How I made Experience musical video cover

Music, Projects · 
8 mins read

In this post I’m going to explain the process behind the cover video I posted on July 18th of the song Experience by Ludovico Einaudi.

I don’t remember exactly when I discovered Experience.
I do remember, though, that I didn’t like it particularly when I listened to it for the first few times.
Sure, it was beautiful, but initially, it wasn’t giving me the sensations I was used to with other Ludovico Einaudi songs. And that’s probably the reason why I wasn’t so interested in this song for the first few listenings: until then I preferred to hear only the pure and calm sound of the piano without any other instrument “interfering”*Well, actually other instruments don’t interfere with piano, but before I still didn’t like hearing the sounds of other instruments on top of it..
The guitar, the solo violin, the cellos and (especially) the tambourine were still difficult for my ear to digest (pun intended 😁).
I’m not saying they should not be there, I just wasn’t ready to listen to them yet.

Now, unlike before, my musical tastes have evolved over time to the point of abandoning that quite limiting idea for my musical choices. I have completely understood why every instrument is there and the perfect harmony it creates with the others. I am finally ready to fully and correctly respect, value, appreciate and admire this wonderful song.

videocam Original video:

videocam Live video:

The inspiration:

There are many reasons that made me want to create a cover of Experience:

  1. Firstly, I love this song so much, it’s probably my favourite ever (even if it’s difficult to express absolute preferences when it comes to music).
  2. Secondly, when I was listening to it I was imagining how nice it would have been to see multiple copies of myself playing every part of every instrument together in synch in a kind of split-screen video like I saw in the past in other similar videos and some moments in the Einaudi’s live video. This song was perfect for it because instruments join one (sometimes more than one) after the other in progression.
  3. Lastly, the more I was listening to Experience, the more I was realizing that it wasn’t impossible to make a cover of it, considering also that I already knew how to play the piano and guitar melodies, so the idea started to seem more and more viable. Listening to it made the desire to feel the emotions of playing every instrument grow in me even more.

So, three months ago I decided to start making this project.

videocam My video:

While you are watching the video (if you haven’t already seen it), I would like to do some clarifications:

What I don’t have:

What I have:

So, as you can see, I adapted to what I had and I gave my best to get the best results possible… Of course, the sound quality, the technique and the playing of the instruments is not even remotely comparable to the original registration.
As can be seen in the list above I don’t have professional equipment, unfortunately, so the sound quality is quite poor.
It’s just me and the instruments, I can’t do better in a reasonable amount of time…

The process:

I started by listening carefully and doing a breakdown of all the instruments.

As I said before, I already knew the piano notes for this song for some time, they are very easy.
The tempo for this song (the album version) is between 92 and 93 bpm, so I used 92.5 bpm.
This song has two main (very similar) versions, but they differ in duration, tempo and instruments. Since in one it’s used the harp and in the other is used the guitar, and I don’t have a harp, I chose the latter, then realized that its part was quite difficult (but doable) to play at that tempo.

The violin part was very difficult for me because I started practising that instrument just a few months ago, in April, as a complete beginner.
I was fortunate because my fingers were already a bit trained thanks to having played piano and guitar for some years, but the violin is still a very different instrument.
If you are a musician too, I’m sure you noticed that I don’t always keep the bow correctly and straight, some notes are out of tune and several other errors in my performance. I’m aware of it and I apologize but I’m still at the beginning of my learning journey with violin.

The next part to learn was the tambourine, but since I don’t have it, I used a djembe (a typical African drum) with my left hand pressed on it as a “mute” to imitate the real tambourine sound.
The technique used to hit it is particular and took me a few days to learn. Again, excuse any error please, I am clearly a novice drum player.

quiz A curiosity: this hitting technique is also used in the “pizzica salentina”, a Salento type of tarantella, a dance technique practiced particularly in southern Italy.

Finally, I used the free Sonatina Cello sample library and FL Studio to add digitally the sound of the cello because I don’t have it too. To do this, I listened to the song and tried to guess by ear the right notes.
I think they are exactly like the original, but I could be wrong. Furthermore, sometimes I intentionally changed a bit the notes for some instruments for practical reasons.

The overall time it took to make my cover was about 3 months, even if the planning had already started a bit before.

openshot clips An approximate value of the time spent on each part of the development process. As you can see, both editing the video and learning/practising took a greater amount of time.

The software:

In post-production I used:

openshot clips This is the violin part in the OpenShot project timeline.

Trying to synch every single clip all together with the right tempo made me clash with many problems: merging multiple videos at the same time has both overloaded my PC and created audio clipping; despite these sufferings, fortunately in the end I was able to complete my job and fix (almost) everything (some audio clipping and bad synchronization are still there in some parts, but before it was much worse!).

Also sizes changed drastically (I would never have thought so much), after cutting and deleting the wrong/bad recordings:

openshot clips Oh, so satisfying…

Conclusions:

I need to thank a lot Bigcat Instruments for its free digital musical instruments, including the cello sound that I used. You can download it and other instruments in the links below1.

I think that this video would be very useful for practising, and I would be really happy if my video would help with that!
For that reason, I added subtitles with Subtitle Edit to display which instruments and when they join with the others in the song. I don’t know if it can be useful, but certainly it doesn’t hurt. 🙂
Moreover, I started to learn and practice the violin especially to play this song!

I need to say it: it was an incredible Experience! Thanks for reading.

speaker_notes Footnotes:

  1. Bigcat Instruments and other free plugins:
    Plugins4Free Bigcat plugins (and other)
    Sonatina Cello by Mattias Westlund
    Bigcat Intruments’ blog
    New website ↩


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