Well, here goes nothing! I have entered a live version of The Night Wrecker into the 2026 NPR Tiny Desk Contest. Here’s hoping the folks at National Public Radio are really jazzed up about a tow-truck themed rockabilly song.

Making the video was quite a complex endeavor that pushed my production skills beyond the limit and almost broke my laptop. Literally. The free trial of FinalCut Pro I downloaded caused an epic meltdown on my MacBook Air that took hours of troubleshooting to resolve. Not very rock and roll! In the end I deleted the software and was able to cobble the video together using GarageBand and iMovie. iMovie only supports a split screen of two videos at a time, so I had to create multiple split screen videos and then stack them. For the actual recordings, I used my standard audio equipment (Shure SM57, Shure SM58, Focusrite Scarlett 4i4). Since I needed video instead of audio, I plugged them into my iPhone rather than my laptop. The only issue was that the iPhone only recorded one channel of stereo, which I had to fix post production.

The musical equipment was essentially identical as in the studio version of The Night Wrecker, although I switched the amp to the Swart STR-Tremolo pictured in the video. It’s a new acquisition I will hopefully eventually review. It has a great 1950s tweed sound. I also sang through my cheap public address speaker via the MXR Carbon Copy Mini to try and get some slap back delay going. (A less elegant approach than what I did for the studio take).

My conclusion is that it is possible to create a video in which you play every instrument live, one take at a time. But wow, what a pain!