Making Original Music Videos Part I: How I did it

Last week when I presented my original music video, I did not go into much detail on how I put this project together, and how I plan on organzing lessons related to this activity for my students.  I guess I was so caught up in actually making the video, that I put all other things aside.  It just goes to show that when you get inspired, it’s kind of hard to stop doing what you’re doing.  So let me briefly outline my own creative process in this project, and then how I plan to transfer this knowledge to my students.

 For the music writing and recording portion of the project, I used a program  called Band in a Box.  This software allows a person to make completely digital music, without having to play a real instrument.  If you know some music basics, such as what notes and chords are, you can use this software pretty easily.  Because I already had my song written, my first task was to write in the chords using the Band in a Box interface.  This was an interesting process for me because I had never really thought about my song in terms of how many beats each chord had per measure and other musical considerations like that.  It took me a little while to figure out how to make my chords change at the appropriate times, but once I understood how to do it, it was relatively easy to type out the entire chordal structure of the song in the interface. 

After I had my chords written out, I then chose a style for my chords to be played in.  Remember that Band in a Box completely digitizes music, so at this point, I hadn’t recorded a single thing into the microphone.  The style option plays the chords that are entered with different types of accompaniment.   You can choose your chords to played in any style you want, ranging from hip hop to country.  I chose my chords to be played in a 70’s Bee Gees disco style.  I just figured that kind of groove would work best in my song.    Now I was ready to record my own instrumentals.

In the interface there is a button that allows you to record live audio.  I didn’t know it then, but there is only one track available in the software.   I recorded my rhythm guitar part first, and it took a few takes to get what I wanted.  Next up were the lead vocals.  It was at this point that I realized there was no second track I could record to using this software.  Basically, I had to record onto my guitar track, and combine the two takes together in a process called overdubbing.  The annoying part about this process is that once the takes are put together, there is no way to change or edit any of the separate parts.  If I just wanted to redo my vocals, it would be impossible; I would have to redo the entire song.  This was annoying, and I spent a while on the phone with pg music trying to get around this problem in other ways.  Unfortunately, the support representative told me that for recording live audio, I was basically using the wrong software, and that he would recommend Power Tracks instead.  Well, I was so caught up in what I was doing that I decided to go forward with the software I had, despite the annoyance.  Maybe not being able to redo sections of my song would force me to play better on the first takes. 

Well, it turns out that I ended up redoing the song a few times before I got a version I could live with.  It seems that there was always something that bothered me about a specific take.  I sang out of key in one part; I swallowed my words in another; the second guitar solo was slightly off beat; the fiddle part wasn’t loud enough; my back up vocal overpowered the lead vocal.  I guess you can always make something better, but sooner or later, you just have to accept what you’ve done as being okay.  Even though I wasn’t entirely satisfied, recording another take probably wouldn’t have helped.  I just would have found another thing to be dissatisfied with.

Now that I had the audio recorded I was ready to convert what I had done to a WAV file so I could then import it into Windows Movie Maker and make my video.  Much to my dismay, the digital part of my song (in essence, what Band in a Box had digitally created from the chords and style I entered) did not transfer to the WAV file.  Only the audio I had recorded myself, into the microphone, came out.  It turns out that in order to transfer the digital music of Band in a Box, you need to buy a separate piece of software called a Roland VSC which converts MIDI files into WAV files.  This was  a bummer, because I felt the digital music added a lot to the sound quality of the song, but at least I had my own audio which I could use in the video.

Over the previous two days I downloaded about a hundred images from google which I felt represented the lyrics and symbolic ideas of my song.  I imported both these images and the music to my song into Windows Movie Maker and was now ready to begin making my video.  Basically, I tried to weave images together which followed the plot to my song during the lyric sections, and which followed the thematic elements of my song during the instrumentals.  I tried to be creative with transitions and effects, speeding up the transitions at some points, blending images at others.  At some point in the process, I realized that the images I had taken with google were not giving me the emotional context I wanted, and I began looking for personal images.  I decided to use images of my family because I felt like the subtext of my song conveyed ideas about the circle of life, and the ways in which we change, yet never truly change at all.

My final task was to change the format of my video from Windows to Apple.  Luckily, I had some good converter software on my computer, and this process wasn’t nearly as tough as I expected.  I simply dragged the movie file into the converter and within five minutes, it was changed to run on itunes.  

All in all this was an incredible experience for me.  I’ve shown this video to both students and friends, and it has been well received.  My students are really excited to begin making their own music videos; they would like to first use one of their favorite songs before attempting an original.  One student wants to use Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton.   In thinking about this specific song, there are just so many ways to use images to interpret both the musical and lyrical content.   Hopefully my students will become as obsessed and inspired by this process as I was.

Jonathan

Coming soon-

Making Original Music Videos Part II: How my students might do it

~ by scrollman on December 3, 2007.