New YouTube video. Links to all apps below.
🎬 Creating a Song Remix Project for Your Music Class using Soundtrap and Neural Mix Pro
UPDATE: I talk about this project on the latest episode of my podcast, as well as two other Soundtrap project ideas. Listen and subscribe below.
Last week I mused on Twitter about the subject of teaching harmony to middle school students.
In the opening Tweet of that thread, I shared a project idea for my middle school General Music II class and provided a sample of student work. Be sure to read the whole thread for more context.
🧵I am doing remix assignments in @Soundtrap with my middle school General Music II class. They submit songs, vote on them, and then I extract the vocal line and make a template with the tempo/key matched so that the loops sound decent. Here is a recent student submission: pic.twitter.com/D52vahdNDa
— Robby Burns (@robbyburns) April 12, 2021
Here is a brief description of how I set that up.
If I don’t have the track, I use Downie or ViDL to download it from YouTube as an mp3.
For the vocal track, I am using Neural Mix Pro, which allows you to import any song and separate the voice, drums, and other accompaniment parts separately from one another. The results aren’t perfect, but they are beyond acceptable for a project like this.
Neural Mix Pro.
Once I turn down the drums/accompaniment, I export the resulting sound as a new file on my computer. On export, Neural Mix will tell you the key and BPM of the exported track. If the song is something awkward like 83.6 BPM, you can tell it to export at something sane like, 84 BPM and Neural Mix will adjust the final file accordingly.
Neural Mix isn’t cheap. It’s 50 dollars. But it does the job quickly and reliably while offering the user good control over the results. If you do not have access to something like this, there are tons of places you can find isolated vocal stems, like for example, the reddit community r/IsolatedVocals
In Soundtrap, I set the project up using my district’s LMS, Canvas. If you are using an LMS, you should be able to create an assignment and have it link out to Soundtrap as an “external tool.” If you can do this, you can create a template in Soundtrap that will already be set up for your students when they click the link.
When I set up this template, I set the project’s key and tempo to match that of my exported file from Neural Mix. I drag the vocal-only track I exported from Neural Mix from my desktop into Soundtrap and it automatically makes a new audio track for me. Once the vocal track is imported, I have to slide it around left and right until the first measure of the song lands precisely on beat one. If the vocal part has an introduction or pickup note, you will need to consider that and make sure to tell your students that the loop accompaniment starts on a different measure than one.
Set your project key and tempo to match the song.
Once this is set up correctly, save the results. When choosing Soundtrap as the external tool for your LMS assignment, a mini Soundtrap shows up within your LMS (or at least it does in Canvas), and you can navigate to your pre-made template. Having the tempo and key preset for them ensures that the loops all sound mostly decent. It is still possible to wreak chaos, but it is enough structure that some of the loops will end up sounding pleasant.
There is a video at the top of this post covering everything I just explained. Hope it helps.
🎬 My Online Learning Welcome Video
Teachers in my district were tasked with making a welcome video introducing students to the first week of distance learning.
After denying several times that I would put any serious effort into this project, I inevitably got carried away and spiraled down a rabbit hole of apps, workflows, and tricks. Musicians and teachers are feeling a special kind of hunger right now to be creative. I am thankful for software and internet connected tools that help me to communicate in a unique way.
First, enjoy the video below:
The video was produced with the following software:
Apple Clips App
Apple Clips App might be the only one of these apps you need. It is a free Apple app that is kind of like a cross between iMovie and Photo Booth. Its intended purpose is to make quick, engaging videos, designed to be shared in the age of Instagram Stories.
Clips is how I got my Memoji head to appear on my body. It will also automatically caption your video for you. It can bring in numerous effects, call outs, emoji, backdrops, and can even do still images of words. You could make a video that accomplishes the same general effects as mine in next to zero effort using only Clips.
Clips allows you to integrate Animoji, Filters, Text, Stickers, and Emoji to your live video.
Clips automatically adds captions in a style you like. You can edit them after the fact.
You can record yourself speaking over static posters to communicate information in an engaging way.
iMessage
iMessage is where I made my Memoji. It is also another place that you can get a Memoji head on top of your body (see screenshots below). I used this method for a few scenes in the video, instead of Clips, because it can shoot in landscape view. Clips produces square video only.
An alternate way to film yourself with a Memoji head is to open up a text message conversation to someone or yourself.
Select the camera icon right above the keyboard, and then tap the effect button in the lower left corner.
Next, select the Animoji icon, and then select your own Memoji.
Final Cut Pro X
Final Cut is an industry standard video editor. It is currently free for 90 days. If you know iMovie and want to go deeper, this will be the easiest option for you.
I used Final Cut to dump all of my audio, video, and photo assets, and to mix them all down into the final product. I didn’t use Final Cut to do anything iMovie can’t do except for the fancy moment where multiple videos show up on top of the main video at once (and it was very important to me that it do this).
ScreenFlow
ScreenFlow is like the iMovie of making screencasts. It can do fancy video automations and call out things happening on the screen (like mouse clicks, taps, type our whatever your keyboard is doing, etc…)
ScreenFlow’s editing tools are almost as easy as iMovie and it is so powerful, I probably could have probably made the entire video in it. There is a free version if you don’t mind a watermark on the final product.
Keynote
Keynote is what I used to make the nice slides with information. I used ScreenFlow to record my screen as I tabbed through the presentation in time along to an audio recording of my voice over.
Logic Pro
Apple’s premiere audio editing software. Free for 90 days right now. If you have used GarageBand, the basics of Logic will feel familiar to you. I used it to record some of the voice overs in the video but it is frankly unnecessary. I just wanted to use my nicer microphone and it happened to be plugged into the Mac I already use to edit audio in Logic.
Downie
Downie is how I downloaded some video and audio assets from the web to my Mac’s hard drive.
Permute
This is a beautiful and fuss-free Mac app that converts video and audio from one file format to another.
Prompt Lite for iPad
This free teleprompter allows you to write a script and have it appear in large text on your iPad’s screen. It automatically paces through the words as you read them.
Others
I also used OmniOutliner to outline the original ideas, BBEdit to write the script, and YouTube to publish, but those are largely unnecessary.
If this seems overwhelming, I assure you that you could make close to the same result in just iMovie or Apple Clips with next to zero effort. I have been locked inside for weeks and wanted to learn some of the skills required to polish up a video in Final Cut. I hope you enjoyed it.