Obsevation Day 5 - Posted on 2018-03-27 by Sean \\\'Glass\\\' Kancewick

Today during observation Mark had us first learn about creating your own template session in ProTools. This I have quite a bit of experience with and have set up my own templates pretty much identical to how Vinnie was setting his up, but I usually throw a few more things in my template as probably every ones taste and work flow may be a little different. Still, once again there were a few little things that I did pick up and learn through this though..and that's what it's all about. After that we set up drums in the Mezz. Me and some other students picked out eight microphones including a sub speaker to use to get more low-end from the kick drum. I had not known this technique which was cool. We mic'd up and ran our signal through the SSL console and recorded into ProTools. During this process though, we encountered some problems in the signal chain. We were not getting signal from 2 of our Mics into Pro Tools. This was actually a great experience because over and over we went through our signal chain from microphones to ProTools trying to figure out what the problem was, and eventually found out it was actually something internal in ProTools in the I/O that was routed wrong and beyond our teachings so far. Initially me and a few of the interns and even the GA's were confused by why we weren't getting flow, but in the end me and another fellow were able to see the problem and fix it. I knew I had recognized things not looking quite right when one of the other interns pulled up the I/O screen, just from my past experience changing and setting my I/O at my Home Studio. In the end we adjusted things and they worked for the time being. After recording some drums, Rohan sent us the raw wave files and we will all play around with doing some mixes on the drums we recorded. After that, Carter was doing a practice run for his certification test on the SSL board and practicing all of the routing options. Me and one of the other students hung around and watched the whole process, which was absolutely great. I love to be able to see them exercise the different routing using the board, the patch bay, hardware and reverbs or other effects. Being able to watch the routing and it being explained as well, is making it really sink in. Afterwords, we tore down the drums, put everything away and called it a day.