My name, for those of you who don’t know, is James Hardiment. I am a singer/songwriter, as well as a filmmaker and actor turned vlogger/blogger. What can I say? I try to keep busy!
I’ve been making music, videos, and writing, since high school in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada. My first original song was called “The Nitrogen Cycle”, I created the piece by plugging in my old Casio Keyboard into my old laptop back in 2008. I still remember the machine struggling to keep up with what I wanted to do, and it was a super rough recording compared to what I make now. The vocals were actually recorded with a half decent CAD microphone that my friend, Josh Hart, was using for his own project at the time. The song was for a science class project and that’s pretty much what I spent most of those school years doing, I even have an old album lying around that features 10 of the songs I created back then for various classes.
To create the music videos, I used to use an old Sony Camcorder that used DV tape. The tapes looked like mini VHS tapes that you would have to upload all the footage onto the editing computer using something called a FireWire. (So old school I know, I feel a bit ancient right now!) I originally edited videos with a program called Windows Movie Maker, but would soon upgrade to a more advanced program, Sony Vegas. I found I could do a lot more by upgrading to a more versatile editing suite. Eventually, my friend at the time, Brandon Rainey, would team up with me on certain projects and his camera used SD cards. The switch over from digital tape to SD was such a breakthrough in technology, I’m so glad we don’t use tape anymore it took forever in comparison!
After high school came university, I attended the University of Windsor in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Brandon and I would team up to form “Vince Emerson Media”, it was basically my middle name and his with media at the end of it. It began with a couple of comedy skit videos, with various actors we had befriended in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program, basically a fancy acting school! They were interesting people to work with, and we had a lot of fun, when people actually showed up to shoots.
After first year came to a close, Brandon and I would split on a 1080p HD Sony Nex VG-10 camera, he also built a custom editing computer PC. We would spend the summer after freshman year, creating a feature film called “Windigo” with a huge team in the Cornwall area. It would eventually get over 1 million views on YouTube! A small portion was also shot in Windsor, once the summer came to a close.
After that, we would work on various projects until he would depart the projects in 2013 to pursue other interests. I decided to focus on my music projects again, since that was what I really wanted to do. 2015 rolls around, and I began to team up with my old high school friend, Josh Hart, to work on original music again. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, I worked on a pop album “Wine” with him that I completed in 2017. It was around that time I started to move away from using computers and laptops to create my music and start using my iPhone SE, which came with a program installed called GarageBand.
I was familiar with GarageBand, it was basically Apple’s base music editing program. I had used it in high school before, but I was more of a PC guy at home for the longest time. Upgrading my phone and discovering that I could now build all my music on my iPhone was a huge breakthrough for me. What truly knocked me off my feet was how smoothly the program would run on such a tiny machine. If someone had told me back in 2008 that I’d be building 30 track pop songs on a phone in 2017, I’d have probably laughed them out of the room, but here we are!
Eventually, I would invest in some more equipment, and today, I am able to plug in my keyboards, as well as my professional Shure SM7B studio microphone, used to record pro vocals. You really don’t need a huge studio anymore to create professional sounding music.
Flash forward to 2021, and I teamed up with Chef Derek Mason, in Cornwall, to create a cooking show YouTube channel called “Melted Mayhem”. I would shoot the videos on my phone, with a rode wireless GO lapel microphone hooked into the device for optimal sound. I downloaded a program called Cyberlink Power Director on my phone, and can edit the episodes with that. I’m so blown away by the jump in technology in my lifetime. My smart phone is my portable pocket studio and it still hurts my head thinking about it!
I am constantly creating now at a faster rate than ever before. I love the internet and I love smart phones for that reason.
Can’t wait to make more, until next time!
James
Pictured: James Hardiment creates music in the Garage Band program on his iPad Mini 4. He purchased that to use with his iPhone SE, as it has a bigger screen for playing instruments, but now just mainly uses the phone for convenience!