Moving on Down the Highway - Posted on 2014-10-28 by Alan Holmes

After some difficult setbacks the past few days (nothing program related, but delays nonetheless) we are back ladies and gents! Going what feels like way back to the Saturday before last, I'd been involved in a student weekend where the students were invited in to record an entire track, by ourselves. At least that was the concept. I was only one of two students who made it, thus there were some slight alterations that day. However it probably worked out for the best, at least for myself. At this point in the program, I was working on Chapter 3. Thus very new to the program and working on the theory portion. Thus I was thrown into hands on work far sooner than I had initally anticipated. Moreso, with work that I hadn't had the chance to work on yet. Although this was admittedly a little daunting at first, it proved to be a fantastic opportunity. My brain got a large jump ahead on setting up the equipment. Particularly on positioning the microphones.

I got a good look at several different kinds of mics and which type of microphone works best to pickup different sounds. I was surprised by setting the drum mics up. The positions had to be very specific so as to pick up the sound from the center of where the drum is hit, as well as needing to be positioned so that the mic avoids being hit while playing. It seems like common sense, but I hadn't necessarily thought of it before. The whole process really put things into perspective). Furthermore, it simply felt nice to be behind the recording table again. Familiar process to what I'd worked on with my own material, but interesting to see it in action from a different perspective.

Last but not least, Wednesday was another successful meeting. Although I'd done well on the chapter it was nice to hear from James directly about some of the information on the quiz. The Nyquist Theorem in particular had been very confusing, and James had drawn up a couple of graphs to help illustrate what it meant. It cleared things up spectacularly. All in all, not too shabby.