four rum week ten

creative computational creations

ordeeoe

acoustic guitar experiments coming

fourim 9

Seb - boundaries/milkcrates Works on the basis of two principles - contextualisation (taking things out of one context and using them in another). - limitations (maximum output, minimum input). The first composition Seb played us consisted of an 11 millisecond sample of sound. Using samples and a Max patch he turned this into 20 minutes worth of music. As incredible as this is, I can't seem to find any value for this style of composition beyond the gimmicky, it always has a similar sound - spacious, too alien to be pleasurable. Then Seb spoke at length about his milkcrate project. Sound hackers gather in a specified location for a 24 hour music making stint using only materials they can fit inside a milkcrate. (This fitting nicely with his ethos of context and limits). I find it interesting that, given the capacity to make sound with no limitations, people create limitations for themselves... Darren Curtis - IS MAKING MONEY FROM SOUND/COMPOSITION GOOD GRIEF we should bring him back for the career management class! This guy is the mastermind behind the 'Music of the Spheres' Fringe event. He actually created this experience to investigate the effect of sound on the brain/people in environments. So, very intriguing, cymatics - wave phenomena (galaxy patterns). Sound has an effect on sand, stuff, surely water, and so probably us. The question is how? Well, Darren doesn't quite have the conclusion to that yet but he outlined how he made his composition based on scientific findings (space makes music, F#, A and C# in fact). These frequencies can be found as standing waves in pyramids too (and there is a pyramid in Mexico where, if you stand at the base in a certain spot and clap, the echo returns as a bird call. REALLY COOL STUFF).

creative compy

audio arts wk 9

Once again failing to get in specifically to record drums and post production them, I have for you instead some drums I recorded and worked earlier.... Standard micing used: Kick - beta 52 Snare - SM57 closed miced top and bottom Toms - beta56s closed miced overheads - KM87s a, b formation post production process went something like.... pan overheads left and right (60%), pan snare to the left (36%), tom1 (20%) to the left, floor tom to the right (40%). apply smiley EQ to kick trying to boost thump and click sounds. Apply lots of compression. EQ snare to reduce ring and magnify typical snare sound, use a noise gate (trying to remove ring still). EQ toms extensively in search of typical tom sound send all drum tracks down a bus and into an auxiliary channel where the whole lot get even more compression applied. The result, a drum track that has a bit of drive to it (finally). Photos of some of the plug in settings coming as soon as I'm at uni next as is a mix down

britney comes to forum

Well, this forum was absolutely jam packed with information. Our guest speaker, Peter, had two, entirely different topics to speak about and we got to hear of both. Topic one: Doing a live recording of a 20 piece big band ensemble, how the heck to approach it... PRE PRODUCTION!!!!! Peter couldn't stress enough the value of solid pre production when you have 20 odd people hanging around expecting everything to go smoothly. Handy/obvious advice included confirming with the band and booking your recording space well in advance of the recording day, inspecting the studio resources so to know what you have to play with. Coming in personally to assess the space and equipment/checking everything listed in the resources is physically present. Establishing how you want the band located in the room and making a diagram (which stays in the room). It seems that protoolsing things up is inevitable. Peter found that the trumpets and piano player might nail their parts straight up but the trombonists sound better on the fifth take, he spent a bit of time afterwards mixing and matching takes until he had the best of everything. He also extensively cleaned up spill on the various tracks. The second hour was spent talking about sound production in the advertising industry (where the money is). So the secrets to these super smooth, highly produced sounds....compression, LOTS of it, auto tune/rhythm (Peter says no advances have been made in audio fidelity over the last 10 years, just corrective plugins - how sad). Engineers cut away the gaps in between vocals to make the singer seem even bigger than life. Engineers working on big advertising projects get to use huge protools sessions capable of supporting 190 tracks. There can be potentially 5 or 6 different mixes of the same song stacked on top of each other. The reason for this is because Advertising executives and the so forth are probably in the control room with the engineering and wanting to listen to all available options so as to be able to choose their preferred mix. It seemed to me that this would prove to be an organisational NIGHTMARE. Peter stays on top of things by using markers