We’ve checked out a brilliant new app for making lyric videos easy. It’s called Superstring and it’s the first app by new tech company Simplest Ways. Making any kind of music video can be tough on resources and time. Lyric videos are a great way to get your music on YouTube, and they’re popular with fans who want to be able to sing the songs. We asked London indie electro band Feral Five to give Superstring a try on their new single Strung Out.
This was our first ever attempt at a lyric video. They seem hard to get right, let alone make vaguely interesting and we’ve seen some pretty terrible ones online. So it was great to try out this new app on our laptop.
It seemed really intuitive and we got overexcited as soon as we imported our MP3 and got stuck in.
If you have lyrics in your track’s metadata, Superstring is designed to recognise the lyrics from ID3 and they go in automatically.
We didn’t, and we realised we had picked a disco punk song that had LOTS of lyrics. But we soon wrote them in and started tweaking. Basically you double click to edit, and you can split up your lyrics into text boxes and then drag the boxes to adjust the timing.
You have to get it pretty precise to work best, but then if you’re a musician you know about timing, right? You can add a slash to add a return and to separate lyrics you want to keep on the same page.
We did read the instructions eventually - there’s a link in the information section if you click on support, that takes you to the main website. And we discovered it’s a good idea to get the lyrics all in and then adjust the visual style, rather than do it in each box individually as you go along. But the good thing is that you can customise each segment, so if you want text to appear bigger or do something different in a certain place, then you can.
You can also use “#Intro” and “#Outro” tags for empty lyric columns where you have a break, to give you some animations.
The sample videos are worth watching, but were a touch too pretty for our liking. We wanted to max it out a bit. So we cranked up the visuals and set the music response button to high.
You can select styles for the visuals - we used explosion - and add effects too. The film grain effect punked the whole thing up on our black background. There is also a choice of fonts.
We could have experimented for days, but having found a look we liked, decided to stick with it.
You can add a watermark text or even background image - go to settings to do this, and you can choose the transparency. We tried it out by adding our logo, but it all got a bit busy for this particular song. It’s a great feature though.
When it comes to exporting, you can choose from presets or custom. We selected a 1280 X 720 preset and it took about 15 minutes to export giving a 737MB FLV file. On the time front it compares well to a video editing export. The resulting file was a bit big, but we uploaded it to YouTube with no problems at all.
We used the Superstring pro version that costs £20.99/$29.99. There’s a free version too, which gives you the basics, but no effects and just SD output, and there is a Superstring watermark. The app comes for Mac or Windows.
We think it’s amazing. It does take a bit of work, but it’s much easier and faster than a big video edit. The flying text is also a lot more exciting than you can get in simple editing programs.
We’ve already got a fab filmed video for Strung Out, made by Belka Films but were really pleased with this Superstring app. It’s brilliant for lyric videos. For the next track we release, we’ll get the lyric video cooking while we’re shooting something live. Great stuff!