December 15, 2017
Around December 10th, the accordion forum that I visit mentioned the idea of everyone that wants to, to pitch in and record their favorite rendition of Silent Night. Well, I thought it a lovely idea and a couple days later, I tried my hand at it
To my surprise and frustration, I had a lot of things go wrong for me… first I could not get a clean performance without playing it several times, but when I got a good performance, the main camera went out of focus… and after trying several times more, then it decided that it hit it’s recording time limit and I got a 1/2 song… a few more times and the battery decided to die… UGH!
Well I let it go for the night and decided to try a couple days later, but this time I fully recharged the accordion, all camera batteries and checked everything over three times before starting to try again. Of course, I had to start over at least 8 times before I got through it close to the way that I liked it.
Then I decided to try to take it one step further and employ a little techno wizardry in the form of doing it on a “green-screen” so that I could use a custom background.
The end result was quite nice and I ended up uploading it to YouTube, sharing it on the accordion forum and on my Facebook page.
Here is that video:
It was a LOT of fun, but I did have a comment that the background was kind of “cheesy” and that my contribution was not what one would call “a simple approach”. No, it’s not the simplest way, but it certainly is not the most complex version that I could have done, had I taken more time. I could have easily added 2 more cameras and done multi-cam. I could have done a highly complex multitrack recording and implemented various additional instruments.
Truth to be told… this video was done with ONE camera with a green screen behind me. The audio was mono, sent straight from the accordion to the camera audio input and is 100% original and untouched.
Add 10 minutes of work in Pinnacle Studio Ultimate and add another 15 minutes for exporting and uploading to YouTube and we are done… that’s FAR from being anything but simple!
December 17, 2017 – The Free Bass version!
I made another rendition… one that is MUSICALLY much simpler, but with a different accordion(s). Though simpler, it is a bit more unique… I played a very basic rendition with my Hohner FB36 Free Bass accordion, but with the twist of playing the melody on the LEFT hand Free Bass side, and harmony on the RIGHT hand… totally backward from how a traditional accordionist would play it. Here is that video:
Both were a ton of fun to make, and I always learn little tricks in how to improve my videos. It also shows me the weak areas of my videos, and I see that I have much to learn in how to get good sound out of my accordions on to digital medium. All things that I will improve in time.