How to Film Yourself Playing Piano

hey everyone a little bit of something different today a kind of a late summer special if you like I often get messages and emails from people saying how do I go about videoing myself playing the piano so that's what we're going to go through in this tutorial I'm going to kind of take you through my workflow give you a few hints and tips and show you how I do it and how I've done it in the past it's really straightforward or at least one of the ways I'm going to show you it is really straightforward you don't need to spend loads and loads of money doesn't need loads of fancy kit and you can get started really easily and it's a really handy thing to do especially if you're a learner yeah if you can video yourself then you can you know you can create a video diary of your progress you can stick videos of yourself on Facebook you know hey look what I can do stuff that can really motivate you to get better it's also handy if you're teaching yourself if you don't have a piano teacher staring over your shoulder you can kind of video yourself playing something and then kind of have a post-match analysis if you like you know what did I do wrong there you could even put it on YouTube and say hey bill or hey whoever else what am I getting wrong here okay so what I'm going to do is show you these two methods of videoing yourself one is really low-tech and straightforward and the other is a little bit more complicated and just take you through the whole kind of whole kind of workflow of doing this thing okay here we go so the first thing I want to talk about is light here we are in my work room there's a piano in the corner next to it you might just be able to see there is a window yeah and it and through that window is coming lots of good natural daylight I'm keeping it out of shot because if I bring it in it you know it tends to glare out the image so but take my word for it it's there there's another window behind me and I kind of chose this room actually to work in because of the good natural light and if you can find a space like this for shooting then that's ideal natural light offers you two advantages yeah the first one is that you don't have to worry too much about shadows if you're shooting in the evening in the dark and you're having to put lights on and sort of shine lights on the piano then you're you will spend ages chasing down shadows you can see it in some of my earlier videos that I tried to shoot under artificial light and they just don't look right secondly and if you're using a camera phone or a GoPro or something like that you will almost always find that it performs better under natural light okay you will get a better sharper image so relatively minor things but if you're after a kind of good quality good quality major you know good quality results then use natural light if you can the other thing I'll just mention is that I have tried to kill a fair bit of the echo in the room if I can the way I've done that is just by putting a load of my books in here so there are some books on the left they're under a sort of bookshelves behind me and stuff as well and they're soaking up some of the echo and that just kind of makes it a little bit easier to get a natural sound when I am talking on the mic if you're recording straight into your laptop straight you know taking a line out and not recording any live sound from your room it's not such a big deal but if you are if you're recording from everything on your phone if you're using the first setup that I'm going to talk about if you're using a real piano then having a relatively acoustically dead space is pretty handy okay let's move in and look at some of the kit that I'm using here and first of all as I said I'm going to show you the most basic setup that I am that I've used and this is the setup and the gear that I use for shooting probably I know the first 60 or 70 tutorials I did or something you know a crazy number I did just using this gear and all you need to start off with is a mic stand a boom mic stands there pretty cheap kind of 20 quid 25 dollars I guess from a music store or you can get one secondhand from eBay really cheaply and just two things to check first of all make sure that you have a ring mounting on the end that's really important we'll see why short shortly and also if you're buying secondhand try if you can to make sure that all the clamps are nice and secure yeah on old mic stands you often find that the clamps have got threaded and everything gets a bit wobbly and insecure which is not what you want okay so that's our first bit of kit the only other three things we need for this basic setup are a sock really important well explain why shortly an elastic band and something to shoot on and a phone Lee is absolutely ideal every single one of my piano tutorials by the ever shot has been done on a phone okay so let me get this basic rig set up and then I'll talk through how it works and here we are with it all set up now the beauty of this is that it is cheap and it is simple and you can put it together in just a minute or two let me show you what I've done here so underneath here is the ring mount on the end of the mic stand boom it's in the horizontal position okay because that's what my phone is resting on I've got the sock over the end of the boom because that provides extra grip for the phone yeah if you just try to attach the phone direct to the ring mount with the elastic band you'll find it's kind of rocky and wobbly and I'm not very secure so the sock just gives you a bit of extra stability I should say be really really careful with your phone yeah I think kind of I disclaim all responsibility if your phone drops off and you break it yeah and I've been kind of using a phone like this for seven years now and I've never dropped it once but that's because I'm really really really really careful so please do be careful with your phone because they are kind of expensive things to replace and once you've got the basic position sorted and try and get things level if you can and that means in first of all in that axis it's not such a big deal if you're not quite absolutely level here it's not quite as noticeable as if it's walking other axes but do get this axis as level as you can okay because if you get a slight tip either way then it's really notable you get a very odd-looking shot okay the other thing to do is to make sure your phone is as square onto your keyboard as possible and let me use this phone as an example actually okay so what I usually do is line up on your I pick a line on the you know on the control panel here like that programs line or I pick some of the knobs or whatever at the top and just make sure that everything is square that's because if it's a little bit wonky it really annoying and it doesn't have to be far out for it to be really noticeable so try to get it square onto the keyboard as possible what I also do before I shoot anything is decide what range of notes I'm going to be using and make sure that my camera is at the right height to get them all in and the way I do that is by putting a pen or pencil on my lowest note on my highest note and trying to frame a tight shot around those okay so that's it and as I said I shot dozens of videos using this rig and it worked really well for me the big downside is that you're using the phone to do everything it's picking up the sound of piano and if you're talking you're singing it's picking at the sound of your voice and that means because it's a microphone a phone mic it's kind of general mic you will pick up extra leus noise and the big extraneous noise you pick up will be keyboard noise okay keyboard noise was the bane of my life while I was doing this you should be able to live with it if you're just doing it for fun but and you know it will be noticeable you can offset it by lining your sound out into a laptop using and you know a music application with a piano sound I'll talk about that shortly and but if you are shooting live if you're shooting on a real piano for example you are going to have to live with that keyboard noise to a certain extent it'll vary by piano and bite by keyboard but you know it may well be a little bit noticeable okay so that really is the only hand side of this that the kind of sound quality otherwise it's a beautiful little system and you know if you're just shooting stuff for your own fun for your own satisfaction to keep track of your progress or whatever it should suit you just fine and here we are with the kit that I use at the moment for shooting tutorials this is a pretty good rig it gets a pretty good quality results and it's not cost a fortune I've kind of built up over the years so let me let me talk you through some of the stuff that I've got going on here and I'm still using a phone for doing all my shooting yeah but as you can see it is no longer attached with a sock and an elastic band rather it's attached to the mic which I'll talk about in a sec using this rather good piece of kit which is all from Joby products Jo B Y I really recommend them and that is a Joby action clamp and jojoba game is modular you can screw different different bits of Joby kit together that's a Joby Gorillapod arm and that's a Joby grip tight holding my phone yeah and that gives me loads of flexibility not super cheap I think maybe in total that cost me twenty twenty-five pounds or something I can't have the exact pricing but very good very reliable very sturdy that allows me to attach to my mic which is an M audio Nova cardioid mic really great for picking up my voice and obviously if you're just shooting yourself playing the piano rather than talking or singing you don't need a mic okay but if you are going to be making some sort of the sound as it were then this is a good option people sometimes say to me you know hey bill why don't you use a headset mic because that would solve all your problems of keyboard eyes and blah blah blah all the rest of it and I've kind of tried it but I don't like it I think insolently his Rashad answer it produce a headset might produce a much more a much less natural sound actually yeah with this setup it's actually like someone sat in a room playing the piano rather than someone breathing down your neck as it were so I kind of like it and it is attached to the good old fashioned mic stand and for a ground piece of low technology we have on the far end of the mic stand a plastic carrier bag full of books as a counterweight yeah because this is pretty heavy and if it wasn't a counterweight it will be putting a lot of stress on this joint okay so the sound from that mic comes down cable and into this thing which is an Ocoee e IE audio interface really nice piece of kit I haven't had it that long I paid about 150 pounds for its own right $200 probably and and it is cool because it has four input channels so I can record voice and 2 channels for the piano so pianos in stereo that allows me to actually record the native onboard sound of my Nord which is a lovely Bogues and or foreground sound I never used to do that I sue something different I'll talk about that shortly but that's really cool and if for the eie and I just used one of these in Roland edirol USB audio capture audio interface really cool piece of kit but only had one input so it was kind of cool for using a mic and but but that was about it but much much cheaper I think their lightning so you will 40 pounds or something yeah but yeah really cool piece of kit if you need an audio interface to translate the sound of your voice or the the signal from your piano into something that can your laptop can use speaking of laptops all that's going around the back and piano through a USB cable into my Mac here we go and pair of headphones which are where when recording so that I can monitor the sound and what we're going to look at now is the software that I'm using on my Mac and how I am capturing that sound and then how I'm editing it all together ok so here I am on my Mac and this is where I handle all the sound production it's worth saying that if you use the first of the two methods that I showed you the really simple one just work just using your phone you don't need to go through this stage at all because your your phone will be automatically layering the audio against your video but because I I capture audio and video separately so I have more control over both you know using the second of my two methods that this is where I do the editing and control so it's very straightforward and if you are familiar with Mac software you'll see that I'm using GarageBand or GarageBand if you're in the States and people sometimes say to me you know why don't you use Logic Pro really great high-end audio app and I actually have Logic Pro and I use it for some stuff but I don't use it for this because what I'm doing here is so simple it you know I can get by with a really lightweight but powerful app like GarageBand which loads up really quickly and you know it does everything I need it to do for this job so let me just talk you through what I've got here up here I have the piano that's coming in on tracks 1 & 2 of my audio interface the ei8 interface as you can see here and here I've got my voice okay which is coming in as you can see on track 3 of the audio interface yeah and and it's pretty simple what I can do is get those together that they should be lined up perfectly cuz I've recorded them together if you cut you know if you top and tail either ends you know if you drop a cutoff and delete it and chocolate similar but often delete it in whoops in in the top track it's important to make sure the two tracks stay aligned and apart from that nothing complicated there just talk very briefly about the levels I just have the piano usually quite quiet on about - 7.2 decibels and the voice quite loud on about zero decibels or higher I'm also controlling those volumes through the audio interface but if you're doing for this for the first time do kind of make a test video you know especially if you're doing voice and piano and kind of experiment was getting a balance right between the two just down here I've got this unused track on the new york contact ground track which is his instrument that this is how i used to do things these days as i said i get the onboard sound that my lord piano makes into here through my audio interface but what i used to do was have the sound generated actually in GarageBand itself and I'll decide on pronunciation one day through this and this New York concert grand instrument plug-in which is a really cool piano sound if you listen to quite a few of my videos from two or three years ago you'll hear me using this particular sound so you know you can you know do it that way using a virtual instrument if you want to but right now I don't ok I just use the natural sound of my Nord so that's it that's kind of it so what I do from here is just go to share and export song to disk and I export the file to my desktop and then it's all ready to go into my movie editing application ok and finally here we are editing everything together and as you can see I'm using iMovie the the kind of low end Apple app for movie editing not particularly powerful as apps go but it's dead cheap and it does everything I need it to do and I've got my timeline down here it's all my little bits of video I've got here the start and end segment from this very video that I'm shooting now and the introduction and the conclusion which you haven't seen yet it's at the end here and I've shot them as one taken I'll cut them in two in the middle now what I've done here Oh something I should just draw your attention to an iMovie really move it really useful is the expand and collapse tool there which makes your timeline longer and more you know more kind of granular or shorter and more compact really useful tool as you can see what I've done here all right this is my movie file at the top I've dragged and drop that in and underneath I've dragged and dropped in the sound file that I generated from GarageBand a minute or two ago now the tricky thing to do here is to line up the the audio with the video so that the two are in perfect sync that's not quite quite as straightforward as it might seem so what I'm going to do now is just focus in on this a little bit the timeline and show you how I do that okay so here we are focus down on the time line and as you can see I've got my video file here exported from my phone and my audio file here yeah and there are basically two ways of syncing the two together and as I said you know if you shot everything on your phone using the audio from your phone doesn't really matter but if you are exporting your audio you do need to sync the two files together two ways of doing it and firstly you can just try to do it visually so you can kind of find a bit where you are you know playing the keys and try and match that against the audio that involves a bit of guesswork but but it but it can work pretty well that's how I used to do it and what I do these days is actually sync the peaks and troughs along here because as you can see well what I've got here is the the kind of peaks and troughs iMovies showing me the peaks and troughs in the soundtrack file that I'm using but while I was shooting the video and my phone was also picking up its own sound yeah so what I can do although this sound is going to be ditched it's going to be muted what I can do is match up the peaks and troughs against the two to get the sink working so I've done that roughly and let's just see approximately let me turn my volume down a bit let's just see approximately how that is come out coming out not bad hey everyone a little bit of a different cable you can something over you can hear like there is if you can hear there is a little bit of an echo there just with tiniest tiniest bit of echo so to try to correct that I mean if it was that small I probably wouldn't bother but what I will do is just expand I just look at the waveform and you can see that how that's happened because the start of that peak there is just a little bit behind there when we expand it there we go so let's try again hey everyone and there it's gone okay so what I would do then is just kill the sound from the from fok's I don't need that and job done one thing that I might have to do is and just go to the end of the clip okay we'll just squeeze along to there and to deal with a problem that often crops up depending on your hardware and software that you're using and sometimes the to get out of sync towards the end my golly it's like a deficit I had earlier in the year so okay can you hit half here help the two tracks I've got out of sync there what happens is that the my audio interface is slightly more efficient it's slightly faster bitrate when it comes to gathering data so it creates a slightly shorter a soundtrack file and then than the the audio from the phone and over time those kind of micro milliseconds differences mount up until they're out of sync there's a dead easy way to fix that what you do at the moment I'll just hide it I'm going to show you what you do in iMovie at least is right-click on that track and click show speed editor yeah and then if we stretch things out again we can drag the speed editor so that it is much more in the right place watch this and then could be another one coming that is sorted often and really long ones you'll find it's like back there and really watch this space there could be another coming I'm really badly out okay but you know you can soon fix it just by getting to the speed editor and just dragging those peaks back so that they match and then kill the sound on there and that's kind of it as I say it kind of depends on the hardware and the software that you're using whether you have to deal with that effects it took a little bit working out the first time how to deal with it but it's not a major problem right so I hope that was useful and I look forward to seeing some of the results of this you know if you do manage to video yourself stick it on youtube or email it to me or what I'd be absolutely delighted to see what results you've had as usual quick plugs first of all from my book how to really play piano the stuff your teacher never taught you if you're just starting out an improvisation things like that this book will really help you okay loads of stuff on chords and that kind of thing there's my cocktail piano a book and which is quite handy for if you're interested in cocktail piano cover styles and my new book seven studies in pop piano is coming out very soon hopefully in about five weeks time or all the beta testing is nearly done that's it also my patreon crowdfunding campaign if you can spare a dollar or two dollars per tutorial that will be awesome really help me spend more time making these things patreon.com slash bill hilton head over there and have a look at that okay so that is it and i'm going to try and crank out another tutorial for August to make up this make up the slight deficit I had earlier in the year so watch this space there could be another one coming very soon see you soon

Channel: Bill Hilton

Views: 113,276

Keywords: how to film piano, make a piano video, piano tutorial, piano lesson, film piano tutorial, how to video piano, video piano tutorial, how to make a piano tutorial

Id: PnXEYMuBntM

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 15 2017