For the Senior Music Recording project, I learned the basics of being the “recording engineer” in Freestyle’s recording studio. Throwback to last year’s Music Recording project, Mr. Florendo was the one who recorded me and my friend Albert playing our instruments. This time, with the help of Mr. Florendo, I was able to control the recording studio to record my brother playing the piano.
So as I mentioned, my brother Jason is the musician for this project, and he played the acoustic piano in the recording studio. Because why spend so much time finding a local musician when you have one under your own roof? My brother and I both started learning how to play the piano at the same time in elementary school, and aside from the piano, my brother also plays the violin and viola at Golden State Youth Orchestra.
▶ Fairy Tale
⏸ Fairy Tale
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 teach my brother 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 me some audio mixing skills in Pro Tools, such as the pitch curves, which gave me the ability to emphasize the higher melodic tones over the harmony.
Overall it was really fun to record this piece as I got my brother to step onto Freestyle’s soil and get to know some of the people there. Being able to understand some basic features in Pro Tools and the recording studio setup made me appreciate the advanced equipment and editing some of my musician friends use in their own composed songs, and I hope to use these skills to potentially help others edit their music too.