Thanks Mark. That is one area I have really improved in over the last two years. Before joining as a gold pick member I had never played with a jam track. I do better now when I get the chance to play with others.
Will the Circle Be Unbroken Banjo Contest!
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Hey Archie, just using one microphone, its built in. I see where other players use headsets. Wish I knew more bout those tech components. And are you guys reading tab at the same time? I’m just not sure how to put it all together. 
Playing with the tef files is so much easier than rhythm tracks, to me anyways. But that didn’t work out either.
Good job on ALL the wonderful entries and I’m a proud teacher! I’ll announce the 3 winners on facebook live at noon central, then also post here. More of these contests to come soon!
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Thanks!
Congrats to 1st place winner (by random drawing): @cflauge! You win a BlueChip thumbpick of your choice, strings, and more!
The next 2 winners by drawing are: @Wendell and @dougfish! Y’all get strings and some more goodies!
I’ll be emailing the winners soon, along with a couple other surprise winners for their submissions!
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Congrats all!
Congrats everyone! This was a fun contest. I’m really impressed by all of the entries.
Hi Butch
It might help to resolve your audio problem by using an external mike and disabling the build in mike. I am no expert it was trial and error plus asking lots of tech questions on the BHO
I too was surprised to see headphones in use especially with the audio track and banjo clearly audible…
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Headphones are used to improve the quality of the final product. You can import Ben’s backing track into a multi-track recorder like GarageBand, play that track in your headphones while recording your banjo part, then blend the volume of the 2 tracks so they sound good together.
The real benefit is that there’s almost no quality loss of Ben’s backing track.
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Well done Y’all really great to see so many new faces posting such great videos.
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Hi Mark I’d love to know more, perhaps you could do a video tutorial to explain the process.
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Seriously great job on this! Doing great for 6 months.
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Thanks Archie. Someone also suggested updating the drivers so I learned how to do that this morning. Hopefully my next attempt will work out better.
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I could probably do that. It’s a little different for each software package, and even different within the same package on different platforms. For example, GarageBand on the Mac is very different from GarageBand on an iOS device.
What would you be using?
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Hi Mark, Just had a look on YouTube it seems GarageBand won’t work on a PC despite all the ads suggesting it will.
What interested me was what you said about "Headphones are used to improve the quality of the final product. You can import Ben’s backing track into a multi-track recorder like GarageBand, play that track in your headphones while recording your banjo part, then blend the volume of the 2 tracks so they sound good together.
The real benefit is that there’s almost no quality loss of Ben’s backing track"
I would like to see how this process works and how those guys who used the headphones were able to use the headphones whist the audio track was on playback. When I plugin my headphones my speaker sound is turned off.
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I don’t use mac myself (I use a PC) but the general process is basically the same (I use Adobe Premiere for my PC… which is not free). Unfortunately I don’t know of a good free equivalent for PC like garageband (garageband is free on mac? I think?)…
Although I didn’t do this for my submission the general process is basically:
-
Put on headphones so that ben’s play-along track is only in your headphones and record your video of yourself playing along with the music. So after, if you watch that video you won’t hear anything but your banjo playing but it will be the exact timing of the play-along track since you played along with it.
-
Launch your video editing software and pull in two things:
a. The Video you recorded of yourself with the banjo only audio.
b. The MP3 play-along track that you played along with. (Ben graciously gives an easy “download” button for each track).
- Drag those into the software and put them into separate tracks in the software (this varies widely from software to software). Now this is a little tricky here because you have to line up the start of the playback track to coincide with the start of your playing in the video so that it’s in sync. The reason you can’t just drag them in and leave them where it puts it initially is because you will have a different amount of time from the start of your video to when playback starts and that will definitely not be the same as the amount of time in the original play-back MP3 track. So you’ll have to move the MP3 audio track a little to the right and view the preview to make sure the start of the playback audio is perfectly in sync with when you start plucking your first note. If you get it lined up right, it should stay lined up correctly all the way thru.
Then you can balance them like separate recording tracks and then “export” the final balanced product out to a new video file.
Anyway that’s how I do it. I wish there was a free and simple Windows 10 PC video editing software like Garageband.
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I’ve started a new thread to avoid taking this topic off track.
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woooohooooo! Thanks for the contest Ben and congrats to @cflauge and @Wendell, and the other surprise winners. I really enjoyed everyone’s entries with banjo, mando, and guitar. I have a few things to do yet but when I finish I’m gonna grab a beverage of my choice and make a toast to all of you in the community.
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A HEARTY CONGRATS TO to @cflauge and @Wendell. AWESOME!
I SHOULD SAY - CONGRATS TO EVERYONE BRAVE ENOUGH TO ENTER!