I’m continuing to crank out educational videos for Play With Your Music. Part of the process involves remaking old videos as both my chops and the facilities in NYU’s Blended Learning Lab improve. Here’s my series on the basics of rhythm:
We’ve made several improvements, some technical, some creative. The most immediately noticeable one is multiple camera angles. NYU’s Blended Learning Lab now has three cameras instead of just one. We can now cut back and forth between various angles, rather than showing a continuous talking head shot. It doesn’t seem like it would make such a big difference, but it does.
The Blended Learning Lab people have a very specific process they want you to use for shooting educational videos:
- Prepare and rehearse extensively.
- Shoot live continuous takes until you get a good one.
- Upload the good take video straight to the web with no editing or other post-production.
These guidelines make sense given the typical users of the Lab: professors who are adept lecturers but inexperienced video producers. I was initially fine with the live lecture format; it suits my style, and I like the immediate gratification. However, the Lab’s workflow has some problems when it comes to talking about music. First of all, the smartboard in the room requires the use of PowerPoint, which is a lousy audio player. Everything is unpredictable: the file linkages, the volume levels, even the size and shape of the little speaker icon. I’ve spent half my sessions just fiddling with PowerPoint.
The bigger problem with the live-take approach is that whenever music is playing, I have to just stand there on camera awkwardly until it’s done. Even if the audio segment is only fifteen seconds long, that’s still an eternity in on-camera time. I learned from experience that talking over the music is a bad idea, because the speech is unintelligible and the music is harder to pay attention to. For this round of videos, I was blessed with the help of an intern with some video experience, and we decided that it would be smarter to replace all the music with “music plays here” placeholder slides, and then edit the music in afterwards overlaid with a static “album cover” image.
I’m a good off-the-cuff speaker, so I don’t write scripts or rehearse. For me, the bulk of the work in making these videos continues to be assembling slideshows, especially the graphics. The first video covers rhythm basics, which I like to talk about using different visualization schemes. I’m especially fond of this graphic by Godfried Toussaint showing eight different notations for son clave.
The fifth notation system in Toussaint’s graphic is the Time-Unit Box System. It’ll be familiar to anyone who makes electronic music, since it’s the basis for all drum machine interfaces.
The second video talks through some noteworthy grooves from funk, rock, hip-hop and Afro-Cuban music. In addition to Time-Unit Box System notation, I also show the beats using a circular rhythm visualization scheme borrowed from my masters thesis:
If you’d like, take a look at my collection of beats transcribed in Time-Unit Box System notation.
The third video discusses swing.
Next week, I’m going to re-shoot the video series on the basics of chords and scales. The Lab recently acquired a very nice MIDI keyboard, so that’ll be a big improvement to my just talking about these things in the abstract. I’ll post those here along with some process documentation when they’re done.