Continuing On - Posted on 2017-10-03 by David Deines

I haven't had the chance to blog for a while, unfortunately.  My life has been incredibly busy with two jobs and trying to learn this new field so quickly.  Nonetheless, I have been learning a lot of great things and am starting to feel more comfortable around the studio and with Pro Tools.  We've finally been doing some tracking activities in the studio with our mentor lately, which I have been wanting to do since day one.  Last week, we recorded Jason (our mentor) playing a couple acoustic guitar parts, a Wurlitzer keyboard part, and a harmonica part.  It was very challenging trying to get all the signal paths in place - from plugging the mics in the live room, routing them to pre-amps and such in the patch bay, and finally setting up Pro Tools.  We had many challenges, but at the end of the day we all learned a ton and ended up with a pretty nice recording, too.  The next day, we did a little bit of mixing on the session, but didn't have a chance to really finish it up.  Yesterday, we worked on a drum set that was already miked up, but Jason wanted to put up some barriers to help isolate the sound.  It was pretty amazing how much of a difference it made when we put up a few walls to help absorb the sound and minimize the late reflections, which were causing phase issues and cancellation.  Today, I finished up chapter 9 and I am really starting to feel comfortable with Pro Tools and look forward to working on some of the sample songs soon.  Pretty soon I will need to purchase some gear so that I can practice some things on my own.  I'm not sure exactly what I need yet, and hopefully Jason will be able to help me out with that, but for the moment I'm probably going to need to start with some sort of interface so that I can plug my guitars into my computer and start recording those.  I will also need to buy an affordable mic, probably a SM-57, to start working on some vocals and probably work on some beatboxing too - and whatever else I can play around with!