Tag: Ukulele

Bad Moon Rising (Lockdown Version)

Lockdown Ukulele Group – Bad Moon Rising

Simon Reeve Leave a comment

I have had a certain video project on my photo/ video bucket list for quite some time; the creating a grid of my fellow ukulele group players all playing the same song at home or wherever.

  • Bad Moon Rising (Lockdown Version)

Lockdown here in the UK spurred me on, as we are all locked down at home, unable to meet up at our usual pub (The George, Tunbridge Wells) for a jam 😞

The group, of which I am the current leader, is The Tunbridge Wells Ukulele Night Thing (TWUNT for short) We always start our jams with a rendition of Bad Moon Rising, and so it seemed logical to use that as our first virtual strum along, even if (with hindsight) the tone of the song might seem inappropriate.

It took longer to create this than I thought it would though! Firstly recording the audio track for them all to play to. I chose to add a drum track to play along to, to help everyone keep to time. I don’t play along with drums typically, so that was a learner 😁

I posted the audio with the simple instruction, “film yourselves playing along to the track in your headphones, making sure we can see and hear you”. I said they could use whatever device or app they like, and upload to a Google Drive folder. A bit of a gamble, but didn’t want to restrict folks to any specific device or format. Finding a method for people to upload from all the different devices proved tricky, but we got there with footage arriving to me on all the channels.

Once I had the footage, it was a simple case of aligning the clips, using the audio waveforms. I did notice that some videos seemed to play out of synch. Turned out it was variable frame/ bit rates, solved by transcoding to fixed.

Next step – arranging the different shaped videos into some sort of Grid. I cropped as best I could, but couldn’t simply go with a square, so had to manually create the tiled layout you see above. This took a while, as no matter where I moved them around, I always ended up with a gap. Then BOOM – I had the idea of filling the gap with the group’s logo and video title 🙂

I would do it again, but mabe specify they film themselves centrally on screen so I can crop to a square. Plus find a universal means of sharing the footage with me.

Thanks for reading… Time for you to watch the video 😁

It’s quiet round here…

Simon Leave a comment

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done much with this blog, but there’s a reason for that, and it’s the Ukulele.

More specifically it’s being part to TWUNT, The Tunbridge Wells Ukulele Night Thing.  Having only taken up the instrument back in May 2010, it’s grown and grown, through many a TWUNT night in the pub, to playing local gigs, to playing Chris Evans’ Carfest South 2012.

See our write up on how it went, with a wee bit of footage and photos – it was brilliant!

I am the web guy for the group, of my own volunteering and it’s nice to have a real reason for doing stuff with WordPress.  The Ukulele has impacted my life quite considerably and I’ll write that up one day.

 

 

 

 

London Moonwalk Bra @ Ukulele Night

Simon 2 Comments

Moonwalk Bra and UkuleleJust a short post..  I thought I’d attend the Tunbridge Wells Ukulele Night Thing wearing my suitably lit London Moonwalk Bra and Hat.  Put a smile on many faces, even got to pose with a pink ukulele.  To top it of, some kind folks sponsored me too.

I managed another walk last weekend – 13.5 miles @ 3.8mph.  Found it harder than last year, so will have to step up training if I’m to complete this years London Moonwalk intact!

Tunbridge Wells Ukulele Night Thing website

Simon 4 Comments

www.twukulele.com

Here’s a website www.twukulele.com, for The Tunbridge Wells Ukulele Night Thing, I’ve built and there’s quite a story behind it.

It all started when I bought my toddler son a Ukulele.  The scale of the Uke to the wee lad seemed a perfect match.  Then, by chance, I bumped into Dave Kinder who was organising a Ukulele night in Royal Tunbridge Wells and he invited me along.  Having never played guitar or uke before, I thought what the hell, I’ll give it a go.

After the first night, I was hooked and have been going ever since, and I’m not alone.  The group has grown, such that we have even played in public on the Pantiles Bandstand and appeared on TV (Meridian Tonight – Southeast).

The idea of a website, was born out of the fact that whilst we have a Facebook Group page, not everyone in the group uses or wants to use Facebook.  With the group growing in size, with songbooks, video clips and photos, it seemed the next step.

www.twukulele.com is a hobby site for me that is growing and proving a very exciting real life experiment.  I am not only the web developer, but the customer too (no excluding the rest of the group).  That gives me great freedom to experiment, in a controlled fashion, of course!

Powered by WordPress, I initially created a two column site for simple blog posts.  As content and traffic grew, I’ve widened it to 3 columns, to give me more space near the top, for the stuff I want visitors to see.

I did make and early mistake, by adding a forum and discovered forums are dangerous, as empty forums look awful and give the impression no one visits your site.  Since no conversations got going, I removed it.  We now leave that to Facebook, email and good old fashioned conversation in person.

The group has given me the opportunity to experiment with my Olympus E620 camera too.  It’s not easy photographing in a dimmly lit pub, especially when crammed full of ukulele players.  Still I managed to get enough to justify populating galleries.

Next up came video and I decided we need a YouTube channel.  Two reasons; firstly it’s saves on my web space and bandwidth (this is on a budget!), more more importantly, YouTube increases our exposure, driving traffic to the site and maybe new members to the group!

In line with that, I created a Twitter account for us and added a widget to the site listing recent tweets.  Adding the Facebook group’s badge to the site, completes the loop (for now) and traffic is on the up 🙂

Songbooks are maintained in Google Docs to save having to upload every time we add to them.

Then there’s the Newsletter module too to help us keep followers and non Facebook members up to date with latest news.

I am making use of Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and a Stats module for WordPress, to keep track of our progress.  This is really interesting, see the effectiveness of Newsletters, Tweets and Videos.

The site is being followed by other Ukeulele groups, such that we’ve had a contingent from another group join us for a session, taking our record to 45 ukuleles at once!.  We’re also seeing request to make appearences!

Who knows where this will go!

Please visit www.twukulele.com and let me know what you think – you may just find yourself joining us!