because Sydney mentioned in a stream once that she wanted a Hit Clip of her music
(made for Sydney in October 2021)
Long story of how I discovered Sydney Sprague:
Third Eye Blind came to my college in 2010. My friends were going to the show, so I came along, despite only knowing the hits.
The band that opened for them, Alpha Rev, caught my attention with their electric blue electric violin, and quickly became my favorite band.
In 2015, my partner and I went to see Alpha Rev, and the band that opened for them ended up becoming my new favorite band (Jared and the Mill).
When the pandemic hit in 2020, I started following Jared and the Mill on Twitch, because Jared was doing regular streams playing music and just chilling with the Twitch chat. I enjoyed chatting with everyone so much that I joined the Discord. I soon discovered that a lot of the same people also frequented the Discord and Twitch chats of Jared's friend Sydney Sprague, who also is a musician.
I had nothing better to do with my time (pandemic) and loved hanging out with this crowd and also enjoyed listening to Sydney playing music, so I made sure to catch every stream I could.
Sydney's music is modern but her general vibe and the songs she likes to cover are '00s pop/punk, and she loves anything that's in that aesthetic. One time during a stream, she mentioned Hit Clips, the short-lived precursor to ipods, and made an off-hand comment that it would be cool to have her music on a Hit Clip.
For those of you who are unaware, I will explain what Hit Clips were:
Imagine, if you will, you are a young teenager who wants to listen to the latest music any time you want. However, you are living in the early aughts - the internet is still in its infancy, and the only way you can listen to music on the go is by carrying around a bulky walkman or portable CD player. Hit Clips were not only portable, but they were cool. They definitely were not the best way to listen to music - most Hit Clips only played 30 or 60 seconds of a song (an edit of the song that specifically showcased the best/most popular parts of the song), and they were absolutely terrible quality. But everyone thought they were cool, so they were a popular fad for a short amount of time, before ipods became the norm. I personally never had a Hit Clip, but I knew people who did and I listened to some songs on them at least once. There were Hit Clips for nearly every single one of the most popular songs of the time: So many of the songs on Hit Clips were so good that they're still popular today - songs like All Star, A Thousand Miles, and Oops!... I Did It Again.
Sydney's nostalgic desire to have her own music featured on a Hit Clip made me wonder if bringing this dream to life was even possible. I soon discovered that later in the life of Hit Clips, they paired with Yahoo and created a recordable Hit Clip cartridge, on which you could store up to two minutes of audio, and play on any Hit Clip cartridge player!
I soon found a bunch of them, brand new and unopened on ebay, for really not that much money ($25), and decided to follow though and make this dream come true.
Shortly after I bought the recordable Hit Clip, a friend from the server messaged me with another link to a recordable Hit Clip, remarking how they really weren't that expensive, so I let them in on my plan!
The package finally arrived, and it remarkably seemed brand new - like this had been sent to me directly from the '00s. It came in a Hasbro-branded box and had a Toys-R-Us price tag sticker on it.
I carefully opened up the packaging in a way that would let me easily put it back together later - cutting it only along the edges where a reseal wouldn't be particularly obvious.
And then I started playing around with it - seeing how it worked and what I could do with it! I quickly realized that once the song has been recorded onto the Hit Clip, there is zero volume control - the volume of the song recorded onto the Hit Clip is entirely dependent on the volume of the song that you're playing as it records. This is important, because, as I stated before, the sound quality on Hit Clips is terrible. And if it's too loud, it sounds even worse. And somehow I was unable to adjust the input volume using my computer's volume control, but adjusting the volume in iTunes adjusted the input volume just fine.
Plus the device was a little finicky - it seemed to only record when it decided it was receiving enough input, so you'd have to start playing your song and watch the light on the device - if it was blinking, it was still listening for input, and if the light was on and steady, it was recording. It received input through an audio jack; I was unable to get it to work plugged into my iPod or my phone via a USB-C dongle (I really miss having an audio jack on my phone), but it worked most of the time plugged into my computer.
Another thing I noticed is that there's a nice spot on the cartridge for some art:
My plan was to make a cover that looks like the other Hit Clip song covers - with the artist's name, a song name, and an image relevant to the song/artist:
Looking closer at this image of Hit Clips, I realized that not only are Hit Clip songs abridged versions of their songs, but the covers on the Hit Clips are also abridged versions of their album covers!
Compare these with the art for the All Star single and Sammie's From the Bottom to the Top (which includes the song I Like It):
So when I was considering album art for Sydney's Hit Clip, I had originally been considering one of these options:
The album art for Maybe I Will See You at the End of the World - the album I'd be taking a song from
The image from this "90s fangirl" t-shirt, because it was specifically designed to look like album art from this era
The cover art for the single of the song I was using, which at the time was steve
But then I discovered this image on Sydney's Facebook page:
I felt like it was perfect, because it captured the vibe of MIWSYATEOTW while still feeling like an abridged version of that cover - with a much stronger focus on the artist, much like the other Hit Clip covers I had found.
I found a version of the Sydney Sprague logo that had a clear background, and used that to add her name to the image, and used a more generic gothic font that looked fairly similar to write "steve":
I still had yet to get steve to sound ok playing on the Hit Clip, though - the song starts off with a powerful, loud guitar part that really pulls you into the song, but also sounds truly awful on a Hit Clip. The chorus also contains similar sounds, so it really wouldn't be a matter of clipping that section out.
Unrelated to this project, my friend from the server let me know that they actually had an audio recording of an unreleased song that we both loved, from the one time Sydney had played an early version of the recorded song for us on stream. They hesitantly sent me a copy because they knew I'd like it and that I hypothetically had the same opportunity to record it that they did. Just for fun, I tried putting this song on the Hit Clip and it was amazing. I felt like I was instantly transported to the aughts, listening to a song that I couldn't hear anywhere else on this tiny crappy speaker. The recording was already poor quality, so putting it on the Hit Clip made it just sound like any other song on a Hit Clip. We didn't want to get Sydney in trouble with her label, so we decided that as much as it felt perfect to have this particular song on the Hit Clip, I needed to go with a different song. My friend, however, decided that it would be more ok if they were the one who gave Sydney a Hit Clip with that song on it, since Sydney was already aware that they sometimes ripped audio from streams.
My next choice of songs was another single off MIWSYATEOTW: object permanence. This song was ideal for the Hit Clip because not only did it have a slightly gentler sound, but it also was just over two minutes long - which means I didn't need to change the song much to get it to completely fit on the recordable Hit Clip! I sped the song up just a tad, to the point where you can't even really tell it's sped up (especially with the distortion in sound on the Hit Clip itself), but it fits completely on the Hit Clip, minus a few of the final notes.
Now that I had a recording I was happy with, it was time to work on the art for the Hit Clip. I ultimately ended up with this:
I also created some art for my friend to use for their Hit Clip:
The final version had the song's name on the right side in the same gothic font but I'm omitting that from this post because the song still has yet to be officially released.
And now time for the Hit Clip package art! I was keeping the same packaging from the recordable Hit Clip, but I wanted to modify the art to look more like a more traditional Hit Clip, like this one:
Here was my sketch of what the final product would look like:
I used my scanner to get a digital version of the packaging:
And used GIMP to make modifications!
I added the album art and removed the text in the center:
I grabbed this from the image of the Hit Clip I found online, and grabbed the "2" from the text that used to be in the yellow section:
And cleaned it up, changing the color of the 2 and straightening the purple box:
And added it to the packaging:
And I removed more text from the main part of the packaging:
I grabbed this from the Hit Clip image, and cleaned it up/straightened it out:
And added that as well:
I grabbed this song art from the image, and put my Sydney song art on top:
Then removed the middle section that still had the Madonna art, and added the swoosh back in:
And added that to the packaging:
[image temporarily missing because I've run out of space on this site]
I grabbed this from the image:
And this from the packaging:
And put them together, changing the colors to match:
Ending up with this (I grabbed the "A", "N", and "D" from "DOWNLOADER"):
Added it to the packaging:
[image temporarily missing because I've run out of space on this site]
I did a print test in black and white to make sure everything fit correctly:
And then started printing everything out!
Side by side before and after:
Here's the Hit Clip with the song art on it - printed on sticker paper:
I put it all in the packaging, and hot-glued the package closed.
I printed out the stickers for my friend's Hit Clip, and put them in an envelope along with some other stickers I printed just for them (using the Sydney Sprague Twitch emojis), and l put them in an envelope for me to give to Sydney along with my Hit Clip. My friend was attending the concert the day after the concert I was going to, so the plan was for me to give the envelope to Sydney, who would then give the envelope to my friend, who would then give Sydney their Hit Clip after attaching the stickers :)
Along with the Hit Clip I made, I also found this unopened "Girls of Rock" pack that has Hit Clips for Michelle Branch - All You Wanted, Vanessa Carlton - A Thousand Miles, and Avril Lavigne - Sk8er Boi, which was just too perfect to pass up. Sydney absolutely loves Avril Lavigne, and she named her band van VANessa Carlton. I also got a basic player to go with it, which came with Britney Spears - Stronger... not realizing that the "Girls of Rock" pack would also be shipped with a player. So here's the whole stash of Hit Clip items I ended up giving her:
And Sydney loved it! She said it was the best gift anyone had ever given her :)
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