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Matt Harvey
This week's lesson was on Dynamic Signal Processing, or Compression techniques. Compression is used to decrease (compress) the dynamic range of a sound or recording. Compression can make or break how a track sounds. Compression can make track parts sound more full than the original sound that you started with. The right compression on drum tracks and vocal tracks are very important. Compressors and limiters today can be a physical piece of hardware or a digital plugin that emulates the physical hardware. Both technologies work exactly the same way. There are many important parameters when it comes to setting compressors- Ratio, Threshold, Attack ,Release, and Makeup Gain are just some of them! Compression is something that I have not used much of, but have known about it for a while. After another awesome grade on this week's quiz, it was time for me to get back to Weddington for my studio time with Boo!
In this week's studio time, Boo had started on a new track using a riff that he wrote in high school! The drum track was recorded the night before I arrived for this week's learning session. Boo wanted a thick guitar part for his track, so we loaded 2 good sized speakers into the recording room and used 2 microphones on each speaker and recorded the part twice! We added some EQ to on the guitar tracks that we decided to keep to get the sound that Boo wanted. We also used the Steven Slade drum Trigger plugin to to trigger snare and kick drums. After that, we jumped on a track for Province of Thieves. We worked on some tuning for the background vocals for one of their tracks. We ended up with 4 hours total hours in the studio in this week's session!
-Matt Harvey
