How to Record Guitar Videos (Audio & Video)

hey everyone it's Rachel today and we're going to answer the most asked question that I get on my channel how do I record my guitar videos all guitar cover videos consist of two primary components the audio and the video in this video I'm going to walk you through how I record both the audio in the video and edit both and combine them together I want to start out by saying that I'm not an expert in either video or audio recording especially in the mixing and mastering aspect of recording guitar audio I've only been doing this for a little bit of time but I know that starting out I would have liked to see a guide like this to show me how to get started recording videos I'm hoping that this video will be useful to some of you who are looking to start making your own guitar cover videos or it's guitar videos in general in this video I'm focusing on electric guitar covers I have not had experience with putting acoustic ones and with that let's get into it so to start out the number one thing you need for good sound quality in your videos is an audio interface now what do you interface will allow you to get your signal from your guitar directly on to your computer you can also start off by just recording with a microphone that you have but the sound quality will be a lot worse but I wouldn't let that stop you if you want to get started recording videos you can just record a video of you playing next to your amp for my audio interface actually use my amp the Yamaha HR 10 which is over there the Yamaha HR 10 is both a really great practice headphone amp and also a great way to get started recording it outputs both a dry and wet signal the dry signal is the direct sound on your guitar is outputting without any effects and the wet signal has the effects that the amp is providing so the Yamaha to your R 10 has a bunch of different settings of a bunch of different built-in effects and you can actually record those effects onto computer as well my recording process with the Yamaha guitar 10 has changed over time up until around 6 months ago I was recording the sound directly from the amp so I was only using the effects and amp models that the amp provided I'm sure they're also other audio interfaces and amps that you can do similar things with where you can record the effects directly from the interface but my only experience at bars with the thr 10 I'll have a link in the description to the Yamaha thr 10 if you're interested in checking it out for yourself and of course you don't need the thr 10 any audio interface will do however you won't be able to do this direct recording method without having an audio interface like the thr 10 that has built-in effects that can be recorded but really any audio interface will get you going with recording guitar so now let's just walk you through my initial really simple recording process with the Yamaha EHR 10 so when I first started out my recording process was pretty simple I downloaded audacity which is a free audio editing program and I was able to record directly from my Yamaha EHR ten including all the sound effects that are already applied from it into audacity and it was really simple and quick now to do this you'll probably want some sort of interface that has effects already applied like the Yamaha EHR ten but it is really simple and easy to get started so all I would have to do is select the inputs here to be my thr ten and I can set the record button and record something so let's try and record something [Music] so that was pretty simple as you can see I recorded but I displayed and it has all the effects that's I played it the recording powered video also would obviously have a backing track so you could just create a new track here and you can put it in your backing track audio so you can just play over on top of the backing track audio now though this is a very simple way of recording you just hook up your aunt for our interface you hit record and you're pretty much done there's all the effects done you can't edit the audio so you don't that much after you recorded so it doesn't allow a lot of flexibility in recording audacity also is a little bit harder to work with for more full-featured guitar editing I know for me at least they would start lagging after I was trying to record a more complicated a song with lots of guitar parts and I really just wanted more flexibility with my sound and more flexibility after I recorded to be able to change the sound of the guitar so I did a little research and I learned about da WS or digital audio workstations these are more full-featured more fleshed out for full song audio editing and I think that's where I recommend going if you're looking for more control over what you're doing the D aw I use is called Reaper and I'll link to that and everything else I mention this video in the description Reaper is free to try out and you can try it for a clumsy bike if you want to buy it that needs $60 Reaper allows a lot more flexibility and control over your recording once you figure out how to use it so this is Reaper and in Reaper what you want to do first is fine your audio interface go under preferences you can then go to device and you want to look under yes IO probably at least that's how it works for me then you can choose your drivers so for me I'm using my Yamaha thr 10 which uses the Yamaha Steinberg USB ASIO and then you want to suck your inputs so for me I have the direct input long direct input - and I'm playing out through the amp so now that you have your device selected whatever your audio interface is you can get into recording and now to get started what you'll want to do is add a new track so you can insert a new track right there and then you want to select your English make sure that you have the right device selected so for me that is the Yamaha 2 to R 10 so I just like the direct input 1 and direct input 2 which records from my amp so the direct output of my up the drive signal not the wet signal which includes the effects now how we're to start playing at this point I wouldn't hear anything no sound nothing is coming out of this even though I've set up the inputs correctly so what you want to do in order to be able to hear your ATAR is you need to enable recording so there's a record arm button here that you want to hit there's also a button called record monitoring which is the off by default that you want to turn on to be able to hear what you're playing so you'll want to switch that to on there and now I can hear the direct output of my guitar so no effects and if I hit the record button here I can record the playing guitar audio [Music] so this is great and all but it just the plain audio no effects nothing on the guitar and if you're a budding guitar cover video or even just your own original guitar song it's likely that you want effects not just the plain direct output from your electric guitar so let's get into how to add guitar effects to your recording so to make your guitar video sound the way you want it and to apply guitar effects after the fact that you can change you're going to need a BSc or virtual studio technology there are a number of guitar bsts out there the one I use the one I'm familiar with is bias FX and I'll link to that in the description I've been using bias FX as well as repaired for around the past six months and it allowed me to really make my guitar sound sound really good and be able to change them on the fly so I can come up with the sound that sounds right for the song I'm playing so let's get into how to use that so first you'll need to have installed bias effects into Reaper I'm not going to walk through that right now but if you search for that I'm sure there are tutorials out there so once you have bias effects in Reaper all you have to do to get it into this song into the guitar track is to go to the FX button on a track and then you'll see all your VST is here and what I want is bias FX so I hit OK and it opens up bias FX so we'll have something selected by default but let's go ahead and create it to something else let's go to this Marshall actually let's go to this marshall jcm 900 I found this in the tone club where you can find eligibles amp builds so let's just kind of take off some of these effects and now if we play back this track [Music] so if I disable this back tear and then I hit play it's back at you well no effects applied if I just enable this effect [Music] so that's pretty cool and you can change the effects on the fly so let's say I want to try something else so we're playing something [Music] [Music] so you can just change it to whatever you want whenever you want Watts playing you can go through the different options you can choose things you turn on and off effects and it makes super easy to edit and choose what you want and the effects you want on your guitar tracks another cool thing about this is that in reaper and probably other da WS as well you can in lifetime hear the effects of the VST as they would sound so I play something now [Music] you can see that that's actually playing back with the effects applied so if I burn the effects off here and then it creates something it doesn't have the effects applied I believe that in audacity you can actually use vsts as well but not real time so you can't play something and hear how it will sound before you record you have to record the guitar single after the fact he can process it so if you're looking to use a VST I highly recommend going to something like Reaper so if your cover song or whatever you're recording is more complicated than just one guitar part it's easy to setup multiple tracks so all you have to do is just right click again insert a new track and choose your input make sure it's the right input for your app or your audio interface now what you want to do is you want to make sure that you're recording on and listening to the guitar track that you want to be so you have to disable the record arm of the first one so it won't record when you play and you just want to enable it and enable the monitoring on the track that you're about to record on and right now this one won't have any effects on it because I haven't applied the effects so you can just you can do something else even if you wanted to I'm going to bias FX again and then you can choose whatever you want so let's say the one of this one to be clean and the other track is distorted what's easy you just go to choose something so let's say what do we have here it clean [Music] so now we have a totally different sound for this track that we do for the other track so once the exit of that if you want to start recording something if you don't want to hear the original track you can just mute the original track so you have to hear that while you're recording or you can solo the track that you're trying to record on whilst we make everything else be muted and this one will stay on - you only hear this new track so you can just start recording on this new track and record whatever you want [Music] and it has four sounds and the other track they recorded so this combo of ad aw like Reaper and a VST like bias FX is really amazing it allows you to edit your guitar on the fly make it sound the way you wanted to sound and not be limited by what your initial recording sounded like I know this is a pretty simplified overview there's a lot more you can go into talking about Reaper and about vsts but I wanted to give a simple overview so you can get started recording and then you can kind of figure out more as you go along so now I thought it might be interesting to briefly look at one of my existing projects that has a lot of recorded guitar tracks and kind of walk through some of it right now in Reaper I've opened my for Whom the Bell Tolls project there are a lot of guitar tracks in this video so there's a lot of different things going on here a little bit more complicated than the last thing I showed you one thing worth mentioning and how I refer my videos is that I usually record my rhythm guitar parts twice and then I pan one to the left of number set and one to the right one percent so you have one guitar part coming out one year one side the speaker one coming out of the other this technique is really commonly used in metal guitar recording so we can actually look at an example of this because I did this in For Whom the Bell Tolls so I have a left and right track and we can listen to them right now both together one pan left one pan right [Music] okay so that's what it sounds like with both guitar tracks one pen left one pen right and now let's hear what it would sound like if you only have one guitar tracks pan to the center so it still sounds alright but it doesn't sound quite as good as it does when you have to rhythm tracks one pan left and one pan bright so just a small tip if you're going started recording that might help you out recording guitar metal parts so now that we've gotten the guitar recording taken care of let's get started talking about video so to get started talking about video I need to first mention my camera for a long time now I've been using the Panasonic Lumix G 7 I got this camera because it's one of the more affordable 4k cameras and I usually record my videos in 4k and then I edit them down to 1080p which allows me to zoom in on parts of the video without losing quality so now in terms of how I actually edit my video I use Adobe Premiere Pro it's not that cheapest option I think it's around 20 dollars a month but it has been really good for what I'm doing it's easy to find help online because there's a lot of people using it and it also works well for editing 4k video and doing more complicated things with video editing than other software if you're just starting out and want something free as an option you might want to look at whatever is under computer by default when I first started out I was using Windows Movie Maker and while it's not as full featured as the WM pro and probably won't handle 4k video it works for what it is so now let's take a look at my editing process in Premiere Pro using the for Whom the Bell Tolls video again so as you can see here we have a display of a preview of the video at the time so right now you have me playing the intro rhythm part I click ahead here there are two of me playing the other part in the intro and you kind of go through the timeline like that now you see that there a bunch of different audio tracks here the audio tracks are the ones with the sound waves the audio clips under the video are the clips from the actual video itself even though you will be using the audio from the clip itself it's useful to have both the audio from the video and from your final rendered track because you need to sync up the video and the audio so this is where we get into combining the audio with the video in Premiere Pro there's actually a nice built-in feature which allows you to sync multiple audio tracks automatically so to do that you want to select the clip that you want to sync up and then also select the audio that you want to sync it to once you have both selected all you have to do is right-click and go to synchronize and then you hit OK and if these audio clips are in different places and they need to be synchronized the clips will move to the right place and the automatically synchronized this is really nice than it works but this worked all the time it kind of depends in the audio levels of the video and how much stuff is going on in the actual song audio track so if it doesn't end up working out automatically you can also sync them up manually by looking at the audio waveforms you can zoom in on them and try to match them up exactly so that you have the video and the audio matching completely so once you have all of your video looking the way you want to look and you've watched the preview it looks good you're ready to render the video so to do this all you have to do is go to file then export then media now once you're in your export screen you can set up your settings here for how you want the video to look I have a default YouTube one that I found online and it basically just uses 1080p and uses maximum render quality and you want to make sure your start is actually at the start of the video so you get the whole thing you have to render it twice and then you just hit export the rendering process may take a little bit of time depending on how long the video is how many clips you have but once it's done you'll have your full video and all the audio ready to go and ready to upload to YouTube so I hope this gave you some insight into my recording process and I hope that if you're interested in starting recording videos of your own this gives you a good starting point but if you don't have any of this equipment if you don't have an audio interface you don't have a nice camera you can't buy Adobe Premiere Pro don't let that hold you back you can make a video with what you have right now although it won't be the best sound or video quality you can record a guitar video with your phone while you sit next to your amp and play and record the audio through your phone as well then when you're able to you can get an audio interface or a better camera and upgrade your whole setup but don't let your current equipment hold you back from doing it you're excited about if you're excited about you refer to yourself playing guitar go ahead and start right now you can also use free programs like audacity Windows Movie Maker and still make a really good video if you have any questions about my recording process feel free to leave a comment also if you have a very different recording process for me please leave that in the comment as well I'd be interested in hearing about it all links in the description to pretty much everything I mentioned in this video I wish you the best of luck in recording your own guitar videos and I'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Rachelf

Views: 523,917

Keywords: electric, guitar, metal, rachelf, ibanez, progress, how to record guitar videos, how to record guitar covers, electric guitar recording, reaper, bias fx, audacity, yamaha thr10, learn to record guitar, guitar cover tutorial, reaper tutorial, beginner guitar recording, audio interface, panasonic g7, guitar recording tutorial, record guitar tutorial, how to record guitar, guitar recording lesson, how to make guitar video, how to make guitar cover video

Id: rmSbOpOluDo

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2018