How to Make Video of Yourself Playing Guitar

Lately I’ve been working at creating video based lessons on guitar. I like to teach everything from classical, to heavy metal. While I have experience both with recording composed music, and with recording and producing video, I’ve never really put them together before until lately. If you’re looking to record yourself playing guitar at home and publishing it on the YouTubes and Google Videos of the world here’s some helpful tips to make things go smoothly:

1. To get a professional look record your video with a solid backdrop. If you’ve got heavy curtains in your house that can do the trick. If not you can hang a sheet or a blanket on a wall. Pick a cool color like dark blue, purple, or black. White it you must.
2. Besides a good backdrop bright lighting is essential. To give you an idea of what I do, I record in the bedroom of my house with no less than 9 light bulbs shinning. This gives me a nice crisp bright image though. If you can pull some lamps into the room I recommend that. Another option is to record in a room that has a lot of bright sun light. Since I work at night that’s not possible for me.
3. When recording video record it from your video camera directly into a laptop. Laptops are portable and you can easily move it to be positioned close to you just off camera, or move it to different areas of the house while you’re looking for a good spot to film. Most likely where ever your PC is that’s not a good place, so you don’t want to be tied to a 70 pound machine. You can connect the two through your USB port.
4. Your camera must be on a tripod. Get a cheap one from a local electronics superstore or from an online shop like Amazon.com.
5. For recording sound I don’t recommend you use the microphone in your video camera. It’ll sound weak and have a lot of room noise captured in it. For clear powerful sound you should run a line out from your guitar amplifier’s line our, or from your amp’s headphone jack to the line in on your computer. You can then adjust the input levels using your computer and or your guitar amps volume. Likewise if you’d like to play a backing track using WinAmp, or Guitar PRO and play over that you can. Whether you’re using a Windows machine or a Mac you can capture all of the sounds playing in your computer together and dump them to the video recording along with the video.
6. Now that you have the essentials setup, I recommend you fire up Microsoft Movie Maker. You should have it on your Windows based computer system already if you have Service Pack 2.0 installed. If you’re on a Mac you’ll need to use what ever your comfortable with for recording video. Movie Maker will walk you through recording from your camera.
7. All that’s left is to get a comfortable chair, or stool, and sit in front of the computer and hit record. Microsoft Movie Maker will record you and then make it really easy to add some transition effects, edit the video and then export your video to a format you can upload into your favorite video sharing site.

The first time you do this it’ll be a learning experience. I hate to say that but it’s true. Once you’ve done it once it’ll be much easier. If you like creating hacks and processes, one thing that I did was opened a Word document and I created an outline of all the steps and details of my setup so I don’t have rethink everything if I forget it.

Good luck with your guitar video ventures.

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