Week 4

Due to the major flooding event that happened this week we won't have access to the campus for next 2 weeks as they assess and repair the damage. So this week decided I wanted have another go at mixing the sample song David gave us and I wanted to experiment with using my bathroom as an echo chamber effect send.

In the bathroom next to my office I placed an old guitar amp speaker and an AT2020 on a mic stand as seen in the image blow. I only had one 10m xlr cable so to get sound to the speaker I used a RODE wireless go as its what I had at hand. I initially soloed the drums and played them though the speaker with the mic facing to the left and did another recording with it facing the right to make a stereo mix but the effect wasn't as strong as I had hoped for. In the end I only ended up using the reverb chamber for the lead vocals but with some extra fiddling I probably could have made a stereo mix. 

for the rest of the song I played around with the default reaper compressor and eq plugins and even had a try of sidechaining which took a while to figure out how to do. I ended up sidechaining the bass with the drums bus and I chained the drums with the vocals. I EQ'ed the kick snare and hi-hats to try and isolate the instruments to try and separate them a little but I think I overdid it as they don't sound right on headphones. 

I also added the widener plugin to the lead vocals echo chamber, backing vocals and the drum bus. I added compression to the drums and bass along with I used a multiband compressor in adobe audition after as a master compressor. After adjusting the levels I thought that the chorus sounded like it needed something else to make it stand out a but more so I did some automation to the volume of the reverb chamber channel and made it increase for both choruses.

Parallel processing: Is were you are processing a copy of the audio on another track and combining it with the original.

Aux send: sends a copy of a signal to extra output for processing or for listening.

Insert: when enabled allows you to insert a nother effect or chain of effects on an audio track.

Reflection

What?

What activities have I completed this week?

Because of the flooding we didn't have class this week due to the campus being underwater. I decided to use this time away from class to experiment by myself and I ending up putting a guitar amp in my bathroom next to my office. I placed a microphone facing the ceiling above it with a 10 metre XLR cable running back into my office. I used this as a physical reverb chamber for different instruments like the vocals and drums on the multitrack we have been using to practice mixing. I even tried recording the drums left and right by rotating the microphone each time to try and get a slightly different reverb sound.

So What? 

So, what have I learned this week?

This week I learned about reverb chambers and how to set them up. Using the equipment I had available to me I was able to practise this and learnt how to tweak things to change the sound i.e change the distance and volume of the mic and speaker. I also learned that the Brisbane river can get high enough the cause major flooding. We learned about parallel processing and what it means. We learned about AUX sends and context for how to use them. We also learned about inserts which are a combination of both in a way.

Am I on the right track with this unit?

I as a little sad we weren't able to use the studios on campus this week understandably because of the flooding. But it has kicked off a starting point for me to want to go out on my own to learn for instance learning about reverb chambers and such.

Now What?

Now what will I do to move forward?

I need to start thinking about what I'm going to do for project 1 and start planning/ timing the studio bookings. I want to research more about reverb chambers and echo chambers and how well they were used in the past as well as using physical effects for sound manipulation.

References

Adobe. (2021). Adobe Audition Audio recording and editing software. Adobe. Retrieved 2 March 2022, from https://www.adobe.com/au/products/audition.html.

Audio-Technica. (2022). AT2020. Audio-Technica.com. Retrieved 2 March 2022, from https://audio-technica.com.au/products/at2020/.

REAPER. (2022). Audio Production Without Limits. Reaper.fm. Retrieved 2 March 2022, from https://www.reaper.fm.

Rode. (2022). Ai-1 Audio Interface. Rode. Retrieved 2 March 2022, from https://www.rode.com/interfaces/ai1.

Rode. (2022). Wireless GO Compact Wireless Microphone System. Rode.com. Retrieved 2 March 2022, from https://www.rode.com/microphones/wireless/wirelessgo.