Blink and time disappears, so here’s a little summary of the four videos I added to my Coded Notes YouTube channel.
First was a piss-take on the “reacts” and “unboxing” type videos. The guys at work suggested I make something a bit more click-bait-y, so I took the opportunity to try out a Légère reed for the first time, on camera. I’m generally lazy with my one-take-videos but this time I threw in some b-roll footage to at least attempt to level up my videos.
In short, the Légère reeds are okay, I guess. They certainly have their limitations, which may be worth a different blog post to try and explain.
Abount a month later, I figured it was time to keep the engine running and made a video for one of my students who’d been struggling to motivate himself to practice. Unfortunately he’s plagued by the “Fortnite curse”, where Fornite could be a placeholder for anything computer or internet related that kids spend far too much time doing now. Sure, I played plenty of games as a kid, but it seems to be on a completely different level now.
The idea was that I could potentially inspire some action by being the “cool teacher with a YouTube channel”, so I made video of his homework, just for him. The result was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Did it work? Maybe. I think a whole host of different nudges are getting William to play more now.
Next up was Roundabout Sax from the Sixty for Sax book, which I can’t recommend enough. It’s inexpensive and full of progressively difficult, but interesting pieces. Someone requested this piece in the comments section of another one of my videos, so I obliged. Perhaps it was the compound quadruple time that was proving challenging for this person, or perhaps they just needed some reassurance they were playing it right.
Notice at this point I’ve been getting lazy with making thumbnails.
Finally in this little batch of videos is Singing Sax from the Sixty for Sax book. I wanted to try out some microphones I was borrowing, so I picked a piece that I hadn’t yet done, is reasonably short, and highly likely to be played by students. In this video a had a couple of Rode M5 pencil mics, one above for voice and another for the instrument. The goal was to try and better control the dialog levels against that of the instrument, because some feedback was suggesting that despite my best efforts, the voice levels were not high enough. It was suggested that a two mic setup would be the best way to address this.
Audio editing is another project in itself, and projects are not something I’m short of, but it would be great to get better audio for my videos. And lighting? Ha! Did you see the mic stand shadow?
The main problem with a two mic setup is that editing in Da Vinci Resolve becomes a lot harder. I’m having to constantly adjust audio track levels depending on whether I’m speaking or playing. I’m sure there must be ways to streamline the workflow; more things to learn.
I made a recording of another piece, this time for clarinet, which uses a Sennheiser ME-66 for the voice and a Rode M5 for the instrument, but I haven’t attempted to edit that yet. Perhaps I’ll write about that later.
Coded Notes 