How we cut up a band practice live-stream into a song
Filming a band practice and editing the video into a song
I wanted to show the process of how we filmed the band working on an idea for a song during a two-hour practice session and chopped up that video footage into a working song.
Run a click track the whole time
The key thing about this idea is that we had a click track running the entire night.
We had headphones placed around the studio and the click track was constantly running, whether we were talking or actually playing it was always running.
That way no matter what ideas we played throughout the video recording, whatever parts that we came up with they would still work with each other in the video editor when I placed them side by side.
It started with a keyboard part and went from there
I came out to our studio one day and showed the guys just an eight-bar melody that I had on the keyboard.
We just jammed on it coming up with different ideas. We even switched instruments as we messed around with song ideas.
Move video sections around for arrangement
All the parts in the finished edited song actually come from different parts of the video throughout the night and we re-arranged them in the video editor to structure the song together.
Add video layers for over-dubs
Cliff is playing a midi bass guitar, Rob starts out on drums but later on, Rob plays guitar to come up with a part that we layer on a new track in the video editor to add to the song.
Loop video parts
We even loop a couple of short ideas from the video to make a verse and chorus part.
We edited this video using the free and open-source video editor KDENlive by the way. It is the video editor we use for all our videos.
In the end
We kind of liked that we were able to create an entire song out of a two-hour session of us playing and we were able to cut up the video and turn it into a song later on.
-Tom
