posted by cs004 on Oct 20
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.
Archive for October, 2008
posted by cs004 on Oct 20
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!
posted by cs004 on Oct 20
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.