Youtube gear demo recording setup?

TimmyO

Eh up.

I'm toying with the idea of doing some gear demos, because Youtube clearly needs more of this ;-) 

Nah, just for fun really.

Anyone do this and have any learning points to share?

Staring at the beginning of the chain, my preference would be to capture room sound rather than close mic - I've seen more demos where the sound left me cold that were close mic'ed than was the car for room recordings.

That being the aim, what's a decent mic to look for? One of these Blue USB things or something else?

Something as simple as the newish Sonicport with miss built in, or not enough low end response on something like that? 

The benefit of an option like that would be I don't need a separate interface of course.

If that's likely to be shit, any suggested interfaces? I have a PC and a MacBook Pro - I'd lean toward being able to use the Macbook, but that's not essential. 

Video-wise I'd probably use an iPhone on a mount.

Anyway, be keen to hear others' setups and experiences.

Tim

PolarityMan

If you're doing a room recording then imo you ened to be able to play loud enough taht the mic isnt really picking up and acoustic sound from the guitar.

Also chugging one chord and sweeping the settings is more informative than the widdly widdly.

Jez6345789

I think if your going to mike up then probably close and ambient works unless you can play loud enough with ambient to drown out the clank of the guitar. Also lighting is cheap and helps greatly in showing stuff off iPhone camera look loads better if there is adequate light. Any half decent interface should get you there. If using an amp then usually it needs to be something people understand and is fairly neutral, blues junior type thing. No point having a massive rig that imposes its own signature on everything or the annoying jazz German Gregs guitars where no matter what guitar he plays he makes it sound the same and nether shows off the difference. Look forward seeing them

goldtop

I'm a brand-newbie to Youtube, and only last week uploaded my first two short clips. Both were done on a Zoom Q3HD about 1m away from the speaker, so captured a bit of room sound, too. It may seem obvious, but maybe not: the AGC was turned off (I hate gear reviews where the AGC kills any idea of dynamics).

One clip is here (apologies, it's an ad, mods please feel free to delete, etc)

As PolarityMan says, acoustic noise can be an issue. One clip was of the 0.3W amp cleanish and you can hear the strings being played, especially if you listen on headphones. The recording approach I used previously was a Palmer speaker emulator (zero room sound), but just for making audio clips. I was very happy with the sound captured by the Q3HD's mics. There's also a line in, so I could use the Palmer with the Q3.

Might try that next. The reason I want tostick with the Q3 is that I want to avoid any latency/sync issues, so I favour getting the Q3 to do all of the audio and video recording work, and then editing on PC. (FWIW, I was amazed how long it took me to edit/annotate - even this little clip.)

TimmyO

Hi goldtop - that's really interesting thanks!

thomasross20

I did these two recently:

The mic was fairly close to the amp but not that close. You can still hear some acoustic string noise. I use a Zoom H2n. 

I use a Canon G7X for the video. TBH I've not had time to suss it out properly so set it to auto for now (not the best as AF can blur things when you move a little, but it's ok in those vids). 

Unfortunately no mic input to the G7X (which is its only downside IMO) so have to sync audio & video separately. 

For gear demos, mics defo. Otherwise I'd (at some point) like to record into a DAW. 

I use Lightworks for video editing. It's powerful so takes a lot of resource and it's free but only outputs to 720p (which is all you need for YouTube) in the free version and has a steep learning curve.