Homebrewed Music

REAPER 4 has brought quite a lot of improvement to REAPER video handling. With a little creativity it’s possible to add titles, cut between multiple clips, and insert stills, all with reasonable stability, excellent performance, and great audio processing. I’ve done a blog post and a video about using REAPER to sync audio and video, but I thought I’d do another one that looks at making a complete simple music video, with titling and overlays. (more…)

I’ve posted before about positioning the Q3HD for better audio when recording acoustic guitar. The other day I remembered the dinky little wide angle lenses available for pocket video camcorders and started doing a little research. I wound up ordering one from Photojojo.com. (more…)

Please don’t tell my wife how many little HD cameras I have. She wouldn’t be mad, but she would certainly tease me without mercy. These things have gotten so inexpensive that each one seemed like a reasonable purchase, it’s only when I look at all of them spread out on a table that I realize what I’ve done.

Now that I’ve done it, though, I’m pondering uses for all these gadgets. One that I’ve been playing with for a while is a “guitar cam” – a camera mounted directly on the guitar and giving an unusual view of the performance. With all these cams hanging around and Lynnie out of town I went to work. (more…)

The mics and preamp on the Q3HD deliver a new level of audio quality to lower cost video cams, simply by being as good as today’s average pocket recorder. But I read posts by folks who have the Q but are still frustrated in their efforts to get the sound they hope for in their videos. (more…)

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. (more…)

I’ve been a bit frustrated as I thought about using the Q3HD in the field. We’re getting ready to head to O`ahu and I’m looking forward to shooting outdoors in the beautiful scenery and weather there. As good as the Q3HD mics are, their sensitivity is a bit low, and they’re going to be pretty far away to pick up the sound of an acoustic guitar outside. I would really like to see a preamp for external stereo mics, like the 1/8″ mic input on the H4n. With this feature I could use my very effective Rode NT4 stereo mic and put some very nice audio into my videos. With the current configuration I would need a portable battery powered preamp, adding to the size, weight, and complication on every shoot. (more…)

Video is going through some wonderful transitions these days, and the addition of 720p HD to the iPhone got me to sign on the dotted line with AT&T. Honestly, I rarely use the feature, but it seemed like a natural comparison to the Q3HD – after all, if the iPhone does the same job, or close to it, the Q becomes a lot less attractive. (more…)

Most of my video work consists of “look at me” videos I post on YouTube, shots of my slack key guitar playing. The audio is at least as important as the video, and a couple of my camcorders, the Sanyo Xacti HD2000 and the Kodak Zi8, were chosen because they had some sort of audio input and some degree of control over that input. In both cases, though, I’ve never been really happy with the audio I was able to record with these cams, even when I used an external source. Both these cameras, and others I’ve tried, have some kind of processing on the audio that attempts to maintain a constant level. And, of course, the audio circuitry gets a pretty small share of the development and manufacturing budget. The combination of these factors results in noisy distorted audio unless every detail is exactly right, a rare thing indeed. (more…)