Building Bowcott’s Bunker – and Making It Better!

Working remotely is nothing new to me; I spent the last few years of my lengthy tenure with Marshall Amplification doing it. Plus, as a freelance journalist, I’ve “remotely” written countless magazines articles, lessons, columns, and features over the past 35 years, and I’ve had the good fortune to pen several books, too. So, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit us all, I wasn’t overly phased by the prospect of working from home. That said, it posed a new challenge, as my job at Sweetwater calls not only for writing a bunch of inSync articles, but it involves a lot of video creation, too. Granted, I have been given more than enough writing tasks to keep me far beyond busy, but the latter is something I really wanted to continue whilst in this time of isolation. Why? There are three main reasons:

• I really enjoy the challenges and creative paths that making videos brings to light.

• I teach guitar at the Sweetwater Academy in the evenings and on Saturdays, and nothing gives me greater joy than helping a fellow guitarist a little on their musical journey. And, as COVID-19 had caused the Academy to close its doors weeks before the stay-at-home order, I needed a way of getting my teaching fix!

• A lot of my videos have a teaching bent anyway, and I genuinely enjoy paying forward whatever knowledge I may have gleaned over my decades of working in this weird yet wonderful industry.

Baby Steps

Because of the above, I dreamed up the idea of Bowcott’s Bunker — a series of short, low-tech, no-budget, isolation teaching videos filmed at home, alone, using my phone. The proposed portal? Facebook. This seemed like a pretty sound and simple plan on paper (don’t they all?!), so I decided to make the first one on my own time over a weekend so I could pitch it to our team. And that’s where the fun and challenges began, as this was totally new turf for me!

The first installment of Bowcott’s Bunker. Low-tech, no-budget, no-clue, redefined…

Those challenges were:

• Creating a suitable “home alone” set and lighting it in a camera-friendly way — not an easy task, as I quickly discovered. I ended up draping all the windows in my chosen room and drafting five lamps from various rooms to do the lighting. Avoiding and eliminating reflective glares took a while… and the angle of my guitar had to be just right, too. Darn!

• I wanted to use at least two different camera shots to make the video more interesting and also informative to watch — a wide one for the speaking parts and a close-up for the playing parts so the viewer could see both hands clearly. But I’m only using one phone, so I had to do all the wide shots at one time and then all the close-up playing parts later. Thus, keeping a well-documented track of “what was where” became critical so I could put the jigsaw together correctly and painlessly at the end — and hopefully not forget to capture something!

The view from both sides of the camera… well, phone!

Sonic issues:

• For minimalistic simplicity, efficiency, and — to be honest — a little laziness, I shot the first two using the phone’s less-than-stellar built-in omnidirectional condenser mic. So, I had to make sure that: 1) I spoke loud and clear; and 2) the guitar level complimented the level of my voice in the same shot, as I wouldn’t be able to “fix it in the mix!” That took both experimenting and a lot of patience, as I quickly learned that what sounded good in the room rarely communicated the same way on my phone’s mic.
• You don’t realize just how noisy a seemingly quiet neighborhood is until you hit that record button! Then, all of a sudden: lawn mowers, hedge trimmers, power drills, cars, car stereos, motorbikes, chainsaws, small but noisy planes and helicopters flying overhead, dogs barking, kids playing (how dare they?!) — they all quickly transform from being totally innocuous to becoming invisible mortal enemies! I quickly deduced that “filming after midnight” (cue the Judas Priest hit song!) was the only sensible and sane way to proceed.

(A Total Lack of ) Editing Skills & Tools:

• Don’t get me wrong, iMovie is an amazing “built-in” tool, but it definitely has its limitations — especially when it comes to a user like me who learns his (alleged!) skills by trial and error. “Manual? I don’t need no stinking manual!” As already mentioned, this was all totally foreign to me. It was a brave new world… hopefully!

Let there be lights…

And there ends the backstory. Making the first Bowcott’s Bunker was a true labor of love that involved a great deal of “trial,” even more “error,” many hours, and many reshoots, but I was proud of the end result. Fortunately, Sweetwater’s social media mavens liked it and gave it a shot on Facebook. It is approaching 20,000 views at the time of writing, and so Bowcott’s Bunker #2 followed a week or so later. I’d climbed much further up the learning curve by that time, and that was reflected sonically, visually, and editing-wise. The Sweetwater video team also loaned me a Kino Flo light for video #2, which helped brighten my makeshift set!

Bowcott’s Bunker #2: Better lights, same camera, same action — better picture!

Upping My Game

Due to the positive response that the first two episodes garnered (thank you!), it was decided that I should record my spoken and playing parts in a much better way and then send the video and audio files to one of our video crew so they could edit my stuff remotely. This brought a new set of welcome challenges and a whole new journey of trial and error but has been well worth the grief. Here’s the gear I now use:

• LG Stylo-4 Android phone
• Universal Audio Apollo Twin MKII Duo interface
• PreSonus Studio One
• MacBook
• Boss Katana-100 MkII combo (recorded DI via its Phones/Rec Out jack)
• 2 x Roland CM-30 Cube monitors
• Kino Flo Double lighting system
• Sennheiser EW 100 Wireless lavalier mic system

The resulting “upping of my game” resulted in Bunker #3 being aired on YouTube and Instagram as well as on Facebook. Nice…

Bunker #3: Better gear + better editing + same dodgy host = YouTube- and Instagram-worthy result!

Lessons Learned from Bunker #3

While making Bunker #3, I made several time-consuming errors including:

• Forgetting to do the video/audio “sync clap” at the start of an otherwise mistake-free and lengthy take. Darn #1.

• Not realizing that the lav mic had come unclipped and was on the floor for most of a 28-minute shoot that was relatively flawless! Darn #2. You live and learn, right!?

Thankfully, I didn’t revisit said errors in Bunker #4, which is, thanks to some wonderful editing (not done by me), IMHO, the best yet.

Bunker #4: “Progress — Not Perfection” Personified

Conclusion

As stated at the very start of this piece, sometimes necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and that was certainly the catalyst for this ongoing adventure. There’s obviously a learning curve involved, and I’m still climbing it, but, as is so often true, the first step of any journey was indeed the hardest one to make. I guess it’s only apt that I’ll close this paragraph with yet another slightly altered cliché: “when life give you lemons — make lemonade videos at home!”

I hope to see you on a future installment of Bowcott’s Bunker. In the meantime, be well and stay safe!