New Song/studio footage video "Head in the Sand" - Rock

I like it! I know a lot of people that don't know their a$$ from their elbow.
Good Job.

Chuck, That was completely and totally awesome. A one man band!! Way to go, reminds me of me. Wow, that was the treat of the day, with out a doubt. Thanks for sharing this.

Peace be with you. Blessings, John

Very Impressive Chuck...
Cool Video... I'd love to do something like this, but I wouldn't know where to start... What video editing software did you use..? What was your Video Production process..?

Thanks guys.  I had a lot of fun doing this one & editing down the video.  I used Sony Vegas pro 9.  All of the video was shot with my little Gopro Hero 2 camera.   I set it up and captured about 4-5 of my drum takes, as you see I move the camera and got 2 different angles (I laid down a scratch guitar & vocal track to a metronome and was literally writing the drum part as I was trying to record it).  
    I swear it had to take me about 35 takes to nail one clean drum track start to finish.  Ya can't really punch in live drums as easily and man is it infuriating to get 9/10ths of the way through the song and miss a cymbal coming out of a drum roll!  With the V kit, that would have been a good take with a minor touch up via mouse click.... Acoustic drums = start over.  I also had to leave a 25 second+ leader on the song to allow me to press record, get behind the kit, grab my headphones, sticks, and get ready to start.
   Rhythm guitars were pretty much 1st take.  It's a simple part and guitar is what I play most with the band.  I doubled the part with a slight difference in EQ to get a nice stereo image.
   Bass was done in about 3 takes (again... I was writing it as I was recording).  Though... there were two punch points used there.  Haha.
   Vocals went pretty quick as I had worked out what I was going to do where when I wrote the song.  
  
   The lead took me about 2 hours to write and record a take I was happy with.  *Because I learned to play by ear I never really could "wing it" when it comes to lead guitar.  I have to more or less sing what I want to do in my head & then find it by ear.  Granted... after 24 years now that is pretty easy for me to do now and I have learned the neck pretty well.   In the band my other guitarist is formally trained and will start telling me he liked this mode, or that pentatonic  scale I used... and I am like ehhhh...  thanks?   haha

  As for my video production process Notnat,  I just started by importing my finished audio track, and then started with the drums (since they start the song) and get one of my takes sync'd with the audio.  Then when I decided I wanted to cut to me on guitar, I imported & sync'd a guitar video.  It works pretty much like the track view in sonar only you have video tracks & audio tracks to work with.  Once I had the video for say the drums sync'd to my master audio, I would mute the audio track attached to that video track.  So now on adding the guitars in.... Id' cut the drum video & roll it back out of the way to let the next channel (guitar video) come through for a segment (basically slip editing).  and so on as I added more and more of my video clips.  Then you can play around with cross fades, transitions, FX (if you want)  I didn't use any FX really on this video.  You can allow mutiple clips of video to play at the same time by adjusting the opacity, & the multi-cam 4 square thing took a little time on youtube to figure out how to do.  It was fun.  This only the 2nd one I have done.  The other is on my youtube channel and the song is called "At the seams" this was more of a conventional music video with live footage and stuff shot for the video.

   I will try to answer any other questions you have if this hasn't covered it!

   

Thanks Rimshot. I think that is a standard Ibanez sound gear, it belongs to my bass player. I used it because it had newer strings and being passive, it seems to record better than mine. I have an Ibanez ergodyne series with active Pick ups that stomps live but is way to dynamic for recording. I can't seem to tame it with any amount of compression. Thank you for the comments on the mix too. It makes me happy as hell when I post stuff up here and there are no mix crits.. (I know the next post will now slam my bass sound or guitar tone or something because I said this....but) I figure if my mixes are getting thumbs up by all of these guys/girls then my ear is improving. I am striving for pro-level mixes (as are we all) but this means I am getting closer & closer!

To me the cymbals sound a little too harsh/loud for my tastes, but this is clearly a very well produced, written, recording, and video-recorded song here. Drums are always the hardest thing to record, but they sound wonderful, mainly with the timing. The song structure has good complexity to keep it interesting, yet it's simple enough to follow. Not exactly my genre of rock here, I personally would do without that chorus-y effect on the vocals(verse) (I seem to hear that alot of music posted on forums like this) You deserve more than 50 views for this! -Jeff

Hey, Chuck,
 
Dynamite song with good songwriting, nice performances on all the instruments, excellent vocals, and the video is really well done!
 
Very cool song, and the mix sounds great, too.
 
Really nice work, brother, have a good one!
 
Bob

I love DIY projects like this.  You continue to impress, Chuck.  I hope you've inspired more DIY video projects.  Well done.

Chuck - man, where did you get all that talent? You are good. Love the tune.

Clean, Thank you sir! I have been playing for most of my life and at some point or another I have played all of these instruments in one or more bands... Not bragging but I also play a little keys (my worst instrument) & I used to be able to tear up a saxophone once upon a time... Dude Ivey, Thank you for the kind words.