I’ve been following Justin for many years (since at least 2009) although I’m sad to say I’ve never been very active in the forums. I don’t consider myself to be a beginner anymore (thanks to Justin), but I’m still very shy about putting my playing out into the world. But, I have a goal to get more comfortable with recording myself and posting videos. This seems like a good place to do it!
This is a pic of my recently updated music space. Clearly, I have a lot more guitars and gear than brains… or talent.
You might be able to guess from my username, that my other hobby is bicycle travel. I’ve ridden all over the US and western Europe as well as a few other countries. Since I retired in 2008, I’ve logged over 50,000 miles (no idea how many miles before that). Bikes and guitars both give me great pleasure!
So, hello to the JustinGuitar Community. And thank you in advance for any encouragement or constructive feedback you may be able to give.
Hi Thomas and welcome!
That’s a hell of a space you’ve got there, I’ve studio envy at that!! I’m also a keen cyclist, off road though so I way near the miles you’ve racked up!
Look forward to hearing more from you, this place is great to share your passion
Hey, hello. Two things, well maybe three. I certainly understand the shyness. Excellent studio space. I am very jealous. And I use to ride bikes around the US so I get that.
I can so very much relate to that. Nice studio. I used to ride my bicycle every day 16km to work. We are traveling around Australia in our RV and when in Albany West Australia met a guy while jamming on my guitar that had bicyled there from Canberra, he said he’d done 17,000km so far in his trip across the continent. Wow. And he slipped a $50 note under my coffee cup to thank me for my tunes.
Hi Thomas,
Welcome and a nice introduction
I hope you can get rid of your shyness, just listen to some posted videos read some comments and then think if you would still find it scary … we are super friendly,. …and wow, what beautiful things you have and super neat…I wish you a lot of fun
Greetings,Rogier
Hi Thomas, welcome to the forum. Nice workspace, seems at if you were quite professional. This is the right place to loose shyness, folks here are so nice and friendly. Take your time, but when you’re ready, don’t hesitate to let us hear your playing. Looking forward to that. Are you of German descent? Your name sounds pretty German
A big Irish welcome for you from me, Thomas
Nice collection of guitars- but hold on… something’s missing
You like to cycle too?
I’ll just leave this here for you
Hi Thomas, welcome to the community. Good you found Justin Guitar to become a better guitarist. If you want to perform for others there’s a section here you can post anything you want to share whenever you feel is the moment for that. Meanwhile you can participate in any topic you feel drawn to.
Now that I’ve actually posted a video in the JG Community, I want to document my recording method. Mostly for myself, as I always seem to forget how I pieced this all together if I’m away from it for awhile. But if it helps someone else, great! I’ll cover hardware (the easy part) first and then tackle the software in a separate post.
The hardware chain begins with one of these (GAS is real) -
Next, a passive direct box. This isn’t really needed to record, but I was looking for a good way to split my signal between a real amp and an audio interface without having to change cabling. I send the line-level output to my interface via XLR cable, and the thru signal to my amp. I suppose I could play through both at the same time, but I haven’t found a need for doing that yet -
Then to my audio interface (a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2) via XLR cable -
For video, I use a Razer Kiyo web cam. I think they’re made for streaming gamers, but it works well for general video recording. It has a nice little ring light that can be adjusted for brightness and is very flexible for positioning, tilt, etc. It can also be mounted to a tripod, if needed. -
And, finally, to my Windows 10 PC
I tried for a long time to record using one of my amps and a microphone, but was never happy with the tone without a lot of work in my DAW. So I switched to using amp sims in the DAW and now I get what I hear in the room which makes my recordings much easier. And amp sims are so good these days, that I would never know the difference.
@TheMadman_tobyjenner Oh, there’s GAS at the end of the chain, too. Just not part of my recording rig. I’m up to four amps now, plus one that I built myself. I may need to seek help for my addiction.
Now for the more challenging part of my recording process - software. It took me a long time to get to a configuration that I thought was easy to use. It wasn’t easy getting it to work like this, at least for me. Note: This is all done on a Windows 10 PC, I’m clueless about how it might be done on a Mac.
I use three main pieces of software:
OBS Studio - free, open-source video recording/streaming software: ( https://obsproject.com/ )
Reaper is the center of my recording set-up. I start with two tracks in a Reaper project, one for the backing track and one for recording my guitar. The amp sim software is loaded into the guitar track as an effect (FX). I also use Reaper to control the OBS video recording process, to edit the video, to add titles, to sync the video to my guitar audio recording and to render the final version into a file that can be posted online.
I found two different sources on YouTube where I learned how to put this together.
Leandro Fachinnetti developed a Reaper script that will control OBS so that you can start and stop video recording at the same time as you start and stop your audio recording in Reaper. Once you stop recording, it automatically loads the video into Reaper on a separate track. The video will be close to ‘in sync’ with the guitar audio track, but not perfect. So you may need to nudge the video to line them up perfectly. He describes the process here: Recording Videos in REAPER (Through OBS) - YouTube
There are a couple of additional installs to make this work.
To use Leandro’s Reaper script, you must add the ReaPack add-on to Reaper. This allows you to install, manage and update scripts from developers like Leandro. It can be found here: https://reapack.com/
For Leandro’s script to work with OBS, an add-on called obs-websocket needs to be installed in OBS. This allows OBS to be controlled by another program.
For OBS version 28.0 and later, OBS-websocket 5 comes with the software. But unfortunately, it is not compatible with some legacy scripts, including Leandro’s. Fortunately, OBS supports having more than one version of OBS-websocket installed. For OBSversion 28.0, you can find obs-websocket-4.9.1-compat here: Releases · obsproject/obs-websocket · GitHub
There are probably as many ways to record audio and video of yourself playing guitar as there are members of the JG Community. This is just my way. I like it because I think it creates a fairly good quality recording without costing a fortune. Reaper only costs $60USD and OBS is free. There are some free amp sims available, or a single Nembrini amp sim can be had for ~$25USD when they are on sale (which is often). The hardware side is a little more expensive if you don’t already have some of the pieces - obviously you need a computer, plus an audio interface and a camera that can be controlled by OBS (i.e. not a cell phone). It takes some work to get it all working together, but once you do, it’s easy and fast to use.
We are traveling around Australia in our RV and when in Albany West Australia met a guy while jamming on my guitar that had bicyled there from Canberra, he said he’d done 17,000km so far in his trip across the continent. Wow. And he slipped a $50 note under my coffee cup to thank me for my tunes.
… we are super friendly,. …and wow, what beautiful things you have and super neat…I wish you a lot of fun 
