New Blog Look, New Camera, New Video

Monday, February 28th, 2011

Lately I’ve been dragging myself into the 21st century in my web design and implementation efforts. I recently overhauled my slack key guitar site, Kaleponi.com and helped out a local hula group with their site as well. All this new knowledge got me thinking about good old Homebrewed Music and its rather generic look, and the result is this new three column fluid layout. I hope you find it easy to read and navigate.

I also made a big step in my video camera arsenal with a shiny new Panasonic Lumix GH2. This little beauty is packed with a high performance sensor, lots of onboard image processing, a full range of manual controls, interchangeable lenses, and enough options and settings to keep this novice busy for a long long time.

I’m a long way from figuring out how to get the best from this wonderful camera, but I took advantage of one of the lovely “convertible weather in February” days we get here in Northern California to shoot a bit of outdoors playing. The wonderful old sentimental ballad, Silver Threads Among the Gold has become part of the slack key repertoire thanks to Leonard Kwan and Ledward Kaapana, and this song about the inevitable process of aging seemed to fit the austere scene.

By the way, I have a pretty fair collection of videos featuring Hawaiian slack key, mostly by me but with a couple of guest artists as well. You can see them at my YouTube channel.

The audio for this clip was captured using the Zoom Q3HD, it was placed about 24″ from the guitar, you can see the black blob of the windscreen in the lower right corner of the main performance shot. I also used the video from the Q3HD for the closeup of the picking hand.

I edited the clip in Edius Neo 2.5 and used a new reverb plugin from Jason Breebart’s Toneboosters line. The crows came with the house.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2011 at 11:22 am and is filed under Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


3 Responses to ' New Blog Look, New Camera, New Video '

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  1. Andrew G. said in post # 1,

    on March 4th, 2011 at 10:16 am

    Beautiful stuff. And a beautiful recording, too – you give me hope for this Q3HD I’m fighting with. I posted a few questions on this forum:

    http://www.2090.org/zoom/bbs/viewforum.php?f=18

    I’d love some expert advice on settings, editing, etc. I think the term “newbie” was coined to describe me. Thanks!

  2. Andrew G. said in post # 2,

    on March 5th, 2011 at 11:18 am

    Thanks for your response on the Zoomforum. I am unable to log in there, and the administrator is telling me to install a new browser in order to do so, which I really don’t want to do. Seems like a dumb way to fix a problem with their website.

    When I recorded PCM audio, Windows Live Movie Maker would take the video, but there was no sound. I found some stuff on the net about WLMM not accepting MOV files, etc. But I just found out the stuff I recorded in AAC audio seems to work OK with WLMM. I’m more than baffled.

    I’ll keep trying to get on that forum – it seems a better venue for these discussions, but hope dwindles . . .

    Thanks!

    Andrew

  3. Fran Guidry said in post # 3,

    on March 5th, 2011 at 12:10 pm

    Andrew, I’m sorry you’re having problems getting connected at the Zoom forum. I hope to get Windows Live going in the next month or two, but currently I can’t really help much with that. But if a video encoded with AAC audio works in WinLiveMM I’d say you’re on your way.

    My experience in video has led me to accept a lot of compromises (grin).

    Fran

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About the Blog

    Howdy, my name is Fran Guidry and this is my Homebrewed Music blog.

    I play Hawaiian slack key guitar and recorded my solo acoustic CD at home. Most of the recording information I find on the internet seems focused on bands, drums, multitracking, and so on but my main focus is recording solo acoustic guitar. Lately I’ve been enjoying video recording along with audio, so that shows up in the blog as well.

    I’m also a guitar nut. I love big ones and little ones, handmades and factory guitars, cheap ones and expensive ones. So I’ll be sharing the fun of exploring guitars as well, along with the challenges of amplifying acoustic guitars for live performance.

    Welcome!

Philosophy

    My recording philosophy is pragmatic, skeptical, not super critical. After all, the performance is by far the most important component of a track, and every aspect of any recording is a matter of taste.

    But I do like to know “about stuff.” Back in hifi days I learned about double blind testing. I learned that we humans can easily hear differences that don’t really exist. The more I’ve learned about our human auditory system, the more I’m skeptical of what people say they hear, especially if they claim that a particular microphone or preamp or cable has some magical property.

    I’ve only been recording since 2001, and when I started I found the usual places on the internet. I sought advice and accepted it, thought I would improve my recordings by using more expensive equipment. It didn’t work.

    Two things that did seem to lead to better recordings were experience and room treatment. Getting an appealing sound is the combination of many small details, and learning those details only comes from experience. Amd the sound of the recording space is obviously a big factor.

    I’ve only recorded seriously using digital technology, but I remember trying to record rehearsals and gigs back in analog days. I don’t have any nostalgia for analog recording and playback systems at all. I think even low end digital systems can capture marvelous recordings. So when I look at gear, I look for good specs: low noise, broad flat frequency response, wide dynamic range, low distortion. I’m not interested in colorful components, mics and preamps with a sound, I want the sound to be the sound of my guitar.

    But the last word is that I’m just learning and I hope you find something useful in my posts.