How I took footage from band practice, cut it up for parts, and turned it into a song.
I filmed my band Lorenzo's Music working on an idea for a song one night during a two-hour practice session.
The key thing about this idea that made it all work is that we had a click track running the entire night.
A click track ran the whole time even when we weren't playing
We had headphones placed around the studio and the click track was constantly running whether we were talking or actually playing it was always running. So that way no matter what ideas we played throughout the night, whatever parts that we came up with whatever lines I chose to use in the finished video they would still work with each other.
Because of the click track when I placed them side by side in the video editor they were easy to match up and cut.
How I filmed it using a private Facebook group
So here's what I did. I came out to our studio one day and showed the guys just an eight-bar idea that I had on the keyboard.
We have a private Facebook group and we just stream live to that when we practice. We can download that video later on and edit it.
We set a click track and recorded the entire time. We just jammed on the song idea, came up with different ideas, and we switched up the instruments we played as we tried out different things for the song.
Recorded backup audio on a Zoom recorder
Luckily we were recording audio as well using a Zoom audio recorder that was in the room.
Something was wrong with the camera we used and when I played back the video footage from that it had some weird noise in the background.
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| Zoom H2n Portable Recorder |
So like I said, luckily we recorded the audio as well.
Taking parts of the video I like and piecing them together in the video editor
I looped different sections from the actual live session in the timeline of my video editor. I use a free and open-source video editor called KDEnlive.
The intro is me showing the four bars to Rob our drummer on guitar which actually happens 52 minutes into the original recording.
The Verse. Then the main verse is a loop of Rob laying down the drum track that I caught from the video that happened 23 minutes into the video.
Break Part. When I was editing from the recorded session there was this little break I wanted to have that happened 19 minutes into the session. It's just our bass player Cliff goofing around still following the click that we can hear through the headphones.
Shuffle Beat. Then we get to this little shuffle beat that I kind of liked and I looped that a few times. This part happened 15 minutes into the live stream.
Warble Drop. To get out of that rocking part I take this little section where Cliff is playing a midi bass. It actually plugs into a midi controller it has a bunch of weird effects to it and he had been messing around with it. You can push on it and it starts making weird electronic noises and that's what this section is.
Layering two different parts of the video for the end of the song
In the last part of the video, I started layering different parts from the live stream in the video editor.
I layered the standing drum part Rob did in the beginning and then the part when Rob was playing a solo guitar line.
All these guitar parts that rob's doing on the guitar part are just him messing around to the click track, not the backing track I layered. And on both of the video clips, Cliff is keeping the bass line going.
So I took like four different sections from that guitar solo and used those for the ending part of the song.
I kind of liked that we were able to create an entire song out of a two-hour session.
The band didn't even know that I was bringing this to the table and we were able to cut it up and turn it into a song later on.
Listen to more songs on Spotify
Check out more songs by my band
Lorenzo's Music (Experimental Rock)
