1/23/14 - Posted on 2014-01-24 by Robert Wiley

Alright, I had another visit with my mentor Mr. Donnie baker and things were really busy in there today. One of his past interns from a few years ago came back for the NES convention and stopped in to see the place. He did not go through the program but was an intern for a few months with Donnie before he left to attend college in Iowa. So he was there along with another student who was going over lesson 15 in the big room but, they had to move because clients came in around two. Then Donnie had a gentleman who was interested in doing some recording and showed this guy around the facility, he was an older gentleman. Later Donnie said, "..he (the guy) had a vision.." "Not sure what that meat but..."

So then we finally got to review CH on MIDI and this was a difficult chapter for me because I was not able to download CHIRP successfully - thus I was not able to participate in some of the exercises. But Donnie told me that MIDI is hardly ever used in post-production so don't worry too much about it. He said its a simple process and he connected up his Abelton to show me how MIDI could be used. That was a cool demonstration, you are able to make anything sound good with one of those. Literally it did not sound like Donnie missed a note - it sounded like he was a composer or he knew what he was touching.

Then we talked about qauntizing when you are working with the MIDI. And that just snaps/pops your values to the closest grid mark - he gave us an example of that which again was pretty cool. Elastic audio is a similar function Donnie mentioned because you are stretching the audio to fit within certain parameters. I reminded him of that little project he let me work on and he said that I was basically quantizing right then. I did not know that...

Anyway next week i See him on Wed and in the books we are setting up for a full band on Thursday so he mentioned setting up drums, etc....... it should be fun.