For our music recording project, we were tasked with using Freestyle’s professional music recording studio and ProTools to record a musician’s playing. For this project, I collaborated with Jerry Liang to record his brother playing the piano, playing “童话” or “Fairy Tale” in English.
Behind the scenes
Recording music isn’t simple. During our recording session, we had 7-8 takes until we got the perfect recording. Using my piano and musical knowledge, I told Jerry’s brother which parts needed more dynamical contrast, as well as which parts needed to be polished more. Through Mr. Florendo’s guidance on the communication system within the recording studio, we were able to talk to Jerry’s brother during the session to ensure a smooth recording.
Album art
Final Product
Reflection
The piece Jason played is a Chinese song called “童话” or “Fairy Tale” in English. The story behind this song is that the singer wants to protect his beloved who is suffering from terminal illness. When creating the album art, I went for a more minimalistic and geometric style by illustrating two rock figures, where the rock figure on the left is hugging the crumbling rock figure on the right. The inspiration behind our album art came from the shapes of Minecraft figures and the pet rock monster named “Brumble” from Prodigy Math Games.
The project began with us asking Jason to be our musician and then figuring out what piece he wanted to play. We initially thought about recording a different piece on the violin instead, but ended up choosing the Fairy Tale piece for the piano as it sounded better. On the day of recording, Mr. Florendo taught us how to set up the recording studio and taught Jason the procedures before we started to record. It was pretty interesting considering the amount of key changes this song had, as while recording, Mr. Flo was like “Is that the third key change!?” After recording a bunch of takes, Mr. Florendo taught us some audio mixing skills in Pro Tools, such as the pitch curves, which gave us the ability to emphasize the higher melodic tones over the harmony.