Rube Goldberg Drum Recording Setup

So I thought it would be kind of neat to be able to record my playing of the drums without the need to have someone actually film or to have to actually record the sound out of the amp with the other room noises. I didn't want to have to obtain any new equipment but I didn't realize how many steps it would require to make it work.

So this is what I roughly ended up with.

The camera being used is a 'bullet' camera that I had from my Zero-G trip a couple years ago. It is velcro-strapped to a mic boom that I had from a Rockband game video spoof that I made a month or so ago. The feed from the camera goes to my mini-dv camera for recording and as a make-shift video monitor along with the remote camera's battery pack and the LANC for triggering the camera. The camera on the boom has a microphone but the only thing I use it for is to help sync the video when I edit later.

The audio comes directly from the Roland TD-6. I am taking both the line out as well as the MIDI into Garageband on the Macbook. I ended up just using the line out audio but having the MIDI data is useful. The music I was playing along with came through an iPod going through the mix-in on the TD-6 which made its way through with the rest of the audio signals to the laptop.

Putting everything together requires just about as many steps..

Exporting the audio out of Garageband to be usable in my video editing software requires converting the .m4a to something else (I used mp3 this time). The video is more complicated. My camera does not support USB/Firewire/etc. output so I had to go a more 'analog' route. Going from the camera to the computer I used a USB tv-tuner and a collection of various adapters and splitters to manually capture the data off the dv tape.