Week 4- Beatmaking w/ Carlos

This week we worked with Carlos again. We got work with him in his office which was really cool! His room was what my dream home studio would look like. He had his desktop set up at one end of the room and had three or four keyboards as well as a bass guitar and a few other instruments. He also had really nice studio monitors which sounded amazing in the office because of the acoustics. All of this plus a couch and coffee table where we sat and worked on a few projects on my laptop. Even though it had only been a few weeks since he had started using a new software, he had gotten the hang of it really quickly. He showed us a few of his projects that he had been working on in the past week and helped him to get around the software and show him the things that he wanted to do. After this, we started a new beat together and came up with a pretty cool melody and drums. It was really cool to have been able to work with him and I hope we will have the opportunity to again.

SugarHill Week 3 - Audio Engineer Class

Week 3- 

This week when Brooks and I came in, we met a man in the lobby named Carlos who rents out his own office with the studio. He had just started using a new software called FL Studio which both Brooks and I are familiar with. We worked with him for a little bit of time to help him find where all of the essential tools were and explain the layout and workflow of the program. We were then all invited to sit in on an audio engineering class being taught to University students at the studio so we decided to join. The class was mostly focused on setting up microphones in a professional studio. The instructor walked us through the differences between many of the industry standard microphones and explained what each one is often used for. To demonstrate the differences he had set up about five different microphones and showed us the difference in the waveforms that we recorded using all of the different mics. For example one of the demonstrations was to show which kind of microphone was best for recording a snare. I volunteered to help by going into the recording booth and playing the snare drum while he recorded it through all of the mics. He then explained which mics he thought would perform better and compared his predictions of how he thought they would sound with how they actually sounded. It was a really cool experience for both Brooks and me. We were very lucky to be able to attend the class as it was taught by an actual professional sound engineer.

SugarHill Week 2 & Workshop

Over the weekend Brooks and I attended a workshop at SugarHill Studios on the production of southern hip-hop with producer Allen "Ayyell" Gibson.  We started out by creating the drums with something that I have really never used, which was a circular drum sequencer as opposed to a linear one. The app which was called "Patterning" was pretty cool because you could visualize the drums in the way that they are looped throughout the beat. I think that more software should incorporate this type of sequencer. 

Using this non-linear sequencer, we made a few variations of beats. We started off with one beat and made another variation with the same rhythm with more energy which we called the turn-up beat. We also made another slower beat and a turn-up version of that. I liked that we made more than just one beat. What I usually do is I will make the drums and then make unique patterns that will change up slightly but I really liked this other method of making variations.

After importing all of the drums and making a few slight changes, we started working on a melody. This was probably my favorite part. He started off by laying a few chords out and he explained his reasoning for his chord progression. To create tension he started off with a chord that was distant from the root note of the scale. By doing this and ending his progression off with a chord on the root note, he created tension and movement in the track. He also made another variation of the chords where he raised the energy by using inverted chords. During this time the Big Chester had come up with a melody for the hook. Which gave Allen something to build on. In the hook, he wanted to emphasize the word crown. He did this by taking the chord that was played under it and built side melodies upon it. I liked how he used the beat to tell a story.

On Wednesday, we came in to give them feedback about the workshop. We told them what we liked about it and what we would want for future workshops. We also got to watch Ryan work through an album from a rock band that he's working with. I have never seen so many files on one project it was quite amazing to see all the takes from one album on a single project file.

First Day at SugarHill

This Wednesday, was the first day that Brooks and I went to our internship at SugarHill Recording Studios! We started off by watching Ryan, who is one of the guys that we will be working with, work on a music video that one of his friends in L.A. had sent to have mixed. I really liked the music as well as the visuals. As soon as the song is released, I'm going to add it to my playlist! After he finished, we followed him into a separate part of the studio which is used more for production and mixing. They showed us the program that they mainly use (Protools). Both Brooks and I thought that using their software would be really hard at first. However, to our surprise, we were able to get the basics down pretty quickly. Once we had walked through everything, we tried mixing a beat that someone had sent into the studio. In order to mix and master the track we used many different virtual plugins such as compressors, equalizers, and limiters. It was a really cool experience to be able to take what I do for a hobby at home go to a place where professionals do the same thing. I can’t wait to go back next week!