Week 8 - Posted on 2017-02-23 by Gino Benedetti

Joey stressed to me this week that compression is the most important thing in audio. Alot of the stuff I like to do doesnt neccessarily need compression because it is high gain metal guitar so it pretty much is always the same level. But something like a Pepsi commmercial where we have someone whispering and then someone shouting we want viewers to hear the quiet whisper but also not be blown away by the person shouting so what a compressor does is bring the whisper up and bring the shouting down. This can be the key in audio for anything. We can compress anything so that the level isn't bouncing all over the place. We also talked about noisegates which hence the name shuts the gate on signals that are lower than the threshold. The attack is how fast the gate opens and release is how fast it closes. A fast release will cut sound off quickly. He showed me how he uses noisegates on a vocal track he had. 

Next time in the studio Joey told me about how reverb was first used. It started with Frank Sinatra and his sound man came up with the idea to put a speaker at the end of a 200 foot hallway and a mic on the other end. The result was natural reverb and from that day on many engineers were using that idea whether it be a hallway or a staircase or whatever. Another interesting thing that we talked about was the plugin Melodyne. This plugin is amazing. It actually breaks down the soundwave into individual notes. Something that has never been done before. So if we have a chord and there is a wrong note or something is off time then melodyne simply breks the chord down and we can easily shift the note to the right pitch. With one chord you can now completely change the song by shifting the note horizontally to change the time or by changing pitch. We can also shift a whole phrase from major to minor with the click of a button. Joey showed me Melodyne in protools and it completely amazed me. How can the soundwave be broken down like that?