Quote:
Originally Posted by Carmel Cedar
Glenn, that was wonderful! Glad to see the Olson pulled out for this one, the tone suits perfectly. You really nailed it with your voice, and I loved your playing with vocal timing to make this your own. Such a timeless piece, but you brought a fresh take on it. 
The black background took me a moment to get used to - you've turned pro, after all these years! Great upgrade. I love how you keep improving and fine tuning your approach to music recording, whether it's the electric 12 string Rick to expand your sound, or new video techniques to improve the visual impact.
Great job Glenn!!! |
Hi Carmel Cedar!
Thanks so much -- you are always so supportive! Thanks for the kind words and encouragement!
I have been thinking about trying out the green screen for quite a while, ever since KevWind did a video about this technique. But I had been waiting for my wife to help me iron the cloth green screen I had purchased. She finally suggested just this last week that I should just get a hand held portable electric steamer to take the wrinkles out of the green screen after I hung it from the window frame behind me. I had never heard of this portable steamer, so we looked them up on Amazon and bought what looked like the right thing. And lo and behold, that steamer worked really great. It was so simple and took out the wrinkles like magic!
And then I remembered reading about the need for lights to properly light the green screen so then I ordered a set of lights and reflectors from Amazon and they arrived two days later. By the next day I had the lights set up, so then I started experimenting with the green screen to see if it would work in the video program. It did, much to my amazement. So then I started experimenting with all kinds of backgrounds.
I thought I had some good backgrounds picked out, so then I recorded "Yesterday" and started programming the video from the three cameras with the separate audio from my computer recording system. But then I was unhappy with the backgrounds I thought would work so well on the green screen.
So I went back to try something different. When I deleted the background image from the track that was showing up on the green screen so that I could try something else behind me, I suddenly got a black image showing up on the green screen. The blank track is just blackness from a video standpoint. I thought, hey, this is really what I wanted all along! I mean, really, does anyone want to see me playing "Yesterday" while I look like I'm in outer space??!!
(I actually had a brick wall behind me on the green screen.)
As you know, lots of discoveries happen by accident.
It's true that I keep looking for ways to do things better. I knew that from the beginning that my lighting and background stuff was not too great on my videos. So I thought I would take a break from recording videos and try to improve a little. Hopefully I will find some improvements on my next video, too.
Thanks again for the encouragement!
Also, I, too, thought that the Olson sounded good on this version of Yesterday. I tried several guitars and I ended up liking the warmer sound of the Olson. Also, the fingerstyle approach to accompaniment worked fairly seamlessly for me. I started out playing it like I used to more than 50 years ago, my version of that McCartney strumming, and then I thought, well, this sounds kind of clunky. Can't you do better than that? So I tried the finger picking approach, and then I changed the key from F to D to make the voicings sound better. Then the song seemed to fall into place where I was comfortable with what it sounded like. I know I took some liberties, but I could never do a good job of cloning Paul McCartney's voice anyway, even when I was 16 years old let alone at my age now.
- Glenn