Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Fuzz Bucket - "fuzz-simile" 3/6/2016

This video is our first attempt to record a jam session in 3 passes. So, with 2 people that means I played drums, tenor saxophone, and then soprano saxophone.  Eric started on Novax CH8 (bass/guitar) and then played a lead guitar track followed by another guitar track providing background ambience.

I don't think it's one of my favorite jam sessions but it is musical enough and we didn't hit any sour notes (none that I could hear anyway), there's just nothing that stands out, except for the fact that in the video you see our clones, so I guess that's kind of cool.  It would have been cooler if Eric had shifted seats for the third pass, if the sax cam could have been rotated left to get more of the soprano playing... But the most disappointing thing of all is the fact that the vsn mobil v.360 camera failed during the third pass because the battery had drained.  We hadn't noticed that it turned off because it was plugged in.  I had to hack together a custom tripod mount that left room for the usb cable.  The v.360 wasn't designed to be charged while it is in use so I can't really complain too much.  What I can complain about is how that thing has a mind of its own and no on-off switch.  So the previous night even though I had switched it off via the iphone app I guess it decided to wake up and do summersaults all night so that it was drained before the jam even started.

I went with black and white because the colors looked pretty bad even with a heavy dose of color grading before I gave up on it.  I think wearing black was a big mistake, but also recording in the daytime created another problem.  I think the dynamic range was drastically reduced to deal with the bright hits where there was sunlight.  And that crushed the blacks and removed any definition there might have been on my black shirt. So, I'm reduced to floating head and hands and saxophones.  Well, I think it looks okay in black and white, I'm just disappointed that I couldn't get it to look good with color.

The audio mix could be better. There were too many tracks to try to keep them separate and I didn't think it was worth the time to automate the track levels to focus on individual instruments when they showed up on camera.  Wow, is there anything redeeming about this video?  Just a bunch of clones... I should have named it "gimmick", anything would be better than fuzz-simile. What was I thinking?  The next video will be much much better... I hope.

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