Monday Drumday: Chasing perfection

This has been a bit of a frustrating exercise. I just wanted to record a video, but the computer had other ideas. I use Ubuntu Studio (type of Linux) and have a program called guvcview that can record from a webcam. It is very configurable and I had it working nicely. At the weekend I installed the latest Ubuntu update that brings new versions of most of the applications. That ran smoothly and everything seemed fine until I tried to make my video.

I saw that Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol was available on Drumeo as a backing track and it was rated as easy. It actually only has drums on about half the song, but there is some variety in the patterns. These are pretty standard apart from one bar towards the end where it reverses the normal beats. I slightly messed that up on the recording and it took me a moment to get back into the groove.

I started off just recording as usual, but when I played it back I found that the audio was out of sync with the video. This is a problem I had before, but I thought I had solved it. It may be that something in the update messed it up again. I tried some other apps, but none was doing what I needed.

I had to resort to alternative methods. I cannot just record with my phone as that will mainly pick up the sound of me hitting the drums and those do not sound so good. I needed to capture the sound going into the PC. For that I used Audacity. Then it was a matter of combining the two and I used Kdenlive for that. By looking at the audio from the phone I can match it up to the better audio from Audacity .The result is not too bad, but I wasted some time.

I was using my new drumsticks. I thought I would try some with nylon tips for a change. They will not make much difference on my electronic kit, but they are lighter than the others I have due to being maple rather than hickory. There is also slightly less chance of them catching on the mesh drumheads.

Rock on!