Band Promotional Video
Stars aligned. Music was played. Video is coming.
My band needed some better marketing materials to showcase our chops to prospective venues. The audience-submitted video clips and our own attempts at recording our shows didn't do the trick — the latter made difficult due to our live sound setup.
Gearing Up
Late last year, we invested in a new rack o' gear we could capture live, multi-track audio. Our digital mixer allows a single USB output to carry multiple channels of audio that can be easily broken out in the DAW for live recording of all tracks at once. In our case, we used Logic Pro that I bought earlier this year for narrating audio editions of my short fiction.
Location, Location, Location
Our band donates playtime to area charities to help them raise funds. Every year we play for a charity 5K event held by a local church. The church was kind enough to let us use event space in their basement to do the recording.
Offspring — Not the Band
My son Matthew is an active duty Marine stationed in Hawaii. In his downtime, he's been side-hustling his own company that offers photography, videography, and graphic design services. On leave this week, he shot the video and my son Josh manned the Macbook.
Go-Time
We played through ten of our favorite songs from our line-up — including tunes from Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, Stone Sour, and Kenny Wayne Shepherd. We didn't encounter any issues with the technical stuff. Everything was buttery smooth, with the exception of my Les Paul going terribly out of tune during Plush. That was our only redo of the night.
Post-Production Fun
Keith (bass player, recording co-conspirator, and good friend) and I are now working on finalizing the audio tracks. It's sofa king much fun. We should have everything mastered and ready for the video in the next few days.
For the full video, we're going to use ~60 seconds of each song with complete attribution to keep things tidy from a copyright perspective. We'll also be making some shorter clips for sharing on social media. I'll share the video here once it's ready.