Introduction

The Innovator project was something that let the students at Freestyle do whatever they wanted, as long as it was approved by the staff. We could do films, music, graphic design, stories, whatever we wanted. For this project, I partnered with Julianne Wilson to cover two songs and make one original. After we got done recording, we made lyric videos to go with the songs, which are shown below.

Process

For the Innoavtor project, Julianne and I decided we were going to cover Guns For Hands by Twenty One Pilots as well as Scars to Your Beautiful by Alessia Cara. We used Pro Tools to record everything and get all the songs mixed. We started with recording the piano for Guns For Hands. We had Julianne's boyfriend, Sebastian, help us with some of the instruments because Julianne nor I could play several of the instruments we neeed to cover the songs we needed to. We took a few sessions in the recording studio to record the piano, and then we started on the drums. During this time, Julianne recorded the guitar and piano for Scars to Your Beautiful. We had to spend several weeks recording the drums because we ran into technical difficulties and the sound just wasn't what we were looking for the first few times. We eventually finished with the drums and then moved on to vocals for both of the covers. Julianne did the vocals for them, and it was pretty straightforward and easy to record everything related to vocals.

Once we got finished with our two cover songs, we moved on to our original. Julianne wrote the lyrics, and Sebastian and I came up with the guitar and bass lines. We tried to record the guitar and bass at the same time, but that didn't end up working. We recorded the bass line with a click track, and that worked perfectly. I only had to do one take on the bass line, which was very nice. After I recorded the bass track. Sebastian recorded the guitar track along with the bassline I had put down. After those instruments were recorded, we recorded the drum track, which took a few days due to technical difficulties. Once we recorded the drums, we moved on to vocals. We had Sebastian do the vocals for this track, which was a good variation in what we were doing. Once we got everything recorded, I mixed the tracks together to make the final master track.

When we got all of the songs mixed and at their final version, we convered them to mp3s so we could put them into Adobe AfterEffects to make the lyric videos. To make the lyric videos, we imported the audio into AfterEffects and used Adobe Bridge to make effects for the text. It's pretty self explanitory, we just typed in the lyrics to the video and make transitions while the words were timed with the songs. Once we were done with the videos, we put them on YouTube so they could be seen by others.

Media
Research Paper

For English, we had to do a research paper on the topic we were working on for the Innovator project. I based mine off of music recording, and also had a stance on how you can get music online and how it effects the music industry.

Here is a link to my research paper

Reflection

For this project, I chose making covers of songs and recording an original because I want to go into recording arts as my career and I’ve always been interested in recording music. From my research process, I learned that there are a lot of components to recording even just one instrument. The research helped me with my project because I learned a lot about recording and the different types of recording you can accomplish.

For collaboration, I worked with Julianne. We partnered up for this project because we both wanted to do pretty much the same thing, which was work in the studio and record music. The collaboration was very successful because we work very well together and both have very different ideas, but they go well together. We have slightly different music tastes, so it was good for me to learn about recording with a variety of music.

If I could do my project over, I would manage my time better. There was a point in the project where we didn’t really do much because we were so ahead of schedule, and we didn’t think we had to do much else with our project. We got all the recording and mixing done with, so all we had left were the lyric videos, and we still had about 2 months left of project time, and we took a little break because we knew that the lyric videos wouldn’t take too long to make.

I feel like I improved the most with the 21st century skill of creativity, because I was very open to new ideas during this project and explored things I hadn’t done before. I improved the least with the visual component of the 21st century skills because the lyric videos I made weren’t extremely visually appealing. I could have done more effects, but I ended up just doing simple ones. I guess if you’re going for a simple video, that’s fine, but personally I wish I had done more.

I will definitely use the recording experience that I had in the studio in my future, because I’m planning on going into recording arts, and this experience will help tremendously. There’s definitely a ton of things I need to learn, but this will give me a good head start.

I feel like I innovated my education this semester very well because I learned a lot of things I didn’t know before, and I’m very proud of that. I could have done something completely different that I wasn’t passionate about, but that wouldn’t have given me a good experience for my last big project at Freestyle.

I value this project a lot because I want t go into recording arts as my career, and this definitely helped me out with getting a head start on that part of my education. The project was really fun for me, and I’m very happy I did what I did for it.