Guest blog post by Hera Hub’s founder, Felena Hanson.
The Hera Hub San Diego team loves to get out of the office and do things that test our limits. For me that is singing. I’m a downright terrible singer… no really… even cats go running for cover when they hear me sing! What’s funny is my mom, Yetta, has a beautiful voice. She has been singing professionally pretty much all her life.
Regardless… I felt we needed a team theme song, so I reached out to a long-time Hubette, Rachel Kowaski of Freewave Productions, to see if she knew any sound engineers who might be willing to entertain our idea of creating a custom song. Rachel graciously connected us with David Helpling of DHM Music Design in North County San Diego – http://dhmmusicdesign.com.
It turns out David had never been asked to do anything like this, but was game to try it!
So we drove up to his beautiful studio on a Monday afternoon to co-create a song. None of us claimed to have any musical talent (with the exception of Amy, who had played drums in grade-school). Ha! That wasn’t going to get us very far. 😉
But with the invention of looping and Auto-Tune, David got our band together in just a few hours!
We first each stepped up to an electronic instrument (keyboard, drums, etc) and played a short riff, which was edited and looped. We then each, reluctantly, got in front of the mic. We had absolutely no game-plan on what we were going to sing! But with the power of play and willingness to improv, we finally landed on reciting our core values… each of us singing a couple and then ad-libbing a few other phrases.
After a lot of laughs and a glass of wine (OK… maybe a couple), we recorded enough to apparently make it work… David assured us. A few more hours in the studio (and I’m sure massive amounts of Auto-Tune) and out comes our anthem! Pretty amazing that David was able to take little pieces and make them into an actual song! In my opinion he is a magician!
It was not only a ton of fun, it was also a really great bonding/team building experience. Nothing brings people together more than stepping out of one’s comfort zone and laughing your butt off!
Get a further glimpse at what happened the behind the scenes 😉