I’ve been wanting to make one of those multi-track videos for some time, but have been a bit nervous about the process, video-editing, etc.. Well, yesterday I pushed through my fears and made myself sit down to record all the parts for one of the songs I’ve been working on with one of my groups for our Back to the 80s set. I plugged my ukulele directly into the sound card (so as not to worry about other noises in the house – everyone’s home right now, all the time), set my metronome to 100 bpm, set up my video camera and started recording.

When I got to the video editing, I found I was having trouble getting the tracks to sync … I’d coordinate the first beat of a section, but then the music would drift apart, as if I were playing at two slightly different tempos. I thought to myself, “Is my timing really that bad?” It wasn’t until I was trying to sync up the last of the videos, a considerably longer one, that I finally clued into what was happening. The beginning was perfectly synced, but a minute later, the track was almost half a beat off. I WAS PLAYING AT SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT TEMPOS BECAUSE …

I had chosen to use my favorite WIND-UP metronome! As the metronome wound down, the tempo gradually got just a minuscule amount slower. For practice, this would not really matter so much, but for syncing digital content it spelled disaster. How much time was wasted in this effort? About 6 hours! Sigh.

Moral of the story: Next time I’ll try using a digital metronome or click track in my recording software.

Post filed under All UkulelePlay! Blog Posts.