I am going to try and record more drum videos this year. One excuse for that is the monthly Drumeo online school collaboration. I joined Drumeo about three years ago and I feel I have learnt a lot. The most recent course I did was on sight-reading and I really enjoyed that. The next one coming up soon is on the great 1970s drummers with Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers as instructor.
The collaboration for February is Bob Marley's Is This Love. I have not attempted reggae before, but it is a nice gentle rhythm. They provide a simplified drum version that I opted for. The full one has a lot more extra beats. It uses the cross-stick technique where you hit the rim of the snare drum. I did practice this one a bit as getting the fills right took some work.
As usual I was recording on my Tama Club Jam kit with Zultan Caz cymbals. Audio is captured by the Yamaha EAD10 and video by my Motorola phone. The challenge then is to combine all the elements. For videos you submit to the collaboration they prefer you to leave off the backing track, but I wanted a version with it and they do not provide a direct download of it without the drums. Previously I Have played it back on my tablet to record on the PC, but I tried a different approach this time.
On my Linux PC (Ubuntu Studio) there is an audio system called Pipewire that lets you route audio between apps. I was sure I could record directly from the Drumeo wed site. It proved to be more complicated as the audio connection is not available until it starts playing. I then routed it into the Ardour DAW (digital audio workstation).
I used Ardour to synchronise my recording with the backing. That is not always so easy even when you can see the waveforms. I also found that there were some glitches where the stream paused for a moment, so I had to edit those out. I got it as close as I could in the end.
I edited the video with Kdenlive. Again I had to get it all synchronised, but the audio from the phone made that fairly easy. What I get from the EAD10 sounds much better. Rendering the video takes a few minutes. I am thinking of getting a new PC soon as this one is really old. I want to make use of the otpion to use a GPU for video rendering as that could be much quicker. I do not play many games, but modern graphics cards are powerful computers.
I hope you enjoy this little tune. We have some very talented drummers on Hive and all are welcome in the drumming community.
Rock on!
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