I can capture myself playing and at the same time screen capture the keyboard keys playing.    I then take those two video and align them pretty closely as the audio is all in the screen capture video.    I build the final video in Adobe Premiere Elements 9 which can upload directly to my YouTube account.     I plan to build several of these learn how to play a song video in an attempt to attract subscribers on YouTube.

So how do I do the recording and mixing?   I will elaborate on that for those that might want to know.    Recording music is a complicated affair but now that I have done over a dozen songs I can produce an entrie song in a few hours.    My computer is a Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop running Windows Vista.   For capture, editing and mixing I used  Sonar LE 6 which is DAW software (digital audio workstation), Sonar LE came with my Roland Juno Stage.    

Sonar LE - tracks in Baby Blues project

For the Bass and Drum tracks I used the DR-880 EZ-Compose feature.  The Ballad Bass EZ option 6 has an underlying background tone and I used I believe a Latin option for the percussion effect.    EZ-Compose  has a 12  bar blues pattern preset so I used that and set the key to C.      The DR-880 plugs into a  USB port and I have the bass set to midi channel 3 and drum to midi channel 10.      So I record the 12 bar pattern into two midi tracks into Sonar LE.  Because the timing isn’t perfect as I don’t know how to sync things up I usually got to use the nudge feature in Sonar to move the tracks a few ticks one way or the other so the first note starts right on the beat one.    That done I copy and paste the 12 bars duplicating several times to make one long track.      I then go in using the Sonar note editor and modify the last bar or add a bar to make an ending measure that fades out.  

 The second step  I record the left hand track for 12 bars and usually replicate those 12 bars multiple times also.      The next step is recording the  right hand track and usually I play the whole song in one step.    If I do have troubles and make mistakes I’ll use the punch in and punch out feature in Sonar LE to correct.   I like to play the whole song so there will be differences in the notes, volume and rhythm otherwise the song will surely sound repetitive.    Midi track wise  I have the left hand track set to midi track 1 and right hand track set to midi track 2 and the Juno Stage keyboard range split as needed.   Often I have a different piano sound for each side of the split.

For  “Baby Blues” song I have a second right hand lead piano track.   I recorded this lead piano track using a heavy left hand on the modulation wheel which made the piano sound a bit like a guitar.   I think that was the first time I ever used that mod wheel/stick in a song and the effect sounds quite nice I think.     I recorded that track in one take just improvising and though the playing is not perfection the notes vary greatly between each set of 12 bars which gives the song some flavor.  

 I use a Behringer Xenyx FX1222 USB mixer.     USB is great because my laptop connects right to the mixer for my audio sound in and out.   So that’s three USB connects, the Juno Stage keyboard, BOSS DR-880 drum machine and Behringer mixer!      My speakers are connected to the main outs of the Behringer.

Behringer 1222 mixer , connects left to right mike, RD700, Juno Stage, BOSS DR880, output to speakers, headphone, not show in back is USB audio to computer runing Sonar LE

 I lost count of the steps but at this point what I do is play the midi tracks in Sonar LE  (which is playing the Juno Stage and BOSS DR-880 and record that mix to a new Sonar instrument audio track  via the USB audio connect from the mixer.    

Recording the vocal.      I  mute my midi tracks and sing along with my instrument audio track.  You got to listen to the sound of course through headphones while singing into the mike.  If you used speakers instead of headphones the sound is going to echo back with your vocal audio track.   The Shure SM58 microhone  is plugged into the Behringer and I have some reverb and equal effects on it the Behringer provides.     The headphones are plugged into the headphone jack of the Behringer so I can hear my voice and the instrument audio track.     I don’t why it works but I’m very glad it does in that the  instrument audio track sound going into the mixer via the USB .. does not come back to computer ..   thus all I get recording the vocal audio track in Sonar is just my voice  nothing else.      This setup my friends was a real mind bender for me to understand and accomplish and believe me seeing it all work and having everything still sync up  perfect in the tracks is a credit to how well Sonar LE works!    However don’t think I have the perfect setup here going as I do have some 60 cycle hum going on though I suspect everyone does.  

 For the dog bark sound I used the Juno Stage GM2 patch 228 dog bark sound effect.   I just put the mike in front of the speaker and put the barks in the vocal audio track.   I thought about scattering barks throughout the song but went with just 3 in the beginning and 3 at the end.     

The final step in Sonar is to use Bounce feature which mixes my vocal audio and instrument audio tracks together into a final audio track.    Of course I can preview the mix and usually I need to adjust the vocal level down just a bit and I add a bit of reverb and compression.        I take the final audio track wav file Sonar built and use Sound Forge to insert some blank space at the end and front and save it to the wav and mp3 formats I need.

 To create the sheet music in Finale Composer I save my Sonar LE project to a .mid file,  open that up in Finale and copy and paste the tracks it into my new Finale document.    Finale is a great little composer program.   I’m able to print to Primo PDF Windows Vista provides and get my nice PDF file version of the sheet music.

The music track of “Baby Blues”  is on my 2nd CD Album available on CDBABY.      The sheet music you can find on my BB Basics Files download page (see menu on right side of this page).   Follow the instructions on the Boogie Basics page on how to get the password for the download page.

Several days later I got a small package and with two DVD’s and two CD’s with ugly marker pen labels which wasn’t a good sign.     I then proceeded to look at the disks and seen most everything was compressed with Winarchive which has an file extension of  .rar.      They supplied a trial version of Winrar which work great and after a couple hours I have uncompressed 369,000 some files to a new ONEMGMIDI folder on my second 250G drive on my PC.   There were several folders on the DVD’s I skipped then some as they were labeled with foreign names on genre I’m not interested in.   

So did I get my monies worth?   Yes then some.   Surprisingly there was also some nice sheet music in .PDF format.   I don’t want to say what was on it but that alone was worth several times the cost.     The distributor of the set did warn there were duplicates and he was right on that.   It appears many of the files were downloaded by a robot via the Internet as the file names were often  like  “Mustang Sally  some.site.net” .     Fortunately it’s very easy to tell which are duplicates as you just sort the list by file size!   

So how do I find anything in a directory with hundreds of folders each with anywhere from a few to 1000′s of files?   Windows XP Desk Top search to the rescue!   I downloaded the most recent version from Microsoft.com.   Then I right clicked on the Properties of my ONEMGMIDI folder.     Under advanced options there is a make Search enabled option, I clicked on that and then came back an hour later after Windows indexed the files.   Luckily the file names for the most part are very good for searching on with blanks between words in the song title.    For Desktop Search  to find them I had one more step and that was to add my ONEMGMIDI folder to it’s list of file folders it searches.

WOW …  it works great !!!!     I search for the word  like  “Mustang ” and get back  a list of 60 entries for the song Mustang Sally.  There are many  duplicates but still probably there are 5 different good versions along with 10 short demo and simplified versions.    I searched for  ”Art Tatum” and found a folder with like 80 excellent songs he is featured on.      I’m very happy with this purchase, this will save me a lot of time in the future.   Quite often a MIDI file version will have tracks that are pretty close to the original recording which often is a version too difficult for me to play or the piano and keyboard tracks are boring background fillers.   What I look for is a piano based arrangement of a song that has a good bass for my left hand and a nice piano lead for my right .. then I’m all set!!!!