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Kyle Ellis
This week’s chapter was on live mixer and signal flow, which was useful to learn because it sparked a question to bring back to the studio: are there specific times where I should use modulation over automation? Up to this point, I’ve become very familiar with automation, but hadn’t even opened the envelope box to mess with modulation yet. Another point that I remembered learning years ago was to use reverb/delay in the send tracks rather than the individual tracks, but as I’m making tracks in Ableton I am not using that function. I’d also like to know if it’s just a stylistic preference or if there’s an engineering benefit to using the send with reverb/delay rather than simplicity of routing multiple tracks to the same effect.
During this week’s studio time, I met two artists, John and Marcelis. John was coming into the studio to sit in a production session for his new album. He is a vocalist and the track the guys at the studio were working on had a middle eastern electronic dance music vibe, which was really interesting to see Mark and Andrew quickly put together the main idea of a track in about 2 hours. Marcelis is a hip hop artist who came in to record vocals over a new track and I only met him in passing.
During my lesson this week, we focused on my final product of my track titled Blood Moon. I had worked on it all week and finally got the mix to a good place and then mastered it to my preference to which Alex’s response was that he was impressed and “stoked” that I am bringing a vocalist in this Saturday to record her vocals. Moreover, I showed him the VSTs titled Neutron 2 and Ozone 8, which I purchased from Splice with their rent to own program. Alex said that he was not a mastering professional, but he heard no issues at all with my mastered track and when we compared my track to AK’s Digital Angel, my reference track, he stated my mix was cleaner and louder, which was very impressive. I am looking forward to going into the studio this week to show that I’m not only going to be making music, but I’ll bring the studio business to show I can make connections, get involved in the LA scene, and can contribute to the company’s bottom line. I'm hoping that this persistence and professionalism gets noticed by the end of the program.
