Homebrewed Music

I hear Mac users have it easy when it comes time to edit their Look At Me Play Guitar videos – their free iMovie application handles trimming heads and tails, syncing external audio, and rendering high quality video. Until recently those of us in PC land have either opened our wallets, struggled with the Microsoft offering, or struggled with some open source alternatives.

Lately, though, things have changed a bit. For folks with a big hardware budget and a willingness to learn, DaVinci Resolve is available as a free download. Hitfilm Express is also available for free. And good old Shotcut has either gotten more solid, or I’ve finally absorbed enough to avoid crashing. (more…)

The video forums and sites I visit go in a lot of different directions, but one of the most consistent points they make is the importance of audio in video. Those of us shooting “look at me play guitar” videos actually have it easy compared to folks doing documentaries or dramatic films, because we usually don’t mind having the microphone(s) visible in the shot, but since we’re showing off our music we really need the audio to shine. For acoustic players like me that means using microphones. The natural sound of the acoustic guitar just doesn’t come across with any pickup system I’ve found yet, so learning to position mics for a compelling recording is a big part of making a satisfactory video. (more…)

Those folks at IK Multimedia have figured out how to trigger my impulse buy urge and they did it again with the iRig Acoustic Stage. The iRig Acoustic is a sound-hole mounted MEMS mic that plugs into a smartphone. The Stage version comes with an MEMS mic and a preamp/mixer. This Stage preamp offers tone control, anti-feedback, and the ability to mix an external source. (more…)

I read lots of posts by guitar players and other performers who want to shoot video of themselves performing. They want decent quality video with decent or better audio, usually on a budget. And they usually don’t want to embark on a technical education project or take up a new hobby, they just want to point and shoot and play. (more…)

I’ve shot a few self-duet vidoes over the last few years, playing both sides using different tunings or instruments or just having a lead with accompaniment. It took me a few years to figure out the tricks that make this kind of video work, but with some careful staging and framing of the shoot and a powerful NLE (Non-linear Editor) for the editing the process is actually pretty simple.

I’ve gotten requests to do a tutorial on self-duets, and happily REAPER video features have advanced enough to make self-duet edits a snap, so I set up in the living room and played through my old favorite, Salomila, on the slack key guitar with `ukulele accompaniment. And I did a tutorial video as I went through the process of editing a self-duet video in REAPER. (more…)

LAMPG – Look at Me Play Guitar – is certainly not the most absurd video genre we find on YouTube, but then that’s not a very high barrier, is it? For those of us who are not stars already, most of our videos will get only a handful of hits, make no money, and bring us no recognition, fame, or even infamy. But with all this I still find it more fun to make a good video than a bad one, so I’m always trying to learn to make these little movies better. (more…)

In my comparison of the Sony HDR-MV1 to the Zoom Q4 I noted that the Zoom comes with wind protection in the form of a rather effective hairy windsock. This feature gives the Zoom a clear win over the Sony for outdoor recordings using the built-in mics. (more…)

The digital camera market is so vigorous that it seems like every niche gets exploited. There are even video cameras aimed at musicians of all people. I call them “music cameras” and the basic idea is a small, light, simple camera with fairly high quality stereo audio. (more…)