 So many people see lyric videos the wrong way. Whether it's because they aren't lyric people, or it's because they don't really watch lyric videos, I find that the biggest aversion to lyric videos is musicians feel they are too much effort for a lack of a reward. In this video, I'm gonna convince you that the hour it takes to make a lyric video is worth your time, and I'm gonna tell you how to make one. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, and this is Muse Formation. So let's talk lyric videos. If you watch the other videos in this playlist, you know I like lyric videos because they're another event you can use to tell people about your song and try to fight against the lack of attention span people have for what you are doing by reminding them that you are continuing to do eventful things and that they should listen and pay attention to you. But many people see lyric videos as way too much effort. But my argument is too many people complicate lyric videos and they should only take an hour to make and be really simple. A compelling music video could do monumental things for your following. But the fact is, an amazing lyric video rarely helps things and may even take away from what the viewer is supposed to focus on. If you're doing all these distracting things in the lyric video, it's not what the purpose is. The purpose is to build a deeper bond with the lyrics. So why don't we first think about what the purpose of lyric videos is? We're giving fans visual representation of your song that is simple, but the key is we want them to focus on the lyrics. Not some college kids' sick animation skills. What a lyric video is for, first and foremost, is a vessel to get someone to listen to your song and second to get a deeper understanding and connection to the lyrics and what you do musically. So the key here is to not think so much about what's in the background and think more about letting a fan read the lyrics. So many artists get lost in the dog and pony show of wanting to compete with the visuals they have seen that are stunning that other artists have done, but this isn't the time to do that. That's for your music video. This is the time to let your lyrics do their work and create a bond with the fan. So because of that, we're gonna talk about a silly business term called MVP. No, not that MVP. I don't know anything about sports and can't explain them to you. A MVP is a minimum viable product and in startup douchebag talk, this means you're gonna make a product that is the bare minimum of features that you could show to the world. And that's what we want from a lyric video, is to put the minimum amount of effort to make something visual to get people to connect with your song. We're not trying to do an art project here. We're trying to just build bonds with fans and make people feel your song more. Now many people have written me with shame for their lyrics saying they don't wanna do lyric videos and ask me what else they could do. But if people are coming to listen to your music, they're probably on your lyrical level and even if that's not that deep, it could be party rock anthem songs and people still just wanna know what you're saying. Not every lyric video is for a TS Eliot poem or a Noam Chomsky dissertation on media reform, but I wish there were more. Whether it's politics or party gems or poetry, people of different wavelengths want lyrics close to what they're looking for. So many bands don't think their lyrics are worthy of a lyric video, but they are, because your fans are on the same wavelength as you and they wanna get a deeper understanding of you. Your audience just wants to go deeper with what you do. I think of that Chainsmokers video for closer. Oh, God, awful smell in this room all of a sudden. It was actually a lyric video for the song. And yes, that's some vapid shallow bullshit and it isn't life changing, but we have to remember it's aimed at teenagers who are feeling emotions that are new to them and it was a huge hit and got people knowing the right words to sing at concerts and it's such a hit. It mentions Bleakway 2 and it has more plays than all of Bleakway 2 songs and their top songs on Spotify combined. Ouch. But before we go further, I want you to get it right that I never feel this way about music. I think you should always strive to be exceptional in your image and most of all, your songs. You should go every extra mile, but lyric videos are not the time for that. This is the time to pick simple imagery that reinforces your image and what your song feels like because people aren't here for a music video. So let me explain this a little more. Poorly designed lyric videos have millions of hits. People are used to watching garbage videos like this Tony Braxton video with 30 million views that somebody made on their iMovie. They don't care, they just want to know the lyrics. So even if your graphic design skills are trash, just give the people what they want. Like seriously, YouTube is littered with lyric videos with tens of millions of plays that would get you an F in sixth grade graphic design course in a shitty school system. I feel a great lyric video really just feels like the emotion of a song. While a great music video can do so much, maybe just put up your single art and your album art as a background. Maybe it's an outtake from your video or a boomerang from your video. Kim Petrus did some great videos like this leading up to her Leia's LP where they're simple boomerang loops from a photo shoot from her upcoming videos. You can go film some stock footage somewhere. If you have an iPhone, it's easy or take some outtakes from your latest music video and change your clothes real fast and everybody will think it's new footage. My greatest point is unlike music videos that are rating the bank on high budgets, doing that for lyric videos doesn't give you a very high ROI, especially when starting out as a musician. So it's putting a ton of effort into animating your lyrics isn't gonna be the biggest fan builder, but it will help fans that like your music feel a deeper connection and then want to share that connection with their best friends. But trust me, they're never gonna share because of your sick Adobe skills. So just do something simple and let the lyric video do its job. If you take an hour to make a lyric video, you can focus your time, resources and money on music videos that's done tons to help your song. But trust me, a good lyric video that's nice and simple is worth an hour of your time, especially for the event and to remind people about your music again. So let's learn how to do this yourself so you can focus your budget elsewhere. Let me first intro who we're gonna be talking about. So I'm gonna be making a lyric video for my friend Zach whose project is called Echo DDT. It's a vapor wave pop song is what he likes to call it. Zach is the singer of Man Over Board. We've been friends forever. I also mixed and mastered the song and I told him I'd make a lyric video for it since I've been talking to him a lot about promoting this thing we've been making together and I've been really psyched on it. So okay, so let's talk about the tools we're gonna use. First we have DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci Resolve is a full-fledged video editor that people make like TV, YouTube, movies with. It's super powerful and the crazy thing is it's free. So I have been editing all these YouTube videos with it and not that that should be a testament. I'm not a video editor but it's free. I didn't wanna pay for another piece of software. I already pay for way too much in audio so I use this. The graphic program we're gonna use is called GIMP. GIMP's been around forever. It's an open source graphic designer. It's toy-free. Now I'm gonna watch it on the secret. I'm not gonna do all of this in GIMP because I'm not fast with it and no one wants me to labor over anything. So I'm gonna do what I recommend you do. No one wants to pay for Adobe Photoshop subscriptions so what a lot of people do to get around that is they pay for Pixelmator Pro which is $39.99 and then you have it for as long as the software stays relevant in your OS system which I'm sure will be yours. For people who aren't gonna do anything intensive graphic design wise, it's great. The cover of my last book which is behind me had something like a thousand something layers to it in Photoshop or whatever. I actually did it all in Pixelmator and it worked fine. You can do anything you want in this app and you can do a lot in GIMP and everything we're gonna talk about today you can do in GIMP and GIMP is totally free and it takes one minute to download. Let's talk about what we're actually gonna do. I have prepared the three things you're gonna really need which is the album art, a font and the song you're gonna make. So let's start by going over to DaVinci Resolve and loading in the song. So let's start by opening DaVinci Resolve. When I open DaVinci Resolve there's these five windows here and I'm gonna work strictly out of the edit window and the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag in the master of this song. So then after that we need to have a graphic that's gonna go up for this song. So luckily I was provided the artwork for this song that was done really well. It was done by this cool guy here named Dino. You can check out his profile and if you think this art's cool and Zach from Echo DDT did one of the other pieces of artwork. So this is GIMP and if you're gonna do this in GIMP let me just give you the rundown really fast. All you need to do is make a new file and no matter what graphic design thing you're gonna do you're gonna do a 1920 by 1080 graphic with 300 PPI because that's what YouTube video is that's not 4K that's what they like to see. We're gonna say goodbye to GIMP now because we don't wanna see me struggle through graphic design in hell. Okay, back into Pixelmator. So we have two graphics for this art. We have his single art and then this is his album cover. So here's what I'm gonna do is since I've made these 1,920 by 1080p things so that they will fit the screen I will make it so that these graphics fill the screen. So I'll do that by doing this as I'll go in, I'll click on it I'll stretch it out so it's as high as it goes vertically and then I'll select the option tool and I will fill it so it fills the entire screen. This was the artwork I copied it from here from his cassette artwork. Here's the single art. There we go. Okay, so I'm gonna export this now I'm gonna call this, let's remember export as PNGs because if you're doing transparencies you need PNGs. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna scan around this song and I'm gonna make it so that the single image is the first thing you see but then the owl image happens during the course. I'm also gonna put in the earphones so I can hear this but I'm not gonna put in two earphones cause you don't wanna hear me talking loud. That's called YouTubing with matters. So in order to do this all I have to do is drag these onto a new track in DaVinci Resolve. Now if there's one thing I've learned with DaVinci Resolve is there's only one crucial rule you have to remember which is the video at the top is what's in the front. So there's all these different video tracks and whatever one is on top that's what's gonna be in the front image and you have to layer things like that. So I'm gonna hit play on the song. What I'm gonna look for is when the song changes to the chorus. So right there I hit the command B button because that's what you do to make a break and what I'm now gonna do is I'm gonna make it so that this goes all the way over that break and it'll snap right there. And I'm gonna check that I got that as tight as possible. I can see I did not. So I will pull it over to where the downbeat is and then I will put in my chorus artwork which is this one and I will snap it right there. You can see in this top screen here what's gonna actually clean the screen and it's gonna switch over to that graphic for the chorus and then I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna drag the original one, the end of the chorus and I'm gonna repeat that through the rest of the song. But we don't need to do that because you get the drift and you're smart and you know how to do that. But now you're thinking, how do we get these graphics onto the screen? So now we're gonna go back to our graphic design program. So we've made these 1920 by 1080p graphics and we're gonna now get rid of that. We're gonna make it so you have a blank background. Now if you're really graphic design literate enough to not know that this big checkered board means that it's transparent. So we're now gonna make new layers of the lyrics. So I've already taken the time to put the lyrics in a text document. Now as you can see, he typed it out all in different lowercase and uppercase but the font I've chosen is a font that only takes uppercase. So I had to use this convert case website which is always good because if you wanna do funny things with your lyrics you can do all sorts of fun stuff with this site. So what I next needed to do was I needed to find a font that feels like the lyrics. So Zack is really into this vaporwave thing I said so I just googled good vaporwave fonts. I looked around and then I eventually found this Felix Boom Gartner font. It looks like this and I downloaded it for free. If you've never downloaded a font before let me show you how to do that. After it downloads you double click this OTF file and then you hit install font on a Mac and it's as easy as that. Regardless now we need to start playing some lyrics I'm gonna select text on here and I'm now gonna select the first lyric of the song but actually here's a good tip that I've learned from making a few lyric videos. You don't always wanna start with the first lyric. You wanna find the longest one to do the graphic design so I can see that this is the longest line here. So I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna paste that long line. So the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stretch out this text bubble so it's as wide as the screen. Let's make sure it's actually as wide as the screen and I'm gonna make sure that the center text thing is checked so that it centers it and then I'm gonna make this font as big as it looks visually right to me. So let's try a little bit more. Big. That looks good to me. Let's move this down a bit. So it's centered. So that'll be the as big as the text ever is but now I'm gonna go back and select the first line of the song. So I'm gonna copy that. I'm gonna hit paste and I'm gonna go great. Now I'm gonna number these and I'm gonna export as a PNG just like I told you before because we need this to be transparent. Now I'm gonna call this one. Then I'm gonna select the second line of the song. Export again and we'll export this third line and then we shall have enough to show you what's going on. Okay, so now that we've exported those let's go back to DaVinci Resolve. So we're now gonna go up to a track above that and we're gonna go in and we're gonna take that video that I just brought and we're gonna put it on a new track above what we had. So now I have to find where the lyrics start. So I'm gonna zoom in pretty close so I can find it. All right, and I've identified it's right there so I put down the cursor and I can then bring this over and it will snap over the cursor and I will hit play. So I can hear that this goes a little too long for that lyric so I'm gonna pull it back and that's where the end of that lyric is so that it's time to bring in and you know the lyrics happen pretty fast in this song, you might have some space sometimes in your own songs and I'm gonna put the next lyric in. I can hear right there is where the third lyric comes in so I'm gonna trim this back and I'm gonna put the third lyric and trim that back to there. And this is all you do is you just keep repeating this and yes, you can get creative, you can change colors, you can change fonts, you can spend as much time on this as you want but realistically you can do this all in under an hour and that's very well worth it for content you can make for fucking free for your music. I should say at the end, you need to deliver it, there's tons of presets in DaVinci on how to do this but really it's as simple as putting out a 1080p YouTube video and then uploading that to YouTube. That's it, am I missing anything? Is there any way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I wanna answer them so leave them in the comments. I hope you liked this video and if you did, please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm gonna be breaking down the concepts in this video along with tons of others on promoting your music and how to make music you're more happy with. As well, I have a Facebook group that's linked below that has only helpful information. No one tried to sell you anything, playlist or con artist, only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you wanna learn more about me, make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, head to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on any of the socials. Thanks for watching. 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