Week 2 - Posted on 2017-03-19 by Daniel Gillen Gannon

This was a busy week for me. The chapter covered basic electronics which I had a class on in high school so it was more of a review for me, but I learned a lot in my observation sessions. I had the chance to observe a mix engineer who has worked with many artists and been in the business for quite a few years. Getting to see the actual process of a song being mixed was an excellent experience because we got to go over gain staging, what to mix first, different types of automation, how to think ahead and ways to keep your mixes original. The engineer talked at length about how he changes the way he approaches a mix every six months so that all of his mixes sound original and why he chooses not to compress bass in certain situations. One of the biggest topics he talked about was the impotance of using delays. Delays help give certain aspects of a track more air and making the sound much more pleasing to the ear. In my other observation session I learned about how to patch and little bit about Pro Tools. We got to go into the studio and send sound from the microphone into the mixing room through a preamp and then into Pro Tools. Getting some experince on Pro Tools was definitely helpful because I use a different DAW so seeing how this particular DAW is set up gave me some more insight into the program and how the workflow will be.