Musical Fun with Disturbed and a 7-String

Because all work and no play makes Jack, or in this case Eric, a dull boy, I decided to try out a quick experiment.  I’ve used a combination of some ear training, and Camtasia to make this a fun project.

I’m a fan of somewhat heavier music, and Disturbed recently came out with a new album.  I decided to learn the song The Light from the new album Immortalized.  This was a chance to muck around with some video editing fun to see how I could produce the video with a few elements.

The equipment I used for this was my Macbook Pro camera which was the top left version in the frame.  The bottom right is a Logitech HD external mounted on a Gorillapod that grips around the headstock of my Ibanez 7-string guitar.

Audio in this case is the original audio track as I didn’t have time to refine the output/input stream to push my live guitar into the mix.  That will be the next iteration.

There is also one section towards the middle where you will hear some guitar elements that aren’t being played.  That is the second guitar in the band, and I have to master that section before doing a third camera run to show those parts.

Video was recorded in real time with the backing track, and manually synced up for two video tracks.  It was surprisingly easy to get the video elements into Camtasia, but you can see that there are some tiny sync issues between video and audio in spots.

You may also see slight variations in the fingering.  Remember, this is two separately played guitar videos synced up over the original audio.  That’s my disclaimer to why it may look slightly off in spots 🙂

The original guitars are not 7-string guitars from what I know, so this just happens to work because the low B on my 7-string is the bottom chord for most of the song.  I imagine they use 6-string guitars that are heavily tuned down, or an open alternate tuning.

All in all, this is just a sample of how we can take a break from the data center and use the technology to have a little fun.  If I was a real good person, I’d transcribe the notes, but I literally learned this in the last day or so by ear, and I can’t read or write music.  Hopefully this is a little bit of a fun and musical break from the usual blog post.

Enjoy!

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