Project 1

Working in collaboration with Skamux

The initial project pitch that my team member (Portfolio: http://jonnybullpitt.wixsite.com/mysite/blog) and I agreed on was to work on an interdisciplinary project which would allow us to mark off the interdisciplinary learning outcomes however, after approaching students in other disciplines, including games, animation and film, these students didn’t plan on needing any audio assistance until later on in the trimester therefore we decided for the first project to work within our own discipline.

Instead of looking to help other students on their projects, I decided maybe we could talk to film or animation students to collaborate with us to create visuals that could be used for our new project which will be working with my friend that also is doing a bachelor of audio at SAE, that goes by the stage name, Skamux (Portfolio: http://jordanfonua.wixsite.com/portfolio, Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/skamux).

For our first session we decided to book the Raven Midi Studio so we could produce on the fly however patching all the outboard gear together was time consuming and took awhile to get familiar with, after we routed everything into our Pro Tools session we saved a template so we can bring it up next Raven session to ease workflow. Below is a layout of the session showing the different routing and tracks used for all the outboard gear. For our session, we decided to hook up the Roland system 1, Roland TR-8, Virus Ti and Moog SUB 37. For each unit we created a MIDI track and an audio track allowing us to record both MIDI and audio information into Pro Tools so we have both option available to us during editing.

-INDEPTH ROUTING EXPLANATION TO COME-

After all the outboard gear was routed to Pro Tools, we decided to make a small drum loop to get ideas flowing however to save time we decided to find a royalty free ‘type beat’ off YouTube to give us a reference point and a style we can try to achieve. The feel we are trying to achieve is a sort of dark room, Toronto style Rnb/Hip-hop.

Reference Tracks:

The session ran quite laidback and as a someone who have never made a beat on and DAW before, I was intimidating to create layers using all the outboard equipment. Both my team member and I decided to work together because of this basis that we felt we had the equal amount of knowledge on audio as we both have had no previous experience working in a studio environment apart from the small projects done throughout this course. Being fresh out of high school, these learning styles and methods are very foreign to me and I feel like I struggled to keep up with the students that have had experience working with Ableton and other DAWs. The following days after recording the try take of the vocals and overdubs, we decided to work individually and come up with our own take on the genre. Creating a beat around the vocals proved to be a challenge for myself so my team member and I decided to work on one track together, I assigned myself to creating a drum loop while my team member made the synth patches and leads.

Throughout the course of developing the track, I became sick so Jonny decided to piece together the whole track however, the stems will be sent to me and I will be able to add sampled drums to add more punch in the mix.

For future reference to mitigate negatives events for the next project and facilitate positive events, I will have to do more self directed studying to better understanding sequencing in a DAW. Also better time management between theory and practical study will also help to understand the production process as well as microphone selection. As a team I believe we worked very well to support each other through times where we felt we had been thrown into the deep end by forcing ourselves to produces are first ever track with very minimal DAW sequencing experience.

During the production phase, the first thing we had to determine was the BPM for the session to be able to quantize samples. The session was at 105BPM which remained consistent throughout the track.