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Judah Ratzlaff
The first lesson went very well. Upon arrival at the studio, Brent showed me an old Rhodes Mark I piano he had repaired for a friend of his. The Rhodes piano, as I now understand, is a very iconic and historical piece of equipment; starting manufacture from around the WWII era. It was one of the first portable electric pianos and was invented my Harold Rhodes. It was originally invented for the soldiers of WWII, but became very popular in jazz, pop, and soul music during the 1970’s and early 1980’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_piano
After this we discussed the first quiz and went a little more in depth on the concepts. He really wanted to give me a larger overview of everything for my first lesson so one of the first things we touched on was fundamental frequency. To demonstrate this better we opened up his grand piano and he used the harmonic series to show that some strings will still resonate when another note is played (at a different frequency) because they have the same fundamental frequency. After this he went more in depth on acoustic beats. The example he used was an out of tune guitar and tuned it just by using the acoustic beats. When the frequency of the strings’ resonation is slightly different you can here the acoustic beats because their frequencies are out of phase.
Next, we moved on to talk about some of the gear in the studio including cables, microphones, speakers, ect. We talked a lot about the cables and cable types including TS cables, TRS cables, 3 pin XLR, 5 pin XLR, and 5 pin midi. Brent showed me how to properly wrap a cable as well and said it would be important, if I ever worked in a studio or if I was doing a gig, to know how to wrap a cord properly as it increases efficiency and my colleagues would highly appreciate it. We then touched on conductors and grounds in cables and why we use different cables for different pieces of equipment such as microphones. The ones we discussed included condenser microphones, dynamic microphones, and ribbon microphones.
To close the lesson he showed me some of the projects he had recently finished and showed me where he usually mixes/masters his tracks and the speakers he uses to do it. Overall, I really enjoyed the first lesson and am looking forward to the next ones!
