Keepin' On Bloggin' On - Posted on 2017-11-29 by David Deines

It's been a crazy month.. or year... or something.  It's been challenging keeping up with all my schoolwork with everything else going on in my life, but I think I'm still doing ok.  I need to read chapter 16 this week, which discusses MIDI.  This is probably one of the topics that I know the least about so far, so this will be interesting.  We've been working in the studio a lot with things like voice doubling, using compression and EQ properly, some mastering practices, and of course just some general discussion about music and such. 

Yesterday was an interesting day; one of my peers (who is a bit further along than I am) brought in her mix of The Siege, which is the same song I'm working on for my assignment.  It's a really challenging one, and Jason even agreed with that.  The recording is terrible, the performances are sloppy, and in my opinion the song itself just simply isn't that good.  Ceshia (my peer) and I both thought it would be impossible to make it sound more than okay, but Jason gave us a lot of advice and at the end of the day the mix was starting to sound actually pretty good.  I took some notes, but it was hard to put on to paper exactly what we were doing; I'm hoping when I sit down to work on my mix today that I will be able to achieve similar results.  I don't have the Slate plugins that Ceshia is able to take advantage of, so that will definitely hinder my abilities, but hopefully I will be able to get some decent results using just knowledge and stock plugins.

I've also been working hard on the Even Stevens sandwich shop music program.  I was able to find 11 or so contacts just by posting in several Facebook groups, and I think that they were pretty impressed with how quickly I got those.  However, I've been having a really hard time getting Jason to help me continue forward.  I understand that he's super busy and that this isn't a priority for him, but it's incredibly important to me and I've brought it up with him at least 5 or 6 times now and I'm starting to feel like a nuisance.  I reminded him one more time via text today, so we'll see...  After that I may have to give up and try other avenues or something.  Regardless, I'm proud of the people that I was able to find by myself, and it should be enough to at least get started.

Time to hit the book now and hopefully have some time to get some mixing time in after I have to take care of boring life stuff... chaores.. go to the store... etc... blah.

Dave