paradoxtma 3Speak Podcast

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/sxlclspx
Welcome back my friends, to the show seen through a lens...

I'm thrilled to bring another home studio recording to the [Hive Music Community](https://peakd.com/c/hive-193816/created)!

This song has taken the most work, but I feel it's the best so far.

I recorded this guitar part at the same time I recorded the first guitar part for [Clear Cuts #2](https://peakd.com/hive-193816/@paradoxtma/cgcnxbex) (which I later scrapped), and managed to get a decent recording after just two takes.

I had to learn the bass part for this song, which took a night to learn and practice, and countless takes to get a decent recording. I'm still not *super* happy with how it came out, but time flies when you're trying to make things perfect.

I wanted to record some more vocals for *"under the bridge downtown..."* with harmonies and one of the screen tiles split into another 4 screens, but didn't have time for that either. The vocals took 3 takes, which finally happened Thursday night, and two of them were *just* good enough to put this together and be happy with it.

For the audio in this one, I edited all the sources for each instrument separately, output them to their own files, then used those files to mix the track. It took a little bit more time, but I'm quite a bit happier with the result.


It also creates a few extra files... here's a look at the folder for this video.


I'm still working on framing the videos, but I feel I'm making incremental progress there as well. Once I get a better handle on that, I'll work more on the lighting.

I recently upgraded my video editing desktop with a $25 graphics card from a decade ago (nVidia g610, 2GB) and it helped IMMENSELY with the video editing and processing. I used to have to pause the video every few seconds when previewing in OpenShot, to allow more to queue. Now, I can not only preview with ease, but my video exports and conversions are at least twice as fast.


I never really talk about compression in my posts, but I do consider attention to file size to be one of the aspects of good content creation. I use a linux command line tool for shrinking my photos, but for videos, there is no tool better than [HandBrake](https://handbrake.fr/). If you've ever had a problem with videos taking up too much space, you should definitely give this free program a look.


Finishing this post feels like the end of a marathon. I might take a break next week to concentrate a bit more on my comedy. If you enjoy a good laugh, you might like checking out my alt account, @oldsoulnewb.

I hope you all enjoy!

---

▶️ [3Speak](https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/sxlclspx)

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/cgcnxbex
Hello again, Hive! For this week's video, I chose a song that was a bit shorter, hoping the files would be easier to manage. That turned out to be true, but I kept messing up while recording, and had to do so many takes, it still ended up taking longer (and coming out less perfect) than I'd hoped.

I'm very happy with the guitar and bass recordings, which ended up being as near to perfect as I can expect. I wanted to record a more forceful, angry sounding vocal, but after several failed attempts, I've decided to stick with these sad and distant sounding performances.

This is the same camera and audio setup I used in [Clear Cuts #1](https://peakd.com/hive-193816/@paradoxtma/cwimvdlb), which I'll continue using until I buy better gear, or take the time to record in one of my friends' studios.

I mixed this one a bit differently, doing a complete mix in Audacity, then using only that mix for the audio in OpenShot. This saved me a lot of time in the video editing, since I didn't have to worry about the audio from the video messing things up in the final mix.

This is one of my favorite songs, from one of my favorite bands. I can never really do true justice to the original, but I'm still fairly pleased with how this came out. I hope you enjoy watching and listening as much as I enjoyed making this!

(Actually, I hope you enjoy listening MORE than I enjoyed making this. A lot of very tedious work goes into making these videos, and it takes a bit of the fun out of performing)

Let me know what you think, I'm always open to criticism!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/cwimvdlb
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](https://www.openshot.org/) to edit the videos, and [Audacity](https://www.audacityteam.org) with a [Behringer UM2 USB interface](https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=0805-AAL) 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.

(insert photo here later)

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.

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/fponqjjr
This is the last video I have from the session when I recorded Rough Cuts #1 and #4. I messed up both the guitar and vocals pretty bad in this recording, but I got through the whole song, so once again, it's good enough for a Rough Cut.

I've learned a few tricks in OpenShot that make it a lot faster for me to cut up the two video timelines, so I used that extra time to get familiar with the various transitions. As I move into making multi track recordings, I want to try using the transitions with the multi-frame video to highlight different instruments during different parts of the song.

I have just one more Rough Cut from my old recordings. If I find the time to simply re-record that song, I'll probably just start posting better videos into one of the music communities next weekend. If I don't find the time, I have one more bad recording to torture you with.

---

If you watch until the end, it looks like I'm picking my butt, but I'm really just stretching my shoulder. If you think that's funny, and have an interest in comedy, I've put [my very first comedy video](https://3speak.tv/watch?v=oldsoulnewb/hdbwjxya) here on 3Speak, under my alt account @oldsoulnewb. I performed the routine you'll see (if you click that link) live last Wednesday, and it did pretty well, so you'll probably like it.

*Thanks for checking me out!*

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/uncqlhgi
Nature conspired to stop me from getting this video posted this weekend, but I have prevailed. Not as prevalently as I would have liked... I really wanted to do some multitrack audio for this one, but alas, I'm out of time.

Like other videos, I'm just using multiple video recording sources, then syncing and blending them all together. For this one, I have the old Sony Cybershot camera, an LG Rebel4 phone, and a Motorola E6 phone.

This is my newest recording, and originally was meant to get a lot more attention, but I've had a touch of the 'rona, and after 3 takes, I decided my vocals just aren't good enough right now for an 'official' cut. For my first 'official' recording, I think I'll use this format, but instead of playing and singing all at once, I'll do the music and vocals in separate videos.

The biggest problem I had to overcome this weekend was resurrecting the old desktop. For reasons I still haven't determined, the newest linux kernel update broke my Ubuntu system on the old frankenstein build, and I've been sampling linux distros ever since, looking for something that plays friendly with my 12 year old hardware. I've also been updating firmware, adding memory, replacing my mouse...

Once I finally got something working, I decided to try the latest version of [OpenShot](https://www.openshot.org/), and it had a cool new feature for tiling all of the video streams on one screen, which is why we have the cool new look.

This video sounds kind of awful, but I'm trying to keep a schedule, so here it is anyway. I hope you manage to sit through the whole thing!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/occidqjq
Hello again, Hive, I hope everyone is having a fabulous Saturday!

Today, I'd like to share with you another one of my rough recordings with the fancy mic setup I used in [Rough Cuts #2](https://peakd.com/hive-105786/@paradoxtma/uzyiqdwr). I was able to get the room mic up high enough that it was off-camera for this recording, and I think it did a better job of capturing the sound overall, but the vocals had a bit less *pizazz* in the midrange.

My little knock on the guitar, which I usually cut from the videos, is a trick I use to make it easy to synce the video with the audio. The knock makes a nice little peak at the beginning of the track, which makes them super easy to line up:

*I'll edit a screenshot in here later, still struggling with the posts on 3Speak...*

It seemed weird to cut the messed up beginning after leaving in the knock, and this song still comes in under 3:30 with the mistake left in, so...

Besides, these are supposed to be rough cuts, aren't they?

Hope you all enjoyed! I'm nearing the end of these early videos that I recorded, and can't wait to get to work on something even better to share!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/wxixuvxr
Hello again, everyone, and welcome to another installment of my rough recordings!

This one is *really* rough, as you'll see. I recoded this using the 'fancy' setup that I described in [#2](https://peakd.com/hive-105786/@paradoxtma/uzyiqdwr), and of all my rough recordings, I'm most pleased with the sound quality of this one. Of course, that makes it easier to hear all my little vocal mistakes...

Those vocal mistakes are one of the reasons I quit my job in blacktop. Breathing the various forms of dust all day would REALLY mess with my ability to sing (and breathe), as well as causing me some other various health problems.

This is another tune I recorded while home on a lunch break, and it is, as I stated, *REALLY* rough! You'll notice a cut I made with a dull hatchet, followed by a similar brain fart to the one that caused the cut, at around 4:00. If you listen extra close, you'll also notice that I miss a few chord changes. It isn't perfect, but it still felt good enough to hold on to, edit, and eventually post.

***

If anyone knows of a Community on Hive where these rough videos would fit in, please let me know! Since I'm not putting these up as contest entries, and don't want to do a 'posted exclusively for...' intro at the beginning, I was asked not to post these in Hive Open Mic, and they're not going to be a good fit for Vibes either.

Is there a Hive Community for posts that are just barely good enough to not throw away? Until I find it, I'll still keep posting these to my blog until I run out of old videos.

In the future, I'll make some with a little more care and polish, which I will then post to Hive Open Mic again.

Thanks for listening, see you all again next week!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/lglemdzh
This is pulled from the same recording session as #1, as you may be able to tell from my look and attire.

I don't have much more to say about it, other than this is one of my favorite songs. Leonard Cohen was an amazing writer, and the world truly has no idea of the depth of our loss without him.

This performance is more in the style of Concrete Blonde, who did a great cover of this song for the "Pump Up The Volume" soundtrack. Great band, great movie. Check them both out if you haven't before.

I hope you enjoy the show!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/dywaodlx
Another quick video shot with 2 cameras, an old Sony Cybershot and a $20 LG Rebel phone.

This is how I would still record, if the Sony camera hadn't died. I really like the audio quality I got from this set up.

I stuck with the video that goes in and out of focus, because the video from the other camera was out of frame.

This was recorded about a year and a half ago, during a lunch break at home.

---

Linda Perry of the 4 Non Blondes is one of my favorite song writers and performers. I hope you all like my very tame version of one of her most moving songs!

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=paradoxtma/uzyiqdwr
This was one of my first recording attempts, and by far the most involved.

I used a cheap large diaphragm cardiod condenser mic on a boom (that you can see some of in the video) to record vocals, and also recorded the guitar directly.

In this video, I blended the audio from the video recording along with the direct audio recordings, slightly out of sync for stereo/reverb effects.

I wasn't super happy with the recording, but I didn't hate it. It wasn't good enough to keep going through all the trouble of this set up and mixing. Not only did it take over an hour to set everything up and take it down, but it left practically no room to move around.