Mentor Log 4

Sunday October 5th, 2008
4:00-6:30

Today I went to meet Chris Scredon at his house where he has a setup that doubles as a studio. I was supposed to be there at 3:00 but mapquest had his address posted down the road and it took me a while to find a way to contact him and find out where he lives. Once I finally got there, Chris' dog went crazy and wouldn't stop barking until an hour or so of being there. Chris set up his speakers and explained to me how the hardware he has for his studio works. A box that acts as a sound processor is a piece of hardware that is used with most Digital Audio Workstations(DAWs) and is required for the program that Chris is teaching me how to use, Protools, which is one of the standard DAWs used in the industry. The box processes the sound and allows you to input instruments from outside sources, through the computer, and then back out to the speakers. Although he had one that was required to use Protools, Chris says that there are many pieces of hardware that can subsitute for this and even be better, and that actual recording studios usually have a bit more than just the sound box to make it accesible with the computer. After he finished setting up, he showed me a song he had made for a wedding recently, and explained to me a basic concept that goes along with recording tracks together. Chris explained that mixing isn't so much about putting the sounds together but seperating them apart to be heard properly. For example, if one instrument is playing two different parts at the same time, their frequencies and tone are going to be very similar and may drown eachother out and not sound as good, this is where equilizers and panning is used. Using the equilizers you can set the exact pitch or frequency for the different parts which allows you to set the high notes louder than the low notes and letting them be heard more clearly rather than having it drown out within the low sounds of the bass. Panning was another useful technique he explained to me that I never realized would be so important in the perfection of the sound quality. Panning is simply shifting an instrument or track to one side of the speakers rather than play on both speakers. My thoughts before having this explained to me were that a recordings sounds would probably sound best if they were equally distributed between both speakers, but after showing me a few examples and having me sit between the two speakers to hear the difference, I was able to see that singling out an instrument on one side will often help it blend better with the other side rather than sound like your listening to a completely different thing through each ear. After showing me those basics, we talked about recording something to work on, which I was at first shy to do and felt I had no ideas at the moment that I would feel comfortable recording, until I decided to use a simple song I had made up awhile back. I found myself feeling very picky about the recording sounding right, it also being a song I felt doesn't really express my true musical taste, rather it was a good sounding simple song. I could manage to get the basic riff down, but I had trouble playing the parts the exact way I wanted it to sound, so we recorded parts of the riffs individually a couple times and picked the best ones(which I was not completely satisfied with but dealt with so we would have something to work on). We then blended these to parts together using a tool in protools that helped mix the frequencies from one track to another so it sounded like it was done in one take. We decided to take a break after that to give myself some time to come up with some more ideas for the riff that we would use next time we met. After feeling a bit more comfortable just getting a recording down, I decided next time we meet rather than carry on with the same riff, I may choose a set of riffs that I work on more often and have more ideas with.