Creating your own audio tracks

B

blboyd

New member
Afternoon all,

I'm starting my voyage into filmmaking with a new Canon 700D. I've built some softboxes for continuous lighting along with a nice backdrop.

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My wife wants to start doing some videos for her company so these videos will be 30-60 minutes and mostly spent in front of a backdrop. Usually one or two people on camera.

I know I can use Creative Commons license and find some great audio tracks but my brother is very talented on a guitar, mandolin, piano, etc.

Where can I find some tutorials on how to create my own audio tracks. I'm looking at a Zoom H4N for my audio purposes... that's about the limit for my budget.

Thanks for any help you can provide!
Brandon
 
Has your brother never recorded any of his music before? Recording music is recording music whether it is for video tracks or not.
Asking "how do I record music" is an impossibly broad question to answer. What microphones do you have?
 
In my opinion, the easiest way to do it is to get an audio interface for your computer with some good preamps. They use USB or FireWire to connect to your computer and provide a clean input path for instrument level (for guitar pickups), mic level or line level, usually with combination XLR and 6.5 mm plugs. They'll also provide phantom power for mics which require it, as well as a headphone output for the musician to monitor himself with. Luckily for you, I'm pretty sure the H4n has this functionality. Make sure you have good, closed ear headphones which won't leak sound back into your mics.

Then, you need some software to do the recording for you. Recently, I've been using Ableton Live but have also had success with Adobe Audition and Apple GarageBand (although GarageBand is frustratingly limited). Other good ones include Apple Logic and Avid ProTools. Some people use the free Audacity but it's quite difficult to get it to work nicely. Don't try to do it inside the H4n, that would be harder than GarageBand, haha.

If you're recording guitar, the last time I tried I was only using its pickup and I didn't really like the sound I got out of it. The next time I do it, I'm going to mix the pickup channel with a condenser mic placed near the sound hole, which should make it sound more natural. You may want to look into using compression, gates and reverb on your signal as well.
 
The question is WAY too broad to answer.

But I will say you should refine it to asking about "music". Music is only one small (well sometimes not so small) element of a film or video's "audio tracks". In a more film centric list you would have confused folks since "music" isn't considered "sound" in the film world. Sound is all the sound except the music, that's why it has it's own awards category.

I would try more music centric forums but you are probable still going to get the too broad issue. If you have the flexibility to cut to the music you could get him to work something up you like that is about the right length and just record him and then cut picture to the recording. Anything more complicated is going to take more than you have.
 
"Audio tracks" is a broad category. What sort of tracks are you intending to create ... dialog, music, sound fx, the final mix, all of the above, what?

It's likely videos done for your wife's company would fall well into the category of 'commercial use.' You need to get familiar with the basics of copyright and licensing surrounding the music you choose. You mentioned Creative Commons but know that there are several different 'flavours' of CC license and not all of them allow commercial use of the material. And if your talented brother performs music for you to record, other than songs that you personally wrote, you'll probably need to license it from the copyright owner.
 
Wow guys... this was alot deeper of a topic than I thought.

Like I said I'm new at this. Guess I didn't have all the lingo down.

To narrow the topic I'm looking for music - not vocals. I need music to fill in the spaces and transitions in between dialog.

What I want to record is basically just audio from the guitar. Instead of purchasing music I can record my brother playing.

Andrew's idea above sounds like what I'm looking for. Thanks guys for the help and I'm sorry for the confusion.

Brandon
 
blboyd said:
Wow guys... this was alot deeper of a topic than I thought.

...

What I want to record is basically just audio from the guitar. Instead of purchasing music I can record my brother playing.

...

Brandon
Click to expand...

It's a matter of who wrote it as well as who plays it. If he plays 'Happy Birthday' on his guitar so you can record it and use it in your videos, you may owe royalties to Warner/Chappel (I believe they are the current copyright owner on that melody, though there has been some recent legal debate over that specific song). What you need is called royalty-free production music and there are a number of sources you can google online. A library I like is Smartsound's SonicFire Pro music library - a wide variety of royalty-free reasonably-priced production music and their software allows for remixing and customizing as to mood, length, etc. Take a look at http://www.smartsound.com/. This is just one of many sources of production music that you can easily license and legally use in your productions without breaking the bank.
 
Yes this is much deeper than you thought. You are asking such a simplistic question about such a complex topic, we hesitate to even begin.
Recording music is more difficult than making talking head videos if you want it to sound professional and presentable.

Even audio for talking head video production is not trivial. Do you have that worked out already?
What mic(s) are you using? How? What are you recording to? Even high-end DSLRs are not considered competent for good audio recording.

A simple solo guitar or piano track can be recorded with minimal equipment and simply edited into your video production.
But when you start combining multiple instruments, and especially if your brother is going to play them "together" (by means of synchronized multi-track over-dub), then you would appear to be in over your head.

If your brother wants to get into the recording game, he wouldn't be the first (or the millionth) musician to start playing with home recording.
But it is hard to imagine how you can devote enough time to doing decent video productions while learning multi-track audio production from scratch.

Just as this (and similar) forums are available to help people with video production, there are similar forums for audio production.
But you could easily spend all your time learning how to record decent music tracks by trial and error and have no time for video.

If you already had several months or years of practice recording your brother, then it would seem reasonable to want to use your own recorded music for your video productions.
But you are trying to bite off two complete mouth-fulls and you are in danger of choking.

Remember also that even if your brother performs and you record a song which is owned by someone else, you will have a potentially difficult and expensive problem trying to license it.
That is another reason production music is so popular. Because you can acquire a "buyout license" for a very reasonable price.
 
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