Week 3 - Posted on 2017-03-13 by Collin Jacka

This week at The Press Recording Studio was very exciting and filled with learning oppurtunities. I met and talked to many diffrent artist and I am begining to learn how to be more hands on in the studio. 

Monday 3-6-17

I walked in on monday to meet a rapper who went under the name Tapiro. I liked him alot because his attitude toward music was inspiring, we talked about old school hip hop to old blues. It was nice to meet a rapper that appricates all genres of music, he is not one to limit himself. Matt was cleaning up the logic beat samples with more unique sounds and effects. We started by using Slate Digital plugins to fatten up the kick drum sound. Then we used a plug in called Omnisphere and found a unique sounding clap that was dissonant yet present. Then we searched for another kick sound inside the Omnisphere plug in to fill the space in between the new fatter kicks, we found a smaller sounding kick that did the trick. After that we added a drop inbetween the verse and chours and we put in a riser to bring up tension. Lastly we found a older sounding piano in side the plug in and Matt explained how he often takes risks to be weird and create a more unique sound to be a tend setter instead of a trend follower, because often in these current days people are afraid to be weird.

Tuesday 3-7-17

On tuesday the first client that came in was a singer/songwriter named Aden, a artist who I have met in previous times at the studio. He came in to polish up some insturmental aspects of his recordings as well as finish some back round vocl harmonies. He manually added claps 3 seperate times and layerd them which gave it a very cool effect. His session finished up rather fast and was the only client I got to see that day but it did give me a chance to ask about some tips and tricks on Pro Tools. I learned that if you use a diffrent track for recording each mic used it makes it much easier and helps avoid echo and such when recording, and it makes it easier to edit on the spot because you can have setting preset on another vocal track. Next Matt told me it is importand to keep I/O ( input and output) open as well as F-J plug in spots just as a general starting point. The he explained how its important to have a technical setup done before mixing so while you are ixing you dont have to worry about other things, just the sound coming out of the speakers. Also I learned that when recording drums it is imortant to an the snair and kick in the center, this creates a very lively drum sound. I also learned that overhead mics on a drumset are used for more than just capturing the cymbals, it can capture the whole drum set.

Wednesday 3-8-17

This dy was nice because no clients came in while I was there and I got the oppurtunity to ask a bunch of questions. A good trick I learned was to highlight the tempo the tap T to find the exact tempo, aswell as bass, kick, snair and vocals are always panned in the middle. I also learned that Matt uses a Burl B32 as a mixing bus to get a nice warm analog sound with digital perks, and that it is important to create a master track so you can control the volume as a whole. Matt also showed me that a cool tool to use that is built into Pro Tools is the auto pan, so you can control moving panning. I learned this while Matt was mixing a song for a guy in the Camen Islands, as we finished mastering his track Matt took pictures of the knobs so if somthing went wrong he would have somthing to go back to. Matt also showed me that he made a couple of his own preamps for mixing which is somthing I defintly want to learn. The next task we did was some Voice Overs for Inshape, this was very fast but i did get to see in depth how to properly set up a mic, In front of te persons mouth and slightly pointed down to capture the lower frequencies. After that we worked on mixing and mastering a song for Tracy Cruz, we took out the breathy parts,and then used the DeEsser. It pin points frequencies then quiets them. Matt then gave me some tips such as making sure your moniter is behind the speakers when youre mixing to avoid the sound bouncing off it, and to edit the mix with everything playing or else you wont get a even sounding mix.He also reccomended that I use the lo-fi plug in built in with protools. 

3-9-17 Thursday

The first client I encountered was named Zack Shane, he came into track some vocals. When he started recording he requested that Matt change the color of the lights in the recording room and ust like that the light swiched from red to blue. This is a good example of how Matt makes his clients feel comfortable and happy while recording, never nervous. we did not do much besides vocal takes before the session ended. But this did give me a chance to ask some questions. Matt told me how to make sure the  hot keys are activated by looking in the top right corner. He also showed me that top click is to highlight and bottom click is to move segments. Lastly Matt explained that the J-37 plug in has presets then he showed me how to acess them, which helped me enormously.

3-11-17 Saturday

The first client Donna Barlow wanted some clean guitar on her song. I very much enjoyed her groovy R and B style. I just caught thee very end of her session, but while I was watching one of the sound engineers Diego gave me a good tip about using the student discount on Sweetwater.com. The next client was a rapper named Detroit, he had a very cinimatic approch and wated to make sure he was telling a story. He also had a rule for himself, no punch ins. He wanted a clean take thogh each Verse and Chours. Diego took over for this session because Matt is in the process of handing all the rappers to Deigo so he can focas on the bands and singer/songwriters. There were some good tricks I took note of such as, Doubling the Hook the make it more powerful and doing a vocal track where he could put emphasis on the verses and the lines he liked the most. Also Deigo would add a drop into each Chours, which everybody seems to love. I also got some tips for Rap Sessions, to first lower the beat volume and raise the mic volume because chances are the rappr already knows the beat pretty well. During this session I was able to talk with Matt more about building pedals and how I could get started. And lastly for the week  Matt explained his theory on making Clients comfortable, he said that he never brings an ego to the studio and he always lets the Client feel somwhat in control. Meaning he doesnt boss them around. This is somthing I picked up on in my first week but it was nice to hear al he does is from experience with entitled enginers and how he keeps buisness coming back and new buisness coming in.