Reply To: JoCo Looks Back – The Live Performances
OK, I finally finished that video that I mentioned earlier in this thread. As expected, it took longer and turned out worse than expected (and yes, I’m well aware that I just contradicted myself). What I did was to take a video that I had shot of a JoCo live performance, extract the audio, then mix it with the source tracks that JoCo just released.
I’ve never done anything like this before and I have no musical training, so this experiment was mostly about trying something new. It was a bit frustrating, but definitely fun. It’s given me all sorts of ideas for my next project.
I did all the mixing with Audacity (it’s free and it works). I used the the concert audio as well as all the source tracks less the lead vocals and guitar parts. Obviously, since those source tracks weren’t recorded for that concert performance, they were badly out of sync. So I had to make up to 30 micro-edits to each source track to get them all to line up. I started by synchronizing the lead vox track to the concert audio. Even though I wasn’t going to use the lead vox track, I wanted it as a reference: I diligently wrote down every micro-edit that I made to it so that I could have a guide to help me sync up the other tracks. I started to do the same with the guitar1 track, but quickly discovered it was to much for my poor tin ear–and so began my downfall.
Most tracks turned out OK, but I did have troubles with three in particular. The harmonizing vocals were impossible to sync up. Even when I had them timed perfectly (which was no easy task), they drifted off and quite apparently just didn’t fit in. I ended up scrapping that track and not using it. The bass and drums were also a bitch. They came out mostly OK, but even after several hours of tinkering, there are still plenty of sections where they obviously just aren’t lining up right. I could have done a much better job if I’d spent a few more days on it (especially if I followed through on syncing the guitar tracks to the concert audio), but in the end I took the easy route. This was just an experiment, so I took a cue from JoCo and pretended that I had a deadline. I found that if I just muffled the bass and drum tracks a little, then the problems were hardly noticed (or maybe just wishful thinking).
I then used VirtualDub to overdub the new soundtrack onto the video as well as crop it down to 640×360 to take advantage of YouTube’s new 16:9 wide-screen format (make sure to watch in “high quality”).
Anyway, here’s the video. Listening to it on YouTube, I’m hearing a high pitched feedback noise that I didn’t hear before uploading. 🙁 Let me know what you think.
~Javier