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Vanessa Agosto
April 9th, 3 1/2 hours
April 11th, 3 1/2 hours
This week's lesson was heavy on lab time, so I got my drum edits checked out and started on bass edits for a country song Steve gave me. The drum edits were much easier to do than the bass edits despite there being more drum hits. I can do the drums on auto-pilot, and then Pro Tools will put in all the fades. The problems I'm still having with the bass: my computer keeps having an error that makes saving impossible, and the bass waveform is harder to read. The drum hits are so discrete and obvious whereas the bass notes slide into each other a lot. I also need to invest in a mouse.
And the process was: I soloed the drums and moved the bass track up between the kick and snare tracks. Then I composited to a new playlist - luckily there were only two bass recording to listen to, being a beginner and all. The compositing was fun. I spent a lot of time changing bad fades and note placement because I didn't understand what I was supposed to be doing. At first I was just looking for obvious transients and putting fades on top of them. Listening as I worked helped out a lot; I'm still not good at spotting note changes in the wave form, but I'm getting better - sure have spent enough time looking at them!
I'm getting better at the key commands: supertool, drop cursor at the beginning of the note's sinusoidal wave, Command-e to clip, supertool hand to highlight the clip, Command-zero to move the clip to the nearest 1/16th note. Extend to the left in the clipped section to match and fade into the previous clip - at least, that's been the deal with these particular bass edits. Oh yeah, and the grid has to be divided down to 1/16th notes, and Pro Tools has to be in slip mode. Getting there, getting there.
I've though about being a songwriter but it may just be a hobby for me, or maybe I just need to get more familiar with ProTools. I've started thinking about an internship. I'd like to stay in Portland, though I'd be willing to relocate to Seattle as well. So, my plans have changed a little bit. I definitely can't afford to move at the end of this program, and won't really be able to start saving for a while, either. I'm excited about getting an application together for Skywalker Sound, as well; by the time the next class starts I'll be in more of a position to move. Fingers crossed on getting in. Doing sound for movies would be amazing, and Skywalker would the perfect place to do it.
Some cool review this week: quantization, sample rate, how cd's are made, dither, bit rates for MP3's and I-Tunes, feedback and its prevention, and the importance of good amps and how they affect sound quality more than speakers.
For our observe, Steve worked on some vocals for sisters from Georgia. The songs always get sent to Steve with autotuned vocals, which really doesn't work for one of the sisters - her vocals always end up rounded the wrong direction. And the huge lesson I've learned from these sisters: DO NOT just hit autotune for vocals! Go in to Melodyne and do it the right way.
