Week 11 & 12 Blog - Posted on 2015-05-01 by Andrew Jordan

For this post, I have taken the two blog posts I created from the notes I took over the past two weeks and put both of them into one post. The reason for this is that Chapter 11 of the eBook consisted of the midterm exam, and there was no link to create a blog post for that week.

Week 11:

This week I took my midterm, and learned some more about Pro Tools and its equipment. I learned that you can get a board called ProControl (made by Digidesign) for Pro Tools that controls sound level, playing and recording, EQ, etc. You can download and install sound drivers for your ProControl, some of which are required to use the ProControl with your computer. I learned that applying effects to a sound clip in Pro Tools uses a lot of processing power; however, you can use the effects through your Apollo interface, which saves most of the processing power. You can split a track into two parts so it is easier to see where to "punch in" a vocal track (begin recording another take at a certain point in an already-recorded take). When you are taking an instrumental track to another producer, you should have all the tracks lined up and edited properly so the producer can just mix and adjust the sound without having to worry about editing it.

Week 12:

This week I learned some more about Pro Tools, as well as file management. I learned that it is a good idea to have a folder for each artist containing instrumentals for each song you record with that artist. If you have time, go through your Pro Tools folders and clear out the files you don't need anymore. During this process, you should also make sure that project files you do need are named properly and stored in the correct folders so you don't get confused in the future (it helps to open up the project file and see what song is inside of it). To copyright a song, you need to bounce it to your computer and upload the file to the Library of Congress through their site, and if the submission is satisfactory, they will send you a confirmation email that the song is copyrighted to you. In addition to sending to your computer through Bluetooth, you can send a beat from a phone by email and download the file to your computer that way. When recording vocals, you should probably lower the volume of the beat and increase that of the vocal track. There are also websites where you can download original beats that you can legally use for a song.