Week 15 – AA1 – Final Recording

I recorded a young three piece band named Unknown Truth. An eight hour recording session and everything got done. Apart from a little mishap with the routing of the headphone sends, everything went well. The recording itself went very smooth. Four takes were done and the final one was judged as having the best vibe. Only one quick drop in each was required for the guitar and the bass. The vocals were recorded in the live room. The guitar ended up being double tracked. Overall I’m pretty pleased with the recording, although I still feel I have a long way to go. The snare especially sounds flat and I probably should’ve used baffles more to tame the room sound. The band was extremely happy with everything so I am happy about that. They got to take a rough mix on CD home with them at the end of the session and got yelled at by some old man from Scott Theatre telling them to turn it down when they blared it in the parking lot. Ahh rock n roll.

The initial mix took around 15 hours. Much of this time was spent mucking about with the snare drum and the vocals. The snare doesn’t have any ‘crack’ to it and no amount of equalising, as I found, was going to help. The vocals (and the drums in general) have the room sound imprinted on the recording. Baffles around the back of the kit and around the vocalist would have helped. In the end I scrapped the first mix and started again with a fresh outlook. This time I used the room sound instead of fighting against it. This kind of thinking certainly helped and the mix went smoother the second time around and got it done in six hours.

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Finished Mix

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Preproduction

Recording

Production

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Fieldhouse, Steve. 2007. “Audio Arts 1.” All seminars presented at the University of Adelaide from Feb to June.

Digidesign. 1996-2007 Avid Technology, Inc All Rights Reserved.

Week 15 - CC1 - Final Composition

The idea for this came from a collection of sounds I had recorded a couple of years ago. The original sounds were recorded on analogue tape via a Marantz tape recorder using a RODE NT3. The sounds are scrapes recorded from a rusty metal louvre on a pig pen and a metal ashtray from a car being slid in and out. A small section from this collection of sounds are used in this composition. A section with as much sustain as posible was found. The longest ‘note’ was around 1 and a half seconds so a lot of time stretching was going to be done.

The piece itself is made from four tracks which represent a string quartet. Each track comprises of small sections of recorded scrapes pitch shifted to create musical notes. A short piece was written in Bm. This was used as the template for the scrapes. I think the idea of sounds of nature replacing traditional orchestral sounds has potential although this piece didn’t really represent it well. With more work and time I’m sure this could get to a level that I would find acceptable.

This piece could easily have been put together via MIDI, but it would have had a different result. If the sound was triggered by a sampler, the sounds would no doubt have artifacts from being pitch shifted and also the side effect of automatically getting the tempo of each sample altered up or down depending on the keyboard note. Having full control by choosing the sound which most closely resembles a particular note gives much better results although doing it that way is a very time consuming method.

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Feast your ears!!

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Preproduction

Program Note

Analysis

Score

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Haines, Christian. 2007. “Creative Computing.” Seminars presented at the University of Adelaide between Feb and June 2007.

Carrol, Mark. 2007. "Perspectives in Music Technology 1A." Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, Week 7.

Digidesign. 1996-2007 Avid Technology, Inc All Rights Reserved.