Week 2 - Posted on 2017-03-06 by Collin Jacka

  Week 2 in my recording program was a very diverse week in terms of things I came to learn about. When I first came in on Monday morning I found Matt putting down a bass line for another "In Shape" commercial.  This time it was a TV commercial instead of a radio commercial, so I am guessing they liked the Zumba music I watched him make last week. This comercial song was rather funky and groovy, much more head turning in my opinion. I saw Matt was putting this bassline down through direct input. He explained, this was so he could get an exact tone because for telvision, they are interested in music that is clean cut. He is good at giving them exactly the product they are looking for. After he finished that up I was able to ask him the questions I had accumulateed through my work in the ebook I did over the weekend. First I asked about patchbays, something that the ebook did not explain very well. Matt explained how his patchbay was older and half normal, and then he showed me how patchbays give the ability to change whitch mic pre the mic is running through for example. This really helped me to understand  the concept more. I think it still will  take a me awhile until I  know how to use it myself. After that he showed me how his bass was a Active Bass which means it uses a 9- volt battery  to run with -15db. This is somthing I didn't know at all.  I hen went home to find that my Bass was an Active Bass! We then went over the diffrence between mixing and mastering as he finished mastering an album for RP-9. He explained how mixing is when you are adusting the sound level and effects of each insturment individually and Mastering is when you finish mixing, bounce the file then add effects and such to the mix as a whole. He was using a mastering multiband compresser and how it spits the file into 5 sections so you can compress certain parts of the masterd file if they are overwhelming. In this case he was taking the low end out of the song because it was a bit much and took away the attention from the other aspects of the song. Later that day Ryan came in and I watched as Matt showed him more things inside protools, such as always leaving on the delay compensation, making a copy of a individual track so if you mess up you still have the original. And lastly,  for that day he showed how to use auto tune when different voices come together for the chours of a song becasue the artists are not always perfect with their pitch. 

  The second day I came in and met Josh Washington, an individual artist who is also in a band called Current Personae. He was doing some Midi Keyboard recording and I watched as Matt left and let Ryan run the boards for a little while. Josh wanted a viberphone sound and also a Rhodes piano sound whitch we found in the omnisphere plug in. After finiishing a track with those sounds Josh used a Moag subtractive analog synth through a Mono Gama mic pre. Josh used loops to layer this song and put on multiple melodys over the rhythm so fast it dropped my jaw, Josh is defintly one of the most talented artist that I have came across so far. He was saying how he was going to release his most current album this summer, somthing that can easily find its way on to my playlist. After that session ended, Ryan took me into the recording room of the studio and showed me some of the common equptment used as we set up for a upcoming session later that day. A Manley Power, Manley Tube Mic, Behyer Stereo Mics ( for acoustic recording ) and a Steven Slate Mic that is especially good for emulating diffrent mics after the fact. Then I watched as Matt showed us some more tricks inside pro tools as he was mixing the cpher session from the previous Saturday. He showed how to autotune the bass becasue in the live session the bass player was playing in the wrong key during his solo. Matt explaned how you can auto tune any insturment as long as they are polyphonic (one note at a time).  And lastlly, for that day he told us that protools plugins have to be AAX compatable.

  The last day I was able to go in this week I came in and Diego (another Recording Connection student) on the boards while Matt and Ryan had gone to the gym with the downtime in between sessions that day. This was a good experience because Diego is almost finished with the program and is employed at the studio I believe.. He tslked to me about Parallel Processing which is adding effects on a duplicate track to avoid mess ups on the mix.  We then talked about sampling old records for beats and he showed me some of the ones he was using currently. He showed me the program he likes to use inside pro tools which is a program called Maschine. He lastly showed me that it is very easy to pull samples off youtube for records that would be difficult to aquire through a youtuber named SoundCrate. We found a really cool song and started to make a beat in the time we had until Matt and Ryan returned. Sadly, that day was ridden with technichal difficulties with Komplete and Native Insturments, that was very frustrating for all of us becasue it dropped the anchor and stoppped us from getting anything done before the next artist was scheduled. The next artist was a older man by the name of Bart Vogel.  We mainly worked on redoing some parts of vocals for his upcoming album. We used a Martech Preamp and the Steven Slate Mic  because of the assortment of desired vocal sounds. This didn't take long at all.  We then added an assortment of car horns and traffic sounds to the chours in his song "Arco" which was both fun and a little stessful to get perfectly.  Matt did it very well  though, and it sounded very organic. Bart had a nice folk vibe to his music and it was a fresh breath of diversity music wise that found its way into the studio. 

     The last day I was supposed to go into the studio I was unable unfortuantly becasue the artist requested that nobody but Matt be there to record them, which was a bummer but I am looking forward to making up for that lost time this week in the studio. Overall this was a shorter week in the studio but I did get lots of advice from other engineers and experience with diffrent kinds of music.