BLOG-O-RAMA (The Dirty Sanchez Experience)

Hmm…let’s see. I am very happy with my choice of major so far. I’m really into the subject, and I like our school’s program very much. I like the fact that the college stresses a lot about having a well-rounded education, which I guess is the goal of a liberal arts college. I don’t necessarily mean just a well-rounded education in general, but rather and more precisely a well-rounded music education. We just don’t learn the tech side and that only of our major, but we also expand our knowledge of music & aural theory and voice proficiency, and also need to keep our musicianship up as well. So far I like the school’s staff a lot and think it’s great how they work as a close-knit team to really help their students succeed. I think it’s very helpful and beneficial, and I think we have great teachers lecturing our classes. However, as Dr. Day taught us all, an intelligent man once said, “With every action comes an equal and opposite reaction.” Although my analogy differs slighty in the equal part, Isaac Newton’s law also reflects my thoughts on my choice of major at this school. So far I like the program a lot, but I just think it’s unfortunate and quite a bummer that freshmen do not have personal access to our school’s studios. Although I do understand why such a rule would be enforced for several reasons, I just get slightly irritated by this. Also, I hope you don’t get offended by this Dr. Hill because I mean no personal offence at all, but I feel like our Survey to Music Industry class was not completely necessary all the time. Your book is a great aid and way of learning about recording technology, and I believe it is very easy to understand and is very well structured; I’m sure I’m going to be using it still in the future to come too. But I just felt that we didn’t always get a lot accomplished in class. It’s not your fault, it’s just that lots of the time there wasn’t much material to cover. I’d say my favorite class this semester was last class I believe, when we went to Studio A and learned about and reviewed facts about mics. I think this course would have been much funner if we had more classes learning about gear. All in all, I’m still excited about my major and I’m looking forward to finishing these following years with my rad MRT classmates. Good luck in any and all of your class voice, aural theory, music theory, and piano class tests and quizzes. And lastly, goodluck to our classmates who have already decided this program isn’t for them. I hope your future major makes you very content.

Proteck yo’ neck,

C-Note

On Sunday, November 9, 2008, I attended Scott Hoon and Bryant Wong’s overdubbing and mixing session in Studio A at LVC. They already tracked the drums, bass, and guitar of the songs they needed, and simply needed to overdub keys and each song and vocals on one. When we first set up and started the overdubbing, Scott needed more signal from Trent’s keyboard so he asked for more and Trent relunctantly gave. Scott reaffirmed Trent that he’d turn it down afterwards if needed. Anyways, we started the redubbing and Trent busted his part out with ease. We had to punch part of the beginning, but Trent cleaned it up right away. While Trent was playing the second song, Scott started playing around with the Bombfactory compressor which is a “bomb”ass compressor (pardon my language). He didn’t like the sound of the kick drum so he was trying to improve it with the compressor. So Trent once again amazed us all with a crazy spotless first take, with exception of maybe a few notes. Once again, we quickly went back and punched that part. Once the organ part was laid out, we went back and Trent added a piano part. It was now time for the third song, which was a sweet 12 bar blues. Trent busted his organ part out nearly perfectly, and we had to go back to punch literally one note out. Furthermore, that one note was at the end of an insane run. Again, that was quickly fixed and we moved on. Now Scott set up a mic (I forget the name) that was incredibly awesome. It sounded spotless and even had its own power supply. We plugged the mic through the patchbay from the studio to the control room and plugged it into the sweet sweet 147 Universal Audio 2-610 Tube Pre-amp. Mark laid down some smooth vocals on the third song. We had to redo the 1st and 2nd verse because it was too hot, and we were practically done. Once that was done, we went back to Trent, who laid down piano fills between the vocals. Everything sounded great, and Mark and Trent packed up and left. We cleaned the little mess that was in the studio and headed back to the control room where we started mixdown. Scott had all three guitar tracks (note: the guitar part was recorded to three separate mics) grouped together so that we could experiment with the part with ease. He ended up bring out the melody in certain parts and automated a pan for the melody in another part. He showed me an easy way to do all this with simply grabbing the track line and raising up, making a rectangular bubble on the track line. Anyways, 2 and a half hours went by and it was time to study for good ol’ Dr. Day’s physics exam.

Today I had the pleasure of attending Bryant Wong’s mastering session of the Honor’s Orchestra concert and LVC Orchestra & College Choir’s concert (Mozart’s Requiem) for two hours. For the majority of the session, we’d switch between projects. For both projects, Bryant mostly used the OZONE plug-in which had multiple effects that you could use. If I remember correctly, it had a compressor/limiter, reverb, harmonic exciter, and I think 2 or 3 other effects. Not knowing what a harmonic exciter is, I asked Bryant and he explained how it added harmonic content to your track. Anyways, for the most part, Bryant did a lot of EQ experimentation. He told me that generally when you EQ something, its best to have the EQ line a smooth as possible. Also, if there is a problem, it is better to cut it by a few dB than to boost it usually. Bryant briefly ran through the audiosuite and explained that it is more to process and change the signal than for simple effects. He also briefly touched on automation, and showed me the waveform option and volume trim. I asked Bryant about the mic set-up and he explained both concert’s set-ups. I believe for the Honor’s Orchestra concert he used two 44’s, one 32, and two PZM’s; for the Requiem concert he used a deccatree that mounted one 44, two 14’s, and two 32’s; he also used four 14’s which he placed infront of the soloists, and two PZM’s which he mounted to the back wall. Bryant pointed out that the PZM’s sounded like they picked up certain singers in the back more than the overall choir, but those mics were needed because the College Choir didn’t do too great of a job enunciating. Also, Bryant told me his philosophy: “You can never have too much material.”  It’s better to have too much and not use some of it than not have enough and work your best with as little as you got. At some point in the session, there was an unexpected celebrity appearance by good ol’ Michael Kudrack, as well as Jeff (Bryant’s partner) coming in a little while before. Mike wanted to back up one of his files from Studio C to his external harddrive. Unfortunately, the computer wasn’t very reliable, and he had to try backing it up nearly 10 times. This took a while, so we sat around and chatted. Bryant explained to me how if your working on something you’ve never worked with before (say a bassoon), or simply are mastering something previously recorded (for instance the Requiem), it’s best to have an audio copy of it so that you could check it out and take a screenshot of the waveforms. This allows you to pretty much copy it exactly. Anyways, after multiple CPU overloads and beneficial teachings, we did one of the last things before I left about 20 minutes early. Bryant cut part of the beginning of a song in the Honor’s Orchestra concert because there was a baby crying. Professor Dietrich stopped the song about 15 seconds into it and restarted. The mic’s picked up a great quote from him in which I believe he was talking to the orchestra, “I don’t think that was your playing.”

In an effort to introduce the world to the wonders and pure genius of one of our great LVC teachers, I present you with the miraculous, the elegant, the mysterious, the one and only… Dr. Eric Fung.

Dr. Eric Fung plays Goldberg Variations

On the hectic date of Sunday, October 19, 2008, I went to LVC’s Studio C, the mastering suite, to observe Shannon Streifeneder’s “Guitarboi” project. She was working on a track that her Recording III teacher had given to her entire class to master, “Guitarboi,” a gentle acoustic song. Shannon was using Pro-Tools 7.4.2 originally for this project. The first order of business for Shannon was to work on the drum track. She didn’t really like it and wanted to dabble with the EQ levels. Soon afterwards she quickly decided that what was needed was a drum doubling. She doubled the drum track and added a limiter, resulting in a dramatic experiment of “lots of knob twisting” (qtd. by John Heenan in Studio C). After this experiment, Shannon concluded that this was not was was needed. She deleted the doubling and began playing around with the other track, once again dabbling with EQ options. Shortly afterwards, Shannon decided she’d need a fade out. She exported the file as a WAV file to Apple’s Wave Burner because apparently Wave Burner has better fade out options than Pro-Tools. Once we were on Wave Burner with the file open, we ran into a tragic problem: There was no output signal from the computer to the monitors!!! And quite tragic it was, for how was Shannon supposed to work on her project, let alone teach a group of eager freshmen, if she couldn’t get pristine sound quality for her project. After a few phone calls and much Wave Burner and Apple computer sound/output option experimentation, this savy upperclassmen and righteous freshmen group were on the way! We got the monitors to work, and Shannon added her fade out in the song. Lastly she added a limiter once more to boost the overall level of her project. Once the mastering part of her project was done, she burnt the track on to a C.D at the slow option speed to ensure good sound quality. Finally, she was done and we were taught!

On Sunday, October 19, 2008, I had the priviledge of attending and observing a live recording of Phili’s own Dirk Quinn Band, an awesome up-and-coming jazz/funk band, in Studio A at LVC. The band consists of a guitarist, bassist, key-man, drummer, trumpeter, and saxophonist/flutist, though the horns were not able to attend the session. The engineers working on the tracking were Andy Mowatt, Mike Kudrak, and Jon “AES man”. They were all working on a project in which they need to record, and mix, and possibly master; though their grades rely mostly on mix. This session however was soley the recording part. I attended part of their session for about two and a half hours, and it was not exactly what I expected. I got there after they set everything up, so the band was already practicing and jamming. When I got there I learned that they had already recorded the first song, and did it in about 4 to 5 takes I believe. In the two and a half hours I was there, they recorded two more songs, and then we cleaned up. Before this studio observation, I thought a recording session had a lot of work associated with it from start to end. However, we just mostly sat around, talking about cool and creative ideas about what to do with the song once the group would get to the mixing. This session was basically just getting all the tracks down, making sure they sound pristine and ready for mixing. Occasionally the group members would dabble around with the pan potentiometer and the fader to tweak the sound, but the was pretty much it until clean up. From about 4:00 p.m. to 5:45 p.m., the second song, Seven Swings, was recorded. It took about 4 complete takes and a whole lot of jamming before that song was laid down. I was impressed because every take sounded so good and was very tight. The only reason for re-takes was maybe 1 or 2 mistakes that might have been an 8th note off or so. One might not even realize the mistakes unless they went back and relistened carefully, which, since this was a recording, would obviously be done. Each take was similar too but not exactly a like. They were great improvisers, and halfway through my stay in the session, I learned that the keyboardist didn’t even know the songs prior to the session. Anyways, after doing about 4 to 5 complete takes of each song, the session was practically over. Kudrak burnt the last two takes of the first song, and the last three takes of the last two songs onto a C.D. for the band so they could listen to it before coming back with the horns for the overdubbing session. While this was going on, I helped Andy and Jon clean up, wrapping cables and setting stands back in their place. Overall it was a cool and relaxing session.

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“Hello world!” My name is Cedric Sanchez and I am a freshman in the MRT program at LVC. So far so good, so keep it easy like Mac-n-cheesy! Peace!