Sarah Jarosz singing with virtual band - Ring Them Bells - The Americana Sessions

Details

Description

This was a fun project where I took the sound track of Sarah's studio session (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8avSGnZlnaY) featuring only her voice and the 8-string mandolin and added the rest of the virtual "band" (drums, bass, organ) to it.

After importing the original video into Cockos Reaper, I had to make Reaper's MIDI grid stay in sync with her free (no-metronome) performance. You can find a video showing this process in my youtube channel. I ended up matching the DAW's grid/metronome to the varying tempo of her performance. After that, I started beefing up the arrangement by adding virtual drums (a variety of brushed drum patterns from EZDrummer 2), an electric bass (from free Magix Independence VSTi) and a virtual Hammond B3 organ (AIR DB-33), icl. a bit of rotary Leslie effect. As I'm not a keyboarder, I had to draw in all notes and controllers into Reaper's MIDI editor for each intrument.

Finally, I rendered the new mix as a wave file and replaced the original video's audio track with it.


You can find a "making of" video where I explain how I created this video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRDPMVKinMA