Back In the Rhythm of It - Posted on 2018-07-13 by Matthew Cloutier

Aaaaaaaaand we're back!

Things are finally starting to feel normal again. I'm almost caught up for time and chapters lost, and the class discussions every week have been really useful! We went over Chapters 8, 9, and 10 in the past three weeks and I've been relearning the basics of Pro Tools through them. I have been using Pro Tools for quite some time now so this wasn't any new information, but it was good to get a refresher. I learned about starting sessions properly, navigating the UI, session file info, and key commands in Chapter 8 followed by a more demonstrative Chapter 9 which gave me the basics on edit and mix window tools as well as the concept of latency (which WAS actually a newer concept to me and needed this explanation desperately).

We'll be going over Chapter 10 tomorrow, and I learned more about plug-ins; what they are/do, types, and usage. It was a very technical chapter, and the concepts of inserts and sends are elementary to me, but I found the history of plug-ins and their evolution to be very interesting.

Last week we had a back-to-back day of recording at Mirror Sound; first a three-part country-rock group comprised of a bassist, drummer, and singer/vocalist. These were all older gentlemen who knew how to ROCK (in a lowkey way). I had a conversation with the vocalist and he told me how he actually wrote the song back in the 60's, and has constantly changed the style of it over the years. Class acts, all of them. The following artist, Benji, was a rapper from Atlanta who happened to be in town and needed a good space to record vocals away from home. He was a really friendly guy and was visibly impressed by the studio space. Matt and I ran the session alone that day, and had a lot of fun engineering Benji. he brought a great beat to record to and we were really satisfied with the end result!

I'll be meeting Ken and Matt again for our lesson on Chapter 10 tomorrow, and hopefully shadowing more over the weekend. Glad to be moving even further; Chapter 10 marks halfway to completion!

Now comes the midterm...