Recording options

Gear & Tools Talk 💻 Hardware, Software & Recording
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@UncleGreggy

I’ve started a new thread as this was under the ‘Worried life Blues’ BLIM thread and I suspect there could be a lot of opinions about this. I didn’t want to dilute that thread. Also, this is visible to non-BLIMers.

There’s a lot of topics already about this subject in the forum, and I know you’ve already done some searching, but here’s my thoughts on the subject…

Recording yourself is a really big deal, and you will get a lot out of it, so I try and do it a lot for my own personal use. Sometimes I’ll share the videos here.
Most of the time I want ‘quick and dirty’, I don’t want to spend time setting up equipment and editing videos when I’d rather be playing guitar. I know that there are plenty of people in the community that really enjoy the process and use a lot of different tools to create some great videos with wonderful audio and multiple angles etc. That’s great, but it’s not really my bag … maybe I’ll go down that rabbit hole one day.

I’m going to give you 4 options that I use from simplest to most complex.

  1. Just using my iphone. Propped up against a coffee cup. Captures all room sounds, works ok particularly for acoustic guitar
    https://youtu.be/p8qhLvVK-V0
  2. Webcam into Quicktime on my Mac. Better quality video (although this clip needed to be less than 10mb so it’s 480 resolution), mic perhaps a little better (I use a Anker PowerConf C200 - cost about 50 quid and will do 2k). I use the mic on the webcam. Again records all room sound,
    https://youtu.be/VteE8ryAg4I
  3. Using my focusrite 2i2 with separate guitar and vocal. Guitar DI’ed from my QuadCortex and vocals from Sure SM58. Captures very little room noise as the guitar is DI and vocal is a dynamic mic. Capturing audio and video simultaneously in Quicktime https://youtu.be/azOJIA64PcQ
  4. Capturing video on iphone and recording audio into Garageband. This requires much more post production as I need to combine audio and video in iMovie (or similar). Gives me much more control over everything, but take much longer to set up and create. https://youtu.be/Dgz_RxuPEsQ

Personally I think any of these option will create recordings good enough to share in the community, if you enjoy the process you can get as complex as you like. These days I mostly use options 1 and 2 because I’m lazy and would rather play guitar than fiddle with recording kit.

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Thank you so much.

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:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: not wrong Paul :+1:

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In my case I’ve shared a few videos of me practicing and I’ve just recorded using my iPhone. Unless you need a professional quality recording a modern smartphone will be plenty good enough. Once you get into separate mics and stuff, with extra software you might end up spending more time tinkering with that setup than playing guitar!

As I’ve mentioned on another thread related to this, probably the best way to improve the quality of a video is to improve the lighting wherever you record. Shooting in a badly lit room, one that’s too dark or has harsh lighting will look bad whether you record on a smartphone or $5000 of specialist hardware.

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Breaking it down to four options is really helpful to those of us just starting to make these videos! One question: I’m going with option #4, but find iMovie very non-intuitive. I managed to struggle through making my first video, but was it slow, painful and inefficient. There’s got to be a better way! Any recommendations for iMovie tutorials aimed specifically at this application of the software? Thanks!

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Me too. I’d also be interested in suggestions for better editors…particularly for iPads.

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Davinci Resolve has an app for iPad which I believe @sairfingers has been using and quite a few folk on here use the free windows version.

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Yes I use DaVinci Resolve on my iPad. It’s free and it’s a very powerful program. I use it in a very basic way, simple editing and creating titles, but of course the learning curve depends on how much time you want to spend on it. There are loads of tuition videos online.

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