Lesson Two - March 14, 2016 - Posted on 2016-03-19 by Judah Ratzlaff

    The second lesson I had was split into two days at the studio and was comprised of going over the second chapter and test, as well as went more in depth on the actual recording of live sounds. We touched on bit rate and that when a CD is recorded it is in 44100 hertz per second (44.1 kHz/s) and has a depth of 16 bits ie. “0110010101101001”. After going through the chapter and the test we then downloaded the driver for my mentors audio interface onto my laptop so we could record some sound wave that we could later edit. The device we used was a Firewire400 and we didn't have any issues hooking it up to my Macbook with his setup. We went through a little bit of microphone set up and used an AKG D 112.We used my copy of Ableton to record the sounds of a bass drum (using various sticks and mallets to produce different sounds), a stick “whooshing” past the microphone, and a Mark II Rhodes electric piano. He left me with the sounds we recorded to play around with and see what I could do in terms of wave form editing.

    Day two we did some similar things to the day before. We recorded a few more of the same sounds and went a little more in depth on wave form editing. This included cutting a recording down to the right size and then copying it to a new separate track. We then normalized the amplitude of the sound to bring it to 0.0 decibels. Following this, the basics he showed me were the reverse of a sound, how to half speed a sound, and also that adding different pure waves to a recording to change the sounds of it ie. adding a sine wave to a bass drum to create a fuller louder bass drum sound. I am, thus far, thoroughly enjoying the program and am looking forward to progressively evolving my methods and developing my own style.