Transcript Of This Video

(00:06):

Let’s talk about your player for your mp3’s. The track player you’re going to perform live is actually very important. Now, the way I teach is I always presume that you don’t know anything about anything that I’m speaking about. So I try to explain it in detail so you don’t miss anything. So there are two types of files, music files, there’s an MP three, which stands for something that’s not important, and there’s a Wave file, A WAV. You’ll run across these two different file types as you, as you do this. The difference is the wave file is a much more detailed file, something that you would use in Recording Studio, because it has all of the details and it’s five or 10 times as large as an MP three file. You don’t wanna use a wave file because of how the size of the file, you want all your music, your tracks to be on MP threes.

(01:11):

That’s a compressed track, a compressed sound. You won’t be able to tell the difference in a live environment. They just use the wave files in recording studios because of the, the detail of the listen experience and the mastering of it. But for all practical purposes, you’re going to be always performing with MP threes. So the player that you use in your, your laptop on your live show is going to have a software, a player software to play those MP threes, those MP three files. Each one of them is a song. Each MP three file is a separate song, hundreds of them, thousands of them, doesn’t matter. They will be stored on your computer somewhere or possibly in an external hard drive. But that’s another video. We’ll talk about this right now. Let’s just talk about having your laptop, the program that you want to use to play those, to pull those up and play them.

(02:07):

The best one that I found is iTunes, free program online. Many reasons for using iTunes as your MP three player. The first one is that you can literally buy all your songs almost, well, I say all of them, all of your DJ songs you can get there, most all of them, and most of your MP three karaoke type songs with without the vocals that you’re going to use as tracks. You can also purchase a lot of those in iTunes, and you’ll have them right here in your player. That’s one reason. The other reason is the actual player itself just functions better. As you’re going to see, as I step you through it step by step, it’s easier to pick, select the next song on the fly while you’re performing. You don’t want to get, uh, where you have to stop the end of the song, turn to your laptop, spend 30 seconds entering the next song, and then start it in play.

(03:05):

That’s dead air time. And I’m gonna teach you in my, in our courses in the entertainers university, dead air is the enemy, just like on a radio station, never have dead air because the, you lose the audience, the momentum goes out the window. So that’s the good thing about the iTunes player is there’s a way to do it that moves, flows, right with the show where you set up the next song, you can pick it easily from a list of many songs. So here’s where you get iTunes, go to apple.com and just click on this link. iTunes, apple, it’s free. Once again. Now I say free. You’re going to have to set up an account with iTunes. You have to do that anyway. They just want your email and a password and a credit card. So when you buy songs for 99 cents a piece or whatever, they’ll have something to charge.

(03:57):

So you, you’ve gotta do that. But when you get on the website here, you can scroll down to either you have a Mac or Windows laptop and whichever one you have, you just click that and it will give you the ability to download iTunes in either the 64 bit form, which most modern computers are gonna going to be 64 bit or older. Computers may be 34, 32 bit. And you can click that here and select it. But that’s where to find iTunes. Next, we’re going to talk about how to set up your playlists. That’s, that’s how this works. Playlists and iTunes.

(04:42):

Now we’ve downloaded iTunes and we’ve set up an iTunes account. Remember I told you, you’re going to have to give them an email and a credit card or some form of payment so that you can have an account. And then you get this free player. And this is what the iTunes player looks like inside. We’re gonna go over a few things. First of all, when you have your music, when you buy it from iTunes, it’s going to automatically appear in your list here. List of all songs, that’s where we are here. This is the songs list. You can choose different things, albums, whatever, but you want songs. These are your songs. Now, there, there are thorough at tutorials on how to use iTunes. So we won’t go deep into that right here in this teaching, but I want you to see how I set up my iTunes and give you a basic understanding of how to bring your songs in.

(05:37):

So if you did not purchase the song in iTunes, it’s going to be on an external in a file somewhere on your laptop. Or if it’s on a cd, you’re going to need to what’s called import it or rip it into iTunes, which that’s a a little a different teaching altogether. I’ll show you how to do that, but it’s, it’s different. It’s more involved than this. So let’s say that you have your songs and you want to, you have them on a, um, a external hard drive. You have a hundred MP threes that are tracks that you’ve collected, karaoke tracks or from karaoke version.com or whatever that is, and we want to bring them in. So the way you’ll do that, when you wanna bring a song in, you’ll go over here to file in iTunes, choose file, add file to library. You have another option, which is to add an entire folder to the library.

(06:38):

I haven’t had good luck with that. Sometimes that works. Sometimes about half the songs don’t come in, so I prefer to do it one file at a time. So you click add file to the library, and then it will ask you where do you want those that file to come from? Now it’s a good idea to set up your computer. I have mine on an external hard drive simply because these songs take up a lot of memory and it eats up a lot of my CPU processing power in my computer. So it’s on an external passport here, right there. And it’s under a file called MIDI Original tracks. Remember we talked about midi? That was the early form of of tracks before the MP threes came along. We used to do these MIDI and I have these all in here. These are songs that I’ve put together over the years, and I have a naming convention with them that I’ll, I’ll kind of show you.

(07:35):

But let’s say we wanted to import this song, Luke Inbox, Texas. Now notice how I do this. I have the actual, let’s, let’s do this one. Let’s do the keys in the mailbox. It’s an old country song, but I have dash a. Alright, that tells me what key it’s in. I encourage you to change all of these to the title, to reflect the key that it’s in. Let me see if I can find one that doesn’t have that. Let’s just change this. Help me, Rhonda. If I wanted to change that, I would select it and I can hold down on my mouse and it, when it highlights like that, you can change that. Whatever you want it to be, take something out or add something to it.

(08:24):

In this case, I just left it like it was. So let’s go back up here. The key is in the mailbox. Come on in. Where did it go? All right, forget that. We’ll do a different one. It’s gonna do old flame. It’s in the key of F. We wanna bring old flame in to our iTunes. Now, I have count here because some of these have a 1, 2, 3, 4 at the beginning, which I need because I’m playing guitar along with these most of the time, and I want to count in and come in on the right beat. We’ll talk about all this when we talk about getting your tracks and doing all that, but that’s what that means. But let’s say I wanted to import this. I would simply click open and it would pop up over here. I’m not gonna do it because it’s already in here, but it would pop up right above this one.

(09:14):

It would pop up at the top of the list. Now you want to keep these in this order. You can select across the top here that the date show up. If you right click on this row, it’ll ask you what do you want showing in this top section? And the only thing I have, sometimes I have album the artist, the date that the song was added, and whether it’s been downloaded from iCloud. That means when your songs are on here, they’re in the the cloud. So if you lose them, you can redownload them and get back on track. So once we import the song and it’s here, then we want to put it in a playlist. This is the magic of iTunes. If you look down here, these are all playlists. That’s a group of songs. My track music is everything has small D, capital, M-I-D-I-D, midi.

(10:14):

Now, there’s a reason that all my track playlists have this in front of them. Let’s say I want to go to my party playlist. It’s important to have a party, best list and a party list. Let’s click the party list. That’s pretty much everything. They’re in alphabetical order. The party best is just the, the ones I think are the best out of this for a party. Now, you can name these different, I have a patriotic version. Sometimes they show up differently. And I want to view that view as see what I want to view, view as songs, and it turns it into songs. Now, they’re not alphabetical at this point, so I’m gonna click here, click and it alphabetized them. I’m giving you some little shortcuts, but notice I have all of these things named and all of my track playlists have a d midi.

(11:11):

Now the reason is because that D puts them in alphabetical order, grouping them all together. For instance, if it didn’t have the D midi in front of it, the instrumental track music would be under the eyes and the party would be under the Ps and r and B would be under the RSS and so and so forth. But with this, they’re all grouped in here. They’re easy to find together. Now, my DJ music, I have a different naming because that’s separate. My DJ music, I use the word dance capital. You’ll find that these little tricks will help you. I’ve learned this over the years. Capital D-A-N-C-E. It’s easier to see when you’re in a hurry with a dash what type it is a waltz’s techno special, which would be for birthday parties, special kind of songs, sound effects, sing along senior sin. These are the actual DJ songs that you’ll choose from.

(12:08):

And again, you’ll have your own. If you see a little, uh, cloud out here, all that’s telling you is it’s needs to be downloaded. And this is the little download icon. It’s coming from the cloud. So for some reason, that was not in this library. This is not my laptop performance, uh, rig. This is my, uh, studio rig. So some of these songs aren’t on here, but the naming convention you use is important, and you’ll figure this out as you go. So let’s say you wanna start a new playlist. You simply come up here and you’re going to new. Oops, it’s kind of hard to get it sometimes. New playlist, not smart playlist playlist. And it will give you a blank playlist and it will be named playlist, and you’ll rename it. So when you’ve made it, it’s gonna appear under the ps. Watch this playlist. That’s the one we just made. We wanna change that name. So we want to click on it. Hold down that mouse when you click on it, and it’ll give you that ability to change it. All right, we wanna call this test playlist.

(13:30):

Now that is our empty test playlist. So what we wanna do, we wanna drag some songs, let’s say from our party list and, or let’s say from our main list, all of your songs will appear here under songs, every one of them. Let’s say we want to drag a couple into our new playlist. We just made our test playlist scrolling down, and I’m going through all this so you’ll see me actually do it. There it is. So I want to drag this one in. I click it. I can hold down my control button and click multiple tracks. Or I can hold my shift key and it’ll do the whole group. See that’s a little shortcut. Click and hold the control key on a windows, not sure what it is on a Mac or the shift key. And it does a whole group. Grab anywhere in the blue and hold down your mouse, click and drag it into our test playlist. See, I highlighted there. Then let go. And it’s gonna all be in this playlist. Now, when I open the playlist, you’ll see these songs, but they’re not the way we’re used to seeing them. They’re these album looking things. We don’t really want ’em like that. So we want to go up here to view, view as, and we wanna change that to songs.

(14:56):

Voila, there are the songs, but they’re not in alphabetical order, and they’re much easier to deal with in alphabetical order. So we wanna reorder them on the name list. Here we click name and look what it did. Put them all in alphabetical order. That’s how the playlists work. We’re gonna get rid of this little playlist, but I’ll do it after we’re we can, you can delete them. They’re pretty easy to delete. Let’s say we’re playing and we are in our party playlist, and we just finished playing Amarillo by morning. And the next song we wanna play is Margaritaville. Now watch what I do. I hit the M on my keyboard and it jumped to the m’s. Now I can hit the arrow down on my keyboard and it will go down to Margaritaville. This is super handy and fast. That’s why I’m showing you this.

(15:53):

And that’s the great thing about iTunes. I’ve not found another player that lets you do this. Not like this. Let’s say I changed my mind. Oh, I don’t wanna play that. I wanna, uh, play brown-eyed girl, so I could hit B or BR rapidly. You gotta hit the B and the R and it will take you up to the bs. So you have Brandy, brand new man, Brickhouse brown-eyed girl. See I arrowed down. You can arrow up. These are the little arrows on your, uh, laptop, the arrow key. Now, when I’m ready to start the song, all I do is press the enter button and it will start. That’s what’s so wonderful about iTunes. You can do this with one hand, literally your right hand, while you’re still performing with your guitar. So if I click the enter, uh, it’s telling me it doesn’t know where it is. That’s because I’m on my desktop in the studio. But there it started playing. Okay? So I’m downloading it so you can hear that. Now, when it’s time to stop the song, you hit the space bar. And if you hit the space bar, it will stop right where it is. If you hit the space bar again, it will begin to play from right where the song is. Very handy. Space Bar Stop. Here comes the Space Bar Begin.

(17:15):

If you hit the inner key again, it will begin from the beginning of the song.

(17:24):

I can’t tell you how handy this is. This is why I encourage you to use iTunes as your player. It just is so handy. And if these are all grouped together where you can change. Let’s say I play fiddle, I play violin. So if I wanna change that, I’ll pick some fiddle songs and we’ll go in here and do the chair maybe and that setup, the other song’s still playing. But I’ve gotten this prepared so that when the, when brown-eyed girl ends, I just hit enter and it begins to play the chair you the count in. And that is how it is done. You also have the controls up here at the top, but you, you won’t necessarily want to use those. This is the magic of using iTunes as your player. Again, pretty self-explanatory, but just search out iTunes. There are tons of tutorials on how to use iTunes, but this is an overview of how to use it as your playback device, as a solo performing musician.