Clear Cuts #1 - my cover of "Keeping The Faith" by Billy Joel

▶️ Watch on 3Speak

Hello Hive, and Music Community!

It's possible you may have seen one or two of my recent Rough Cut videos, which were a bunch of raw takes I recorded to learn what I can do with my sound and video editing equipment. During that time, I was also looking for a music-related Community on Hive where I could post my videos, without participating in some sort of contest. It looks like this is the best place for what I'm trying to do here, but if anyone thinks otherwise, please let me know in the comments.

As long promised, this is the first in what will hopefully be a series of more polished videos using multi track recording and fancy editing of multiple video sources.

Like everything else I do, I'm basically learning as I go along here, and operating on a minimal budget. I record my videos with an old Sony Cybershot pocket cam and a couple old $40 Walmart smartphones. I use OpenShot to edit the videos, and Audacity with a Behringer UM2 USB interface for my mulititrack recording and editing. I run all of this on a variety of free Linux OSs, installed on old computers. The biggest and newest of those computers (which I need to edit the video without crashing) is a 15 year old custom build with an Intel Core2Duo processor (remember those?) and 16GB DDR3RAM. So, not exactly cutting edge stuff, but it handled nine tracks of audio and video just well enough.

I started the video editing on an even older machine, with only 8GB RAM, but the processor kept overheating and forcing the computer into shutdown.

I recorded the guitar part first, then downloaded that audio to my phone so I could listen to the guitar part through my bluetooth earbud while I recorded the vocals. It took 3 takes to get the guitar part right, and 5 takes to get the vocals right.

I had a nice schedule planned for recording and editing this song, which started out okay. That's why I look so presentable in the guitar video. Life threw some extra work and chores my way, however, which is why I look so ragged in the vocal videos. I got home at about 8PM the night I recorded the vocals, and worked on that recording until about 11:30PM.

By the time I queue this for encoding, I will have spent approximately 10 hours trying to get this 4 1/2 minutes of video on the internet.

I hope you all enjoy it. It's not 100% perfect, but I don't really believe in 100% perfection. This one is about 90% of the way there, which I don't think is too bad for 10 hours of work.

Let me know what you think! I'm happy to answer questions, respond to criticism, or generally talk shop in the comments.

▶️ 3Speak