Week 1 - Posted on 2014-04-14 by Will Dawson

Well, there's not a whole lot to report after the first week. As agreed by all, I have spent my time so far doing as much of the coursework as I could get done. With the experience I have already, I could have written most of what I have read so far. I have picked up a few new ProTools key commands though. I have stopped just before the midterm test since the materials indicated that I should turn in my sinewave assignment before proceding.

The sinewave assignment was pretty fun; I'll post my finished product in a moment. It consisted of importing into ProTools an audio clip consisting of a single cycle of a 1kHz sinewave, and then expand it into an entire 30-60 second song by duplicating the waveform and using rendered audiosuite plugs to twist it into whatever we wished. I spent waaaay too much time futzing around with the waveforms to see if I could get the textures I expected by combining sinewaves of different pitches. I have never really used pitch shifting before outside of autotune or elastic audio, so it was neat experimenting with other stuff to get the job done. I suspect that the assignment is as much as anything meant to open our eyes to how much crazy stuff PT can do, and I do feel a sense of accomplishment and power at being able to make so much from so little. However, if this were a serious recording I would definitely be breaking out the real instruments (in this case virtual instruments count as real) to get cleaner versions of some things. I also would have taken the composition part more seriously; this one is pretty cool but it could use some more devolopment and variety.

As I have not met my mentor yet for official tutelage, I have decided to grab a snippet of the Disney movie Hercules to do some sound on, to take to Greg when I see him on Wednesday. We'll see how complete it is by then. I pulled all the original audio out and will voice-over and add sounds and music. Greg probably has plenty of stuff planned for me that follows his game plan better, but I'm itching to get started. At the very least, he'll be able to give me a good harsh critique of what I bring in.

All right, 'till next time everybody!

~Will