Forum - Banjo Ben Clark

Will the Circle Be Unbroken Banjo Contest!

#106

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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#107

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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#108

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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).

  1. 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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#109

I’ve started a new thread to avoid taking this topic off track.

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#110

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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#111

A HEARTY CONGRATS TO to @cflauge and @Wendell. AWESOME!

I SHOULD SAY - CONGRATS TO EVERYONE BRAVE ENOUGH TO ENTER!

#113