Behind the scenes – how to make a multitrack music video
As you may or may not know, I’m a keen a musician and arranger. In my spare time I like to record my brass quintet arrangements and publish regular multitrack videos on my YouTube channel.
With so many musicians and music teachers isolated at home right now, I’ve been getting a heavy stream of questions about how these multitrack videos are made. So I spent some time this weekend making a tutorial.
I am trying to find out how I can purchase a copy of the brass quintet version of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” P;ease advise.
Where I can secure copyright, my arrangements are published on Musescore. You can find them there by searching, or check the link in the YouTube video description.
We have downloaded a number of your excellent arrangements from musescore but they are not all available. Are you likely to publish any of the Xmas ones in the future?
Have you tried publishing on ArrangeMe? They sort out copyright issues for you … either you can publish a particular title with them or not. When you can it works REALLY well.
Love your musicianship!
Nah – I publish my scores on Musescore.com which feels like a better fit for me for now. It’s been a great place to get exposure, interact and learn from other arrangers, and contribute to the open source Musescore software. I particularly appreciate that my scores can be downloaded from Musescore.com in an open source notation format XML, allowing others to make minor adjustments as needed (eg for their instrumentation). As an end-consumer, I want this flexibility when I buy sheet music. So as a creator, I want to distribute my scores on a platform that passes on those freedoms to others.
I do note that Hal Leonard (owns ArrangeMe) has recently been acquired by Muse Group (owns Musescore.com) – I am interested to see how that partnership unfolds. I rather hope that a few years from now we might see an integration of Musescore.com and ArrangeMe, bringing maturity to Musescore.com’s licensing model, and giving arrangers flexibility to make their scores available for free (to members, per Musescore.com’s current model) or as paid scores (per ArrangeMe’s model). This would bring together the best of both platforms, IMO.
Hello,
I really appreciate you making this video! I was wondering, how do you use the metronome so that each player/part starts and ends at the same time in recording? And how would you change the metronome for rits, accels, and tempo changes?
Thank you!
I use Logic’s Metronome, so there is always a steady click going in one ear while I record each part.
Good question. I use a few different methods, depending on the scenario. Here is an excellent tutorial briefly describing the mainstream methods (again, in Logic Pro, my preferred audio editing software). I do occasionally use a few of my own methods for particular scenarios. For example:
1. Do the complete recording of each part at a single,steady tempo.
2. Edit to get everything perfect (minus the tempo changes, rits, pauses etc) and export the track.
3. Import that track into a completely fresh Logic project, and apply tempo mapping.
There is zero chance of any single part being out of time with the others using this method because the tempo changes are being applied cohesively to the fully mixed track. On the downside though, you have to plan ahead a bit – thinking about which notes or rests might need to be extended a few extra beats in recording stage, to allow for artificial tempo changes applied in post-production. Another thing that needs to be carefully controlled is any kind of background noise which may sound totally natural in a real-time recording, but decidedly odd once time is slowed or sped up (breathing, fiddling with valves etc).
Hope that helps!