In this project, we were tasked to be the recording engineer, recording music from a local musician. Later, after recording, we had to mix the audio on Pro Tools. Finally a album cover of our recording. This project seemed very exciting but daunting, so I decided to partner with my friend Jenna.
Our musician, Brandon Olson, grew up in a small town playing music. He started playing piano, which he says is still his favorite instrument. Later in highschool he became an avid drummer, even creating an alt-rock band called King’s Arms, touring across Seattle. In college, his cousin introduced him to the band Nickel Creek, which inspired him to start playing the mandolin. Now he plays at his church every Saturday.
After deciding on a couple of musicians to contact, I hit the first roadbump: no one responded, and the one who eventually didn’t couldn’t participate because of school stress. Went back and found more musicians, but again, only one person responded, and I eventually stopped. After many more attempts at contacting local musicians, we finally set a date for recording. Unfortunately, the we before we were set to record the singer we had agreed to record with fell sick and lost her voice. Struggling to find a backup, my partner talked to her mom, who luckily knew some really good musicians. We were finally all set, with a guy named Brandon Olson, a talented musician who plays the drums, guitar, and mandolin.
For us to know how to use the recording booth, we had to come early to have to be able to know how to record, how to use the mic, and so on. After greeting our musician, Brandon, we showed him around the studio, explaining his side of the recording process. The recording session went smoothly; he played a medley of songs on his mandolin and even a piece from Bach.
Later, when deciding how to mix the audio, I decided to use his medley of D major of Leaves Fall by Chris Thile, A minor of The Robin and Maryanne by Nickel Creek, and A major of Scotch and Chocolate by Nickel Creek because they had a Renaissance vibe I enjoyed. Since a lot of the chords in his music were the same, splicing together clips wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I added some reverb and adjusted the volume of certain parts of the audio, but mostly did a lot of audio splicing to shorten the piece. Since the madaloin needs quite a lot of tunning some notes were off-key, so I either cut them out entirely or used MIDI to adjust them.
When creating the album cover, I leaned into the Renaissance vibe. I inserted a picture of our musician on a stage with a black and white filter on top to imply the Renaissance period.
This project also had a lot of learning opportunities for me, especially with the division of work between my partner and me. The details of how we divided the work aren’t important, but going forward in group projects, where you could choose your partner, you should think twice about choosing your friends. Work ethic matters a lot, and that should be a main deciding factor in choosing a partner for your project.
Even with all the setbacks I experienced in this project, I am really happy with how this project turned out. I was able to contact people I didn’t know and hold a formal conversation with them. On Pro Tools, I relearned a lot of things, like the basics and how to use MIDI, and was able to use my Photoshop skills to create the album cover.