Monday Drum Day: Getting scientific

I have made a few song videos for participating in the monthly collaborations in the Drumeo drum school. This month the parent group Musora expanded it to include their other schools for piano, guitar and singing. There is also a bass one coming soon. I do have some access to lessons in all of these, but have concentrated on drums for the last couple of years. The song for this month is The Scientist by Coldplay. It is a fairly simple song and the drum part is pretty basic, so I thought I could have a go at doing a full arrangement. I do not really play piano and did not have time to do bass this time.

I have done a couple of videos where I played two instruments, but this was a bit more complex. The guitars and vocal were recorded using Audacity with the original song as a reference. I need to synchronise with that for the Musora people to edit me in with all the others. Previously they did not seem to mind you including a drumless backing track, but this time they wanted it without to make the mixing easier. The drums were recorded on my new Yamaha EAD10 system. I did try adding some extra beats, but it may have been better without. It is actually quite hard to keep in time with such a slow song and I had to make small adjustments.

I make no claims to be a great singer, but nobody has told me to stop yet. This song goes quite high, so it was challenging. I ought to do some lessons to get more control. I messed up a few lines, but then I did not do many takes.

All the video was recorded on my phone and then had to be synchronised to the audio in the Kdenlive video editor. I could use the phone audio waveforms to line it up and then apply a transform to each video track to show them all together. The problem I found then was that playback in the preview was very choppy as the computer struggled to process it all in real time. My PC is a few years old and may need more memory. I did some searching around and learned about proxy clips where you generate lower quality video for the preview. That improved it a bit. Then it took an hour or more to render the final file. The first time I did that it would not play back, so I tried a different format.

In the end I spent a few hours putting this all together. It is a lot easier when you just record audio without worrying about video as well. I plan to do more recording with drums now that I have a decent system for it. I also have the option of my Roland e-drums, but the acoustic set sounds good. I have a new head for the snare drum that I need to fit. I have not changed one before, so I shall be looking up tips for that.

Rock on!