Here’s the best way to video record a music performance, be it guitar, piano or any live band. The tips can be applied to music videos as well. It’s important that not just the video, but also the audio gets captured nicely, just in case you decide to upload it on YouTube to share with the world.
Do you or someone in your family play any music instrument? Are you a singer and/or a guitar or piano player? Are you a music teacher or part of any music band that performs regularly?
Did you ever feel that you should be recording videos of your music related activities and sharing it with others? Or may be shoot a music video itself?
If you have, here’s how to go about it.
Easy to Make Videos
It would be really cool to make videos of your special talents and upload to YouTube.
You could do that to educate others or even to showcase your talent.
In fact, you can even do it for others, even if you are not any musician. You might already know people who do live music performances at local venues, and would be interested if someone could take videos of them and upload it to several sites. You could even get paid for doing this, and at same time honing your skills.
But then what sort of video equipment would one need; something that records not just good video but also retains the good audio quality? And without having to spend lots of money?
Consumer Camcorders Not Good for Audio
This is a fact! Most consumer camcorders are not good at record audio. They have small microphones and most can record only mono, not stereo. Also, there is not much you can do to control the balance and gain of the audio.
But for such situations, the audio quality needs to be good. So a better approach is to look for something that has a mic input, and buy a top quality microphone to use with it.
Ideal case would be to buy a camcorder with line in, a good condenser mic and a preamp, and you are all set to record excellent quality audio. But if you think this is too much of a hassle, you can go in for a simple video recorder, which comes with a built-in condenser microphone.
Using a recorder with allow you to balance the inputs and set the proper gain. And you can use more than one microphone (channels). It will give you good video but much better audio, and that’s what you want right? The audio and the video will be in-sync, and you can focus just on the performance.
Other Alternatives
The above mentioned solution is good for video recording musical performances, but there are other alternatives as well.
If you are going to shoot at home and already have a music production setup at home, you can also run a video recording application before you are ready to perform, and capture both on the same computer.
Alternately, you can take the video in the video editor, and if you are not happy with the audio, record your performance on top of the audio.
You can even shoot your video first, and record the audio separately and sync them together in your video editing program.
Whatever method you follow, it is important to remember that a less than appealing video will be acceptable if the sound is appeasing. But a great video with bad audio is very unappealing, especially if your purpose is to showcase the music performance.
In case you choose to buy a camcorder, you need to check the specification of the internal memory card; it should let you save decent sized videos. Also, you need to select a camcorder that is more suited to taking videos, than still pictures.
Read: More Music recording concepts
KeytarHQ editorial team includes musicians who write and review products for pianists, keyboardists, guitarists & other musicians. KeytarHQ is the best online resource for information on keyboards, pianos, synths, keytars, guitars and music gear for musicians of all abilities, ages and interests.
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