How To Make Guitar Videos For Instagram

today we're gonna be taking a look at how to make guitar videos for Instagram and breaking down every step along the way hey nice to meet you all my name is John McLucas and I'm a full-time music producer and mixing engineer who recently got into YouTube and over on my channel if you want to check it out after this video I make informative and entertaining video essays on different facets of the music industry this is what you'll need in order to follow along with this guide your instrument a guitar cable your computer and audio interface your phone a da W which is something like GarageBand Pro Tools logic Cubase Ableton any of those will do video editing software which for this example I'll be using Final Cut Pro X any lamps you have sitting around and a tripod if possible otherwise you can just kind of stack it up against some shelves or build a little book tower stack it up thing one of the first important decisions that you're gonna have to make is whether you want to do it all live or pre-recorded audio if you're doing it live it can actually be a bit more simple because you're doing everything at once and you don't have to spend extra time recording separately but you do have to be near-perfect when you film and record at the same time and that can be a bit frustrating on the other hand pre recording can be appealing because you don't have to worry about being perfect every single time and you can just focus on performing when you're doing the video portion so ultimately it's up to you but for this example I'm going to pre record my audio the most important thing though is to record your audio separately with microphones or with cables direct into the computer so you have high quality audio instead of just the phone this is a small extra step but it gets you tremendously better results alright so I have a guitar a cable and a super talented guitarist my good friend Stephen Ward and so we're gonna go ahead and take the other end of this cable and plug it into the direct input in our audio interface most home studio interfaces come up with a combination input jack so you can plug in an XLR cable for a microphone or plug your guitar directly in so we can use software amps and crafts the sound we like in our software alright so I'm gonna go ahead and make a new track here and because we have it in input 1 we are good and going to name it there we go and now let's check we're gonna turn on record just make sure we're getting signal yes perfect I'd like to just record a couple of bars so then that way I can loop it and dial in the sound separately from playing so I'm gonna go ahead and have Steven play for a couple of bars you'll notice I also have a click track loaded here so that way I can have a nice easy loop with it so let's go ahead and get the click going make sure all right so I'm gonna go ahead and take this bar here so I'm gonna be using Jesse's tone forage and Jason Richardson model and I really love the clean channel in this because we want something clean a little spooky and dark so that's what we're gonna go so then you go ahead and dial the signal quick [Music] there we go that's just super quick dialing it in that's kind of in the ballpark something spooky and dark perfect alright so now we're gonna go ahead and get our performance so we're focusing on just getting a really good take not on performing so focus on that take your time with it and really nail a solid take I'm gonna go ahead and get that and with the power of YouTube you don't have to watch this because it's done the power of YouTube you don't have to watch us play nice easy quick I got the perfect take here [Music] perfect sounds great so now that we have our take we need to bounce out two different versions we're gonna want one version with a click track and one version without it so that way we can have super easy sync when we film our video and then play it all back together so I'm gonna go ahead give us one bar before it starts like this and bounce that out and then one version without the click now let's do the video so let's talk framing number one is to make your visual appealing this may seem like a small detail but it's super important when it comes to filming yourself playing guitar this angle is much better than this angle or this angle when it comes to making videos because you have the nice glowing lights in the bank and nothing is too distracting and the visual of the playing is what catches the person's eye once you've got a good angle it's a good idea to have yourself a little separate from the background like this I'm popping a lot more than the background is right now I'm a little forward from it also on top of that I made sure that everything is cleaned up behind me which you should do as well so make sure that there's no clothes strewn about everything is at least neat and tidy and organized because that does reflect on you as a guitar player and musician even though it's not directly related to your playing number two is lighting and I'm gonna assume that we're all working with the light that we already have readily available and not these kind of nice fancy lights so if you have any lamps lying around that's going to be a massive help I have one here that we're going to use using the lamp I can experiment with taking the cover on or off and placing it in a few different areas and see where it best counteracts the shadows that are created from overhead lighting hey John from the future here really quick just wanted to say if you only have overhead lighting to deal with try to make as much horizontal distance between you and the light source as possible right now I only have one main source over here but it's not as bad because I'm about six feet away from it so it's not causing to too many problems and it is a much better angle than this angle because with this I have tons of deep deep shadows Mozilla's an overexposed nose and top of the head which is gonna be super super difficult to work with so again remember we're looking for horizontal distance between you and the overhead light now back to main John oK we've got the lights now time for camera I'm going to be shooting with my phone which is a samsung galaxy s 9 but I'm also going to use this older iPhone 5 to show that you can still get decent results even with an older smartphone an important accessory to invest in it would be a smartphone tripod that can hold your smartphone up like this in the shooting position so you aren't confined to what you can stack up and lean it against and I'm actually using my tripod right now to hold up this camera so you'll of course see that in a different angle so here's what both angles look like completely unprocessed [Music] another behind for angle set we can go ahead and open the audio file with our click track built in hit record on our film play the track and get to performing also a quick bonus tip that if you do have a friend present which I'm of course lucky to have today then you can have them kind of move the camera slowly for a little extra interest or just gonna have them freehand it and move it around but just be careful that maybe you have them tried a couple of times because you don't want to ruin a really good take because they trip or maybe the angle gets kind of weird in wonky so let them experiment out a couple of times but it can be a big big up to have somebody kind of moving keeping that visual entry through it ok now we have our footage let's go to editing so we got our good video we got some good audio now it's time to put them together and I'm here in Final Cut Pro this is the only computer that have Final Cut Pro on so we're diving into the laptop let's do this so it's pretty straightforward to make a project you can go ahead and just drag a clip directly onto your timeline and it's going to default everything to that clip for you and I'm also going to drag in our audio so we got our audio in we're going to line it up with our video and it's fantastic because we can use the little clicks you see right here from the metronome to line it up very very easy and then now I just line up in my no click version just like that and we are totally good to go it's gonna go and delete that you don't necessarily need to use a click version as well when you're lining up the audio just kind of helps me because I can visually look at those four ticks and then look at where the guitar starts and know that it's gonna be right on time it's going to go ahead and mute my original source clip here and let's just take a listen briefly with the good audio nice so now the big challenge is cleaning up the visual here every piece of video editing software has basic color correction and parameters that you can mess with and I do not want to dive into the crazy world of color correction it's not my specialty but I understand just the basic basic principles which gets me 80% of the results for 20% of the work so that's what we're going for right now so I up here just by selecting a clip and all of this is specifically for that cliff I'd have been selected it doesn't show up but then it does here it's good to make sure we have it up and you can go ahead and add more correction layers if needed don't need it right now just the one should be fine I'm gonna click this little arrow so there's a few different things that we can mess with here the first thing I notice is it's pretty orange and that is pretty common for lighting that is in most homes if you're yellow very orange and we want to kind of cool that down which is changing the temperature of that orange to blue balance and then I also would like to maybe just make the dark pop a little bit more like the dark shadows a little brighter so I'm gonna go ahead and just head over to the color here I can overall pull out how much orange I'd like in other areas you might see this as temperature or you might see this as white balance and there'll be a slider two sliders one that can make it more orange like that color and then if you pull the other way it's gonna cool down the image and pull that warmth of way so I'm gonna go ahead and just kind of eyeball it I mean right you want to make them look like a scary so that about there looks good just massive difference you can always always get to check your work here it says before and that's after and now we're gonna head over to exposure and exposure is the amount of light that is let into the camera and that's something you have to set in all the time if you're using something that has a variable amount of light that it will let in we're gonna leave it as is because you know what just bringing it up a little bit I could see that's just kind of washing it out not a big fan so we're just gonna leave that as is and if you want to try to pull the saturation up which just intensifies the colors in a way you can in this video it doesn't look that great to push it so I'm not I'm not really worried about it so just with that one move right there we've made a massive difference in the overall feel it feels a lot more natural kind of a lot darker a lot more mysterious for the feel that we're going for and now I'm gonna go ahead and show you what that looks like with the Galaxy S 9 camera here all right so here's our galaxy s 9 footage so you can already see I mean of course the newer phone has a lot more definition and depth and richness in the tone compared to the old phone but at the end of the day it's not going to make a massive difference you still have good sounding audio which is going to take it a lot further than spending all this money on a good camera with bad audio so that's the 32nd version of color correction so for the rest of this example I'm going to move forward with the iPhone 5 because I don't want to have anybody kind of give the excuse of well you had a nicer camera than I do or a nicer phone so we're just gonna go ahead and move forward with this footage because it still looks very good so now this is the thing we're on Instagram and that means we're gonna be having a square platform but now of course you can upload things that are wide screen and it'll on the feed the main feed it's gonna show you a square preview so you don't necessarily have to make it square so this as is is fine of course you know you don't want to have six seconds of super-awesome silence at the beginning but this as it is is totally okay you do not need to make it a square because if you think about what that frame is gonna look like as a square exact it's still going to look good so totally okay you do not have to modify it but if you would like to you can go in and change it in a couple of different ways one you can export it as is and then make a new session with a square setting and then drag it in or you can change it within the same session and just modify it and fit it into the square so in this case I'm gonna go ahead and do that window project properties modify settings I'm gonna go ahead and select custom and then be able to make it 1080 by 1080 which is a square which is exactly what we're looking for boom now we have a square piece of footage here and if you want to put it into Instagram in that form you totally can but if you do I would recommend choosing a complementary color for those bars so in this case I'm gonna go ahead and just go look for you also the dark piece maybe like smoky gray background let's see if we can find a good fit here's some cool grey clouds of course if I was going to be doing this seriously I don't make sure that I have the proper ability to use this photo but because this is purely an example and not something I'm looking to use online we're gonna go ahead and just run with something so you're not watching me look for stuff so we can go ahead and add this in and okay so now this is a widescreen photo we need it to fit into the square so I'm gonna just blow it up so it's bigger and then put it underneath our video screen here make it line up nice and straightforward and now we have it's kind of smoky it's kind of smoky background you can kind of pick anything you'd like behind it but that's just kind of the point up to you personally for me in this case I would probably not include anything I don't think it needs it and the framing works in a square format for the preview page so this might be more specifically for cases where you want to add something stylistically with text or if it's not going to fit well in the square frame on your feed so you want to add those bars to make sure people understand what's happening and of course you can always use plain white plain black anything that you'd like to you can put in those frames alright that was a lot of information so let me go over really quickly with you first pre-recorded or live on the one hand pre-recorded is going to work well because you get to focus on just playing and then you get to focus on the performance aspect but live is going to be more simpler as far as the time commitment if you come in prepared up to you on that next you're gonna want to make sure that you get a fantastic take if you're pre recording to a click track it's in that way when you perform and sync it up it's incredibly easy to do so next create an organized appealing frame for your video with whatever you have available to you you want to also keep in mind that you can use lamps and other kinds of lighting to counteract any overhead lighting that's kind of disturbing the feel you want to make in your video after filming go into your video editor and bring in your video and audio clips do a little basic color correction to get it into the ballpark and determine whether you'd like to make a square video or a widescreen video after that all you have to do is export and you just made a guitar video for Instagram and keep in mind after you get the styled in it's so so easy to keep pumping out awesome awesome videos if you'd like to my demonstration here on guitar lessons I have a feeling that you're really going to like the content I'm creating over on my channel on Thursday I do video essays on different parts of the music industry like why certain youtuber got super big why I think touring is a waste for most musicians and artists and some of my crazy stories from the road I have so much fun doing research to create these videos with skits and humor and well thought arguments that's sparking a lot of really incredible conversation in the community and on Mondays I post cut down interviews of hard-hitting people I interview for my podcast learn music freelancing you can learn all kinds of different things from how to build a community around you creative how to find the right team members to help your creative journey and how to approach auditioning for a band that you're really excited about joining if that sounds like something that would interest you I would love to see over there but either way I appreciate you watching and I have the question of the day for you what do you find most difficult about creating content for Instagram let me know in the comments below because I will personally respond to every single comment and make sure that I can help you as much as possible to this of course if you mean it this far you definitely are subscribed to the channel and how the bell turned on you've already liked it so there really is nothing left for me to do but show you how bad at guitar I am oh one two three [Music] [Music]

Channel: Guitareo

Views: 101,115

Keywords: Guitar, how to play guitar, lead guitar lesson, online guitar lesson, guitar lessons online, guitar chords, guitar scales, nate savage, how to play rhythm guitar, music theory, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, guitar riff, free guitar lesson, guitar lessons for beginners, beginner guitar lesson, how to play guitar for beginners, lead guitar, guitar tutorial, song tutorial, guitar songs for beginners, guitar lesson, bar chords, guitar recording, instagram guitar, facebook

Id: x8MBme99EqA

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2019