Well, I finally finished it. As I said in an earlier post, adding video to this whole recording business makes everything take 3x as long… and THEN you have to edit the video. Although I learned a couple things.
I set up two cameras for each take, which added to the length of recording ’cause i had to mess with two cameras the whole time. I pretty much only used one angle for each instrument… pretty much. So next time I do something like this, I may not do as much with the cameras. One angle is probably fine.
I didn’t do much to the song. You’ll notice it’s a couple of clicks slower and has a modern spin on the sound, but it’s pretty much the same ol’ beatles track. I actually started working on this song before the Teenage Dream ipad cover was even an idea in my head, but due to it being a pain in the butt to record I put it off until now.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy, and for reference, here is a link to the original song: YouTube
So what do I do with my time off? Make stupid youtube videos apparently! Actually, it was pretty fun, and it’s good to just try to be creative. I’ve been trying to write the next batch of songs for the next Ben Powell Sketchbook album, but I’m kind of stuck. So maybe doing this for a little bit will get me back on track (I still have to finish that Beatles one as well).
I have accumulated a few music apps in the year i’ve owned my iPad, and the Gorillaz apparently recorded their entire album on an ipad, so why not try to do a cover of my own? What took the longest was figuring out which sounds to use. Way back when I first got my iPad, I downloaded the cat piano app mostly as a novelty for Tay. I don’t think it was actually meant to be used to record anything, as there was a noticeable delay between when i pushed the key and the note came out, so it was incredibly hard to stay on rhythm. I ended up having to mute the track and just play along by sight (hoping I hit the correct notes).
Well, it’s finally finished. Last Thursday, October 21st, I uploaded my album to iTunes, uploaded my video to YouTube, and my facebook page went live.
I started this project a looong time ago. I wrote some of the songs over a year ago today. Here you can see me jamming with my drum track to “So You Say” on November 24, 2009.
I tracked all the drums to my initial 6 songs I was going to include on the album, which were the two Orange Line songs “Grace” and “Runaway,” one cover of the Beatles’ “Please Please Me” and 3 originals. I actually had finished an initial mix of “Never Let Go” which I blogged about a while ago. But then my hard drive crashed and I lost everything. Goes to show the importance of backing stuff up.
I’d say I lost a solid 30 hours of work due to that hard drive crash. Needless to say, I took a little break from recording the EP, during which time I wrote “Do You Know.” Writing “Do You Know” encouraged me to get back on the ball with recording the album, but I wasn’t wasting time with recording a cover this time. The revised track listing was:
1. Do You Know
2. Grace
3. So You Say
4. Without You
5. Runaway
6. Never Let Go
From about March through July I was very busy recording everything (some things for the 2nd time!), and wrapped up recording sometime in the middle of July, at which point I scheduled the video shoot for early August (which I will detail in a later post). When I finally wrapped up editing the video and whatnot, it was already mid September. Then it was just a matter of getting all the artwork in order and get my websites ready. In the end, I ended up cutting “Runaway” because as far as the flow of the album went, I couldn’t find a good place to put it. But I’m definitely planning on releasing it on Vol. 2, which I’m in the process of writing.
I was originally planning on releasing on November 1, but iTunes got my tracks up in 24 hours… much faster than I had anticipated. So, on October 21st Ben Powell Sketchbook’s first EP was officially launched.
Check out the music video below, and for serious, like me on facebook!
This past weekend, Tay and I took a trip out to West VA for an apple butter festival. It was pretty neat, very small town… and lots of white people. Actually, upon the first 5 minutes of walking around, I saw a booth selling Confederate paraphernalia, a dude wearing a shirt with a confederate flag that said “Don’t Apologize For Being Right!” and then another dude with a shirt that said: “Press 1 for english, press 2 to be deported”
But, aside from that, it was very pleasant. I worked up the nerve to take pictures of random people and stuff using Troy’s borrowed 70-200mm f/4 IS lens. It definitely makes you think about framing your shots differently since you’re always zoomed so far. I did like that since it was so bright out, I got some shots that were pretty low-key looking just because of the extreme contrast between light and shadow. For example:
Some Corn from a vendor’s stand.
A Vendor making some Jewelry
I didn’t get a chance to upload all my favorites to Flickr ’cause of the stupid size limitations… but, they’re on facebook. Check ‘em out.
Here’s a timelapse video of the sky from the deck at Tay’s grandparents cabin. For some reason my camera wasn’t automatically setting the exposure to be super long to see the stars, so I had to manually change the camera to take 25 second exposures. That’s when you see all the stars pop up. Make sure you watch it in HD, otherwise it’s hard to see the stars!
Meanwhile, I’m gearing up for a big baby-photoshoot this coming saturday, so expect pictures from that!
So per our usual last minute selves, Jabarie and I made this video for an entry to win Muse tickets when they come in March. Not that I couldn’t just go buy tickets… and I mean, I like Muse, but not that much. But, an excuse to do a video, is an excuse to do a video.
Actually, I suggested this idea to Jabarie when he first brought up the contest, but on the day of, he wasn’t really feeling it. I wanted to do it in front of my green screen, but since we weren’t gonna do it, i didn’t bring it with me. Of course, we ended up doing it…
The contest is that you have to perform a Muse song in one way or another, and you have to keep it under 60 seconds. So our concept is that somehow our bodies are making sounds, and we play the bass-line to “Hysteria” on our bodies. Then to sell the point, we had our various parts light up. Incidentally, we actually mapped out the bass line, so if you look at the info on the YouTube video, you can see which notes each color represents.
It was really, really, really hard to coordinate myself to do that. It took like, five million takes. I also wanted to do more with the video, but like I said earlier, it was very last minute (due tonight). Soo…. let’s see if we win this time around. If not, at least I have another pretty cool video.
During editing we started masking out our hands and stuff so they wouldn’t cover up the colors, but ended up deciding against it because it would take for-freakin-ever to do that, and I only had one night to edit. Besides, this way you see the colors better anyway. I also wanted to do more things for our feet, but again, ran out of time. You’d think that one day we’d actually plan ahead to do something and that way I’d be able to do everything I want with it…
I was originally planning on splicing up the actual Muse song to put into the video, but ended up using some synth sounds instead, so it feels more like we’re “performing” it, rather than just dancing to it. If you can call it dancing. I almost went back to the original recording, but even though this doesn’t sound as authentic, I think it helps sell the idea.
I also wanted to pan the audio so that my sounds would come out the left speaker and Jabarie’s out the right, but again… ran out of time / was too lazy to re-import into pro-tools and mix the audio in there. After Effects is definitely not made to do any sort of audio work. Sheesh!
Anyway, enjoy, and leave me a comment letting me know what you think!
Washington, DC
