Recording LIT “my own worst enemy”

Morning all.

First off id like to start by sharing a quote that arrived in my inbox this morning, “The only place you find success before work is in the dictionary” May V.Smith. I think this is definitely a quote to live by. What do you think?

Above is my latest Video Drum Cover of Lit’s “my own worst enemy”. I had a lot of fun playing this song. It was released in March 1999, Just as I was going through the exam stage at my secondary school, (Seems like a lifetime ago now) and thus holds strong memories for me. As it was my favourite song of the time.

It is a fairly easy song to play (I have improvised a few of the fillings), but as I said before so much fun. As you will hear in the recordings I’m not 100% in time all the way through. But it was a spur of the moment thing. With only 1 run through recorded. Was just a bit of fun on a day when I didn’t have that much on.

My Recording Process

In this Blog I’m not going to go through the equipment I use. I will do another couple of Blogs about that as there is a lot to be said about all the aspects of my recording equipment. Instead I will explain about the process of actions used to record this video and the subsequent problems encountered.

Step 1. I First make sure all the equipment is turned on and working/ Picking up a signal. I then move on to setting up the initial video recording equipment. Which in this case is a iphone 3gs. This is a gr8 piece of equipment in general, The only down side is the video it captures isn’t the best. It can be a tad grainy when the eventual video is produced (As you can see from the video).

I normally use a iphone 4, but as this was one of those on the spot things. I only had my phone available.

Step 2. I check that the drum kit looks good and everything is were it needs to be and make sure my ipod has the right track on it. It is very important (as I found out early on making recordings) to make sure the track you use to play along to is the same as the one you eventually use in the final mix. It turns out that not all studio recorded tracks are at the same speed when they are used on other CD’s, I.e. compilation tracks. As you can guess this makes it impossible to match the drumming track with the original music. I also learnt that playing to streaming music has the same affect :-S

Step 3. (the MAGIC) Set everything to record and start playing J (a nice simple step)

Step 4. Gather all the types of media recorded. Drum Track and Video and then put them all together with a copy of the original track I played along too, I then start importing them into windows Movie Maker to start the process. The problem with this software is that you can only add 1 Audio and 1 Video track at a time. Not only very inconvenient but I also learnt leads to other issues latter on that cannot be resolved.

Step 4 a. The first thing I do is take the Drum audio track and get it in time with the video. Then mute the audio track associated with the video leaving just the video and the sound recorded by the drum mic’s. As I said earlier you can only use 1 video track and audio track at the same time, which leaves no room for the actual Music Track L so I export the video and drum track as 1 complete video.

Step 4 b. I then take that video and import it back into windows Movie Maker, Which means the drums and video are now on 1 track leaving space for the original music track J I then align the 2 (realising that I didn’t have much volume to work with from the first video), and added in start and finishing slides. Happy Days track finished.

Well that’s what I thought

As I said combining the 2 lead me to other problems (I had never done this before, this was the first time using my new Mic’s). As I listened to it back it didn’t sound like my original drum recording at all. It was very tinny with no BOOM to the tom’s. It sounded very flat and well crap. This is when I realised my error. When I made the initial video combining the drum track and video to import into the 2^nd stage it had compressed the audio track distorting the sound completely and giving me the problem with volume I stated above. Then when I finalised the video exporting the final finished track. It once again compressed the tracks, which gives it the awful tinny sound you can hear.

What did I do?

Unfortunately nothing could be done. Other than that I have now purchased a new piece of software to place together and edit my video, which now gives me 16 full tracks to play with. What is the software called I hear you say? Its CyberLink PowerDirector 8 Deluxe brought for a grand total of £10 reduced from £40 on Amazon.co.uk

As soon as I’ve got to grips with the new software ill post a review on it.

If you would like to hear the original drum track in its full Boomy glory please let me know and ill get it on here for you to listen to.

Thanks for Reading. Questions and comments always welcome.

Update 23/6/11

My softwear arived yesterday. So hopefully gona get chance to mess with it before I go away.