Hymn Project #2: Amazing Grace

This is the last project of the year and I chose the hymn "Amazing Grace". 

I started with GarageBand for the music and finished with iMovie for the video. 

If you want to know how to create a video with your own music, check my last article (here is the link).

Hope you enjoyed!!!

Hymn Project #1: Glory Be To Jesus

The new project begins with GarageBand: File-->New-->Empty Project-->Software Instrument.
The first thing we have to do is creating a MIDI region in order to insert the hymn in GarageBand. The melody of "Glory be to Jesus" can be disassembled in four different parts: soprano, alto, tenor and bass. We need to create then four MIDI sections, one for each part.

Soprano

On the right you can see the screenshots of the four MIDI regions that we have to create in GarageBand.

Alto

Tenor

Once we have the music, we have to look for the instruments: which instruments play in an orchestra? We can search on the web and the results will be similar; we need a woodwinds, brass and a strings section. For each section then we have to know which part of the hymn each instrument will play: Wikipedia offers all information that we need for this choice.

Bass

Now on GarageBand we just have to select all the instruments that we have chosen and copy one or more MIDI section (from the firs that we created) in that instrument.
At the end, with all the instruments, it will look like below.

If you prefer the organ you can add it in the place of the piano

At the end we have 32 

When you finish go on Share-->Song to iTunes; now you have the MP3 version of the hymn that you can put on iMovie so that you might start editing the video.

Now open iMovie. File-->New Movie. Now you have to add the music (the MP3 file that you saved with iTunes) on the bottom of the iMovie project (as you can see in the screenshot below).
To add a slide, click on Titles, in the bottom left corner of iMovie; you now can see all the themes: drag the one that you prefer in your timeline to create the slide. Drag on the top of a slide to change its length in order to make it last for the whole verse. You can now choose the pictures for the slides; to add a picture to a slide, just drag the picture (or its file) in the slide and click on Replace. We want to add a cropping: click on the slide, then go to Adjust-->Cropping and choose the one you prefer; we used the Ken Burns crop to make the picture moving around the screen.
We still have to add the lyrics of the hymn: double click on a slide to add a text; write or paste your lyrics on the slide and adjust the time in order to obtain a perfect transition between slides, verses and music.
Now that your project is finished go to File-->Share-->Theater to export your movie and create a version of it that you can share on YouTube or keep in your computer.

Here is my Hymn: Glory Be To Jesus.

As usual thank you for reading my blog, I hope that my instructions are enough clear and easy to understand. Enjoy!

Commercial Project #2: UEFA Respect and Quesadilla, by Walk the Moon

New project, new commercial, new song: this time I chose the UEFA Respect commercial, that you can find below.

This time the song has something special: since the commercial was presented 2013 and UEFA is the "Union of European Football Associations", I looked for a song from the soundtrack of the most famous soccer video game, FIFA 2013. The song is Quesadilla, by Walk the Moon (here its link). 

First of all I downloaded the commercial and the song from youtube using this website (link).
I created a new project in GarageBand and I moved the video in the new project, as I had done with the Project #1 (here the link of that project). 
The real problem was editing the song: its length is more than 3 minutes, while the commercial is 30 seconds. I wanted to keep a part of the beginning and the refrain for this project and it took me three hours to find the exact 30 seconds that could fit in the commercial. For this part of the work I used Audacity, and if you read my older posts you can find everything about how to use that program. Below you can find the screenshot of my editing in Audacity.

After I saved the new edited song, I put it in GarageBand with the commercial and it looked like below.

When you have the song and the video on GarageBand, you need to silence the music of the video, so that you can have the song as a soundtrack for your commercial. If you want to know how to do it, check my previous project (here its link).
The problem now are the sounds present in the original commercial. In my video there are three sounds: the clapping hands in the beginning, the whistle of the coach and the whistle of the referee in the middle of the video. Since I had silenced all sounds of the original commercial, I had to look for those three on youtube. When I found them, I downloaded them (they were three different videos) and I edited them with Audacity. When they were ready and really close to the sounds of the original commercial, I added them in the GarageBand project, with the video and the new song. It looked like below.

At this point the project was finished, so I opened it as a movie and I saved it as a video, with the new song as soundtrack and the three sounds effect added at the end. Below you can find the new commercial.

I hope you enjoy my work. If you have any questions write a comment below!

Dance Project #2: Cinema, by Benny Benassi

As soon as we finished with the Dance Project #1 (link of my work), we started with a new one. But before that we needed to learn something really important: every song can be divided in beats, mostly 8. Even you can try to find the beats in your favorite song: you just need to listen to it and "keep an ear on" the bass; the first beat is usually the strongest one, and after that you can start count (following the rhythm of the song) till you hear another stronger beat (that will be the first again). 
After we tried to count the beats of many songs, we had to choose our song for the next project: I chose "Cinema", by Benny Benassi (here the link of this AMAZING song).
For the editing this time we thought about car commercials: when there is a song it these kind of TV commercials they can't use the entire song, because it's too long and because what they want is the refrain.  
We imported the song in Audacity and it looked like Pic#1. 

Pic#1

We listened to our song and we noticed that is really easy to individuate a single beat. 

Single Beat

We started editing: what we looked for was the beginning, the refrain and the final parts of the song we had chosen. We did again what we had done for the Dance Project #1 (link of my project and its article). It looked like Pic#3. 

Pic#3

When I finished editing I exported the file in WAV format in iTunes and I created a MP3 version of it. Below you can listen to the project completed. ENJOY!!

Dance Project #2

Editing of the AMAZING Benny Benassi's song "Cinema"!! Enjoy. 

Dance Project #1: Audacity Editing

For our first audio editing we used Audacity (link for the download). This program is really intuitive and easy to use and we followed instructions given by our teacher Mr. Witte (link to instructions)
First of all we imported the track "I like that" by Chingy (given from Mr. Witte) into Audacity and it looked like Pic#1. (It is better to create a copy, so you know you will have the original song saved on your computer). 

Pic#1

We wanted to cut all the middle part of the song, leaving just the beginning and the end. So we started cutting parts of the track: you just need to select the part you need with the mouse, as you do when you use Word or Pages; then, keeping the part selected, you need to go on Edit-->Clip Boundaries-->Split New and Audacity will past it in another level. After you do so for the other parts you want to cut, it will look like Pic#2. 

Pic#2

After we deleted the original track we had a new song. 
We exported it in from Audacity saving in WAV. (In Audacity: File-->Export, then set the name, the format and where you want the file as you like, then Save)
At this point we noticed that Audacity allows you to convert the track you edited in more that 12 file formats: we studied 11 of them and we wrote a presentation to show the difference between each one of these formats. (link of my presentation posted on "Marco Domenichelli and Music Technology") 
Since we couldn't export the song in the MP3 format, we put the WAV version in iTunes and we created a MP3 version of it through iTunes (in iTunes: Control-->Click on the song--> Create MP3 Version). 
We put both versions in iTunes and we had now two different versions of the same song: we listened to the difference between the MP3 and the WAV.  
Lastly, we posted the MP3 version on SoundCloud using our own profile (link of SoundCloud).

Dance Project #1

This is my first edited file audio. Enjoy!