Raven's Art Shack: January 2012

Hi there. I hope you enjoyed your new year! I made a music video that I hope you will like.
genre: instrumental, classical.
duration: 4:53.
sounds: piano, orchestral strings, xylophone, marimba and flute.

All sounds came from keyboard including: piano, orchestral strings, xylophone and flute. I hooked up the audio interface with to the keyboard's audio jack and computer and speakers. I recorded straight into audacity software (free open source). I adjusted volume levels. When I pressed the record button I was filled with anticipation as my fingers hit the keys. I was improvising. The fun part came when I layered the recorded xylophone sounds with more piano chords. I stopped the recording and listened for artifacts: pops and clicks. I like Audacity because it makes recording simple and it has useful features like noise removal and clip fix and sound smoothening. I exported my musical pieces to wav file so that I could mix them in LMMS software ( free open source) If you don't have a midi keyboard and audio interface you could still make music with LMMS because it has its own virtual instruments and numerous effects and is compatable with many vst plug ins. Mixing music is an art form in itself that I am learning. It is a good idea to place each musical piece in a separate track to adjust the volume separatly plus adding effects like amp and reverb.

Making an animated photo with GIMP (free open source) is simple. You need two photos of the same size. I wanted to make it seem as if the keys were popping out of the typewriter. I first reduced each photo to one letter like "W". So I added a few keys as layers on the photo. When it came time to animate I simply added the second and third photo as layers. I changed the file extension to .gif. I click save as animated Gif. Do not save as flattened photo because this would result in a still photo. I adjusted the the delay to 319 milliseconds. I select to replace each frame. When I used the image in windows movie make each animated gif lasts about 5 seconds on the time line. The bigger the photo the more bytes are used. A simple three layer animated gif in 640 x 480 could use about 600 kilobytes but a two layer gif made of 1600 x1200 image could make a 1.5 MB.

Happy Creating! :)