that we exhibit in the song. Everybody who has viewed it has got a "lift".
What I love about this whole experience is that it shows off two things: the unifying power of the universal language of music, and the great collaborative culture within VMware. I am personally obsessed with good corporate cultures and I think this shows.
How can we improve on this performance? As Sanjay said "we will have to do it live." Maybe at the next physical VMWorld event when we are comfortable flying again?
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