Hello Everybody! Welcome to our Community Jams holiday keepsake video project. This year we’ve chosen to do a mashup of Blue Christmas and White Christmas, starting with the A chord on the verse. Please use the song chart on the bSteele Music App called “Blue Christmas / White Christmas Medley.”
We are using a backing track with a click track to help everybody synch up. You’ll need to be able to hear the click track in headphones, while recording your performance on video. Here is the backing track download link on Google Drive:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BCKnePE9OWZ89KvX_AjpQnY51-qPfLC/view?usp=sharing
You will need:
- A device to play the backing track, using headphones
- A video recording device, such as a phone or webcam
- A quiet room for recording ‘off the air”
For our example, let’s assume you are using a phone to play the backing track, and a webcam/computer to record. You would follow these steps:
1. Start with headphones unplugged, and the phone playing over speakers into the room normally.
2. Start video recording on computer.
3. Start backing track on phone. It will remind you to leave headphones unplugged, and then it will play a 1-second high-pitched synch tone into the room, to be recorded by the computer off the air. You will have ten seconds to put your headphones on and prepare to record. Put headphones on, and wait for the click-track intro now on your headphones.
4. The click-track will count 2 four-measure bars, followed by a voice counting in “1-2-3-4-1 …”, after which the pickup notes start for Blue Christmas.
5. Start playing/singing the song, following the chart, Blue Christmas first, starting with the pickup phrase “I’ll have a …” immediately following the count-in. So, when counting in, if you were singing, the combination should sound like
TICK-tick-tick-tick-TICK-tick-tick-tick-one-two-three-four-one – “I’ll Have A Blue ….”
6. Switch to the White Christmas chords and lyrics for the second set of verses, but sing either White or Blue Christmas verses for the last mashup part (noted as lyrics for both)!
E-mail your finished video file (or a link to your file on Google drive) to communityjamspdx@gmail.com by Dec. 20th, and we’ll compile everybody’s submissions into a single video!