 Let's talk about visualizers. And your first question may be, what's a visualizer? Hopefully you've watched my video that you should be making three videos for every song you release over a six to eight week period. And if you have it, it's linked in the card now or in the description below. Anyway, I advise making a single screen video, then a lyric video and a music video. But a common question I get is what about instrumental music or songs where you don't wanna highlight the lyrics? Well, that's where a visualizer comes in. Since these are videos that provide a visually engaging image that isn't high budget and doesn't take the time and effort you often put into a music video and allows another newsworthy event to promote your music while keeping fans engaged and catching the eye of potential fans. So this video, I'm gonna discuss how to make a visualizer in a couple hours inside the free DaVinci Resolve software so you can promote your music more effectively. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's on YouTube teaching musicians how to go from zero to 10,000 fans. And this is Muse Formation. So let's talk for one more second about visualizers before we get started with the tutorial. You may particularly be thinking, what's the difference between a visualizer and a lyric video? A visualizer has no lyrics and instead of leaning on those lyrics, it goes a little harder on making appealing visuals for the song. One of the reasons a visualizer is so important is it's another opportunity to up the emotion of your music with something visual and grab the attention of fans instead of promoting the same thing over and over. So you can use this as another eventful way to catch fans' eyes so they build a deeper relationship with your music and then tell their friends to do the same. If you want to learn more on that, watch my video on how to keep fans' eyes glued to you, which is in the description. The key to a great visualizer is to find imagery that fits your song's emotion and then arrange it in a fashion that will help it synergize together. So your goal here is to do no harm and make a video that can sustain the listener's visual attention if they choose to watch. You want it to feel like the song's emotion and make it so it doesn't contradict or ruin the emotion of the song by being cringe. But it should be something that doesn't take a lot of time because an amazing visualizer is rarely rewarded with lots of views. That's what an actual music video is for, is putting tons of time in. So while I want you to be cautious about finding imagery that helps accentuate the emotion of your song, I also want you to not spend 10 hours on this. We really are doing this since it's something else to post about that you did in another piece of content a fan can use to build a deeper relationship with your music. So let's get into how to make one. Now there's two ways you can go about getting the footage for your visualizer. One, you can make imagery yourself. Many people go out and grab footage or take extra footage for their music video and then do loops or manipulations of it by putting on filters effects and put it through the visualizer. You can even use end lights suite of apps and make your images do crazy effects and then loop them throughout your video. The second way to do it is to go to a stock footage library. Now what these libraries are is a place where you can get footage you will be legally allowed to use in your videos. There's tons of services that allow you to do this like Shutterstock, VidEvo, VidEasy, Pisa Bay, and Pixels. And all of them are linked in the description. But honestly, a simple Google search will give you so many of these sites you can get a free trial membership for and often find what you're looking for and decide which one to subscribe to. But since I know a lot of you are on a budget of zero here's what you can also do. Search YouTube and put public domain in the search and then just make sure you check the description of the video to make sure the footage is actually public domain or you can use a search filter and select Creative Commons. You just have to get to know what the various Creative Commons terms are and give credit to the creator for whatever they ask for. Okay, so if we're gonna make a visualizer obviously the first thing we need is a song. So I'm gonna go in and we're gonna be using a song called Idiot Wave by my friend Zach's project Echo DDT. So I'm gonna pull that in first. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna chop off this beginning which and then a shift delete. We'll pull that forward. Let's make sure the end is trimmed, looking good. So if you're not familiar with the windows on DaVinci Resolve, what we have here is the cut, edit, fusion, color, the mixer and the deliver. I'm gonna do everything in the edit window right now because it's really nice and easy to do. So let me give you a little bit of the vibe with the song. So as you can hear it's like a synth wave. He calls it kind of like vapor wave pop type stuff. So we're gonna do a pretty retro feel for this video to try to match what he's going for musically. So I like to think of visualizers. When I'm thinking of doing this, I'm thinking it has to be pretty retro and I really see a lot of this stuff with when you're making a visualizer is is you're just gonna mess around inside here and get to know your video editing software a little bit better so that you know how to be creative with it and you're getting practice for how you be creative to make all sorts of things, whether it's social media or your other videos and you learn how to work with this. So if you're watching this video, I imagine you're not totally familiar with how to make a visualizer. So I'm gonna get started with that. So the first thing we need is we need some basis for the film that's gonna go on and the actual footage. So like I said, there's tons of stock footage sites but the one I wanna use today is called Pixels, P-E-X-E-L-S. And they're a great site because what I like most about it is is you can download the footage really fast and easily without signing in or anything like that. It's got a good search function and has enough there but there's tons of other sites like I said before where you can find this footage, you could search around till you find the right stuff but I thought what we got here today was good enough. So you just search, do some search criteria, they got tons of suggestions too when you do it that this search was headphones, now we got microphone. There's tons and tons of stuff in here that you can grab. Anyway, so I already grabbed some stuff to save us some time. That's been downloaded into a folder which I call my visualizer source material and let me pull that in here. I kept it nice and simple, just grabbed some footage of people listening to music here. So I just dragged that onto three new tracks and DaVinci and all you have to do is drag and drop and let's scan around and look at the footage we got now. So I feel like cause he's going for the retro thing, these other two while they're like electronic music type stuff, they're not quite right for this or is this one's got the nice retro throwback going on? So I wanna work with that one and I'm just gonna basically loop that one throughout the video. So let me do this, I'm gonna delete these and all I'm doing is clicking on them and hitting delete and I realize now though, I only have 20 seconds of this footage. So the first thing you could do is you could obviously slow it down. So let's see what it looks like if we put this down to half speed. Now that that was pulled to half speed, I can pull it out and we have to remember I'm on this pointer tool the whole time since that's what makes that easy. Let's see how that speed looks with this in motion. I'm feeling good about how that looks in there but the one thing is, is this doesn't have much character. So cause this is a visualizer, I wanna just loop this throughout the song and that's gonna be the main course of our visual. You know, you can obviously go in and get lots of them. You know, one of the other tricks you could do with footage where it works is you can reverse the footage, you can do all sorts of things. Under this inspector tab, there's lots of ways to transfer the video and like I said, I think if you're working on this and you're trying to do visualizers, you should be experimenting with these tools. There's always these little reset buttons on the side if you get a little too carried away. So the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna cut off the end of this so that it doesn't exist any more after the song ends. So if you grab that razor tool I just grabbed, what's nice is as long as this magnet's on, it'll snap right to where the song ends and then you can go back to your pointer tool, select that, hit delete and now you have video that's through the song. Now we have this. So I feel really good about that but it has no character and the footage of that just is real boring so let's try to get something more exciting. So the next thing I did is I went on Google image search, I found a gradient. So what is a gradient you say? It's just a color like that. What I wanna do now with this gradient is I'm gonna drop it in here and then I'm gonna take this expand and what's nice is when you're using single images is you don't have to keep looping it like I did before, you could just stretch it through the whole thing. So DaVinci Resolve is interesting in the way that whatever's on top is what plays. As you're gonna see, we're gonna do lots of layering throughout this. So what I wanna do now is under this inspector tab which I just turned on and off when you click this, I'm gonna take the opacity, I'm gonna really bring it down so that it's just bringing a little bit of retro coolness to this image. It's like almost like a mist. Let's look at that. So that's already so much better but it's not quite enough. So what I also have done in the past is if you Google around, you can find free VHS Glitch Effects. I have a bunch of those downloaded already. So I particularly liked this one because it's really busy. So I'm gonna drop this into the timeline on a track above it. But as you're gonna see, it's now taking the audio there and it's gonna cover my track. So what I need to do is I need to pull this up or pull this to the back of the file. So if I hit undo, so I don't do that, I pull this into the file and then whenever you wanna get rid of the audio, especially if it's non-existent like this audio so it's not attached to some video, is you command click either of the regions then you click link clips and uncheck it and then you click away and click back and you hit delete on that audio and now you have this. So this is video and as you can see when I hit play, it's not showing us anything. It's got this black background here. So there's an easy way to get rid of that black background and let it do it. This is called removing the alpha. So the way you remove the alpha is actually counterintuitive because you just go up to the inspector again and under this composite mode when you just click add and all of a sudden that's gone but watch what happens when I hit play. So there's one problem here is that as you can see here, this is meant for a normal size TV and it doesn't extend to the 1080p that we have of this. So what I then do is then I pull that zoom out so that it then covers it and then we hit play again. All right, and now I've authentically made this retro enough. The one thing though I wonder is are these VHS effects a little too intense? So I'm going to go back and I'm going to play with the opacity real quick. And that opacity just looks great. That maybe doesn't look authentic to me but it looks damn good. So now let's pull this so that it stretches through the entire length of the song and we now have a nice little visual and yet again we're going to cut this and hit delete and so that these little levers here at the top are fade outs. We're going to put that to where the song is. So I'm going to zoom in which I do. So DaVinci is interested that it zooms to wherever your cursor is. So I want to bring this to the end of the song and I'm going to put nice little fade out there and a fade out here. We'll hit play on that. Nice. So I could mess around with that and get that fade perfectly if I wanted but that's not what we're here for. So this visualizer is missing one thing though that I like to do which is tell people what the song they're listening to is so that they don't forget it during this. So the way we do that is by going to a photo editor. So you could do this with free software like GIMP if you wanted to but I find it way easier instead of using Photoshop and paying all this money for instance I don't do a ton of graphic work is I use a program called Pixelmator which is $40 and then you own it. And so on Pixelmator I'm going to make a new file that is 1920 by 1080 because that's the size of the video file we're working with and then the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to get rid of the background so it's transparent which I do using the erase button and then after that I'm going to make a nice little block and in that block I'm going to dump black so that we can do some work here. So I want to make a little title card for this so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go get his logo. So I went over before to his band camp and I liked this logo of all his releases so I downloaded that so I'm going to open this file then I'm going to take this I'm going to copy it I'm going to paste it into this file so the one issue is first is we want to get rid of everything around that so we want to select this layer we want to use our magic eraser and try these colors are real similar so let's see this one's going to be a little tough because of those colors around it and we'll touch this up with a little bit of a racing on our own okay so now that we have that nice image we're going to take that and we're going to bring this down to the bottom of the screen and as you can see it's a little too big so I'm going to shrink it down pull this over here and I'm going to write so one tip for you is anytime you're writing a song title especially if it's not your own is double check every bit of the casing and the spacing and all the things about the name so I just checked it I realized it's one word like this and I don't like how that color is matching so I want to make sure I get this so that they're similar and maybe I can do better font-wise that looks much more 80s and then I'm realizing a nice dash like that so if you export this now as a PNG not a JPEG like what was just selected this transparency will stick we can save it here as visualizer title card hit export now if we go back to DaVinci Resolve we can take this bring it in pull it upwards so it creates another track since we want this on top of everything we're going to stretch it out to the end of the song we're going to put that same fade out on it and now what do we have I'm pretty happy with that so one last piece of pizzazz that I feel like that might make this a little cooler and to experiment with this is to do transparencies through this block text so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go here I'm going to sit merge all layers so that these layers are all one thing and then I'm going to go in and I'm going to magic erase out all the blue then I'm going to export this again and I'm going to pull that in so I'm going to bring this up to here and then I'm going to turn off this track by hitting that cut-mute button I'm going to see if I like the way this looks better yeah that way is better so that's what I'm going to go with so now you want to know how you get this to YouTube if you hit this deliver button you push the delete YouTube button and you name it so we'll call it idiot wave visualizer and you select where to send it to you hit save then you have to do one small detail you hit add to render queue you make sure that's highlighted and you hit start render and then it'll be done you upload that to YouTube and then you have a visualizer thanks so much for watching am I missing anything? is there any other way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them so leave them in the comments since I answer every comment in every post I hope you liked this video and if you did please like, subscribe and get notified and I'm going to be breaking down the concepts in this video along with how to promote your music and how to make songs you're happy with in the future I have a Facebook group linked below that is only helpful information no playlist or con artists only artists having helpful discussions allowed if you want to learn more about me work on a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do go to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon on all the socials one last thing there's two playlists here one is on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans and the other is on how you make songs you're more happy with and the other is on how you promote your music with Spotify and the other is specially chosen to match this video or you can hit the subscribe button below and stay tuned as I have tons of tips for musicians