NEW PAGE

:: I have redesigned this blog and put it under new management. Well, I'm still the manager, but the site has moved to http://chrisduncanaudio.blogspot.com. Check it out! ::

File Vault UPDATE: Intro to Audio

:: The separate website I've decided to use to host all my audio files and projects has now been updated with my "Intro to Audio" catalog. Feel free to browse around if you haven't read my very early blog posts and heard my very early work at Evergreen. I did, and it was pretty trippy.

If you've forgotten the address or just can't find it on this page, it is http://musicianator.web.officelive.com/default.aspx ::

Jungle Boss - Final Mix (et al.)

:: I hereby present the final mix of the song Clo-da-do' by Jungle Boss (the title is pronounced "CLOH-deh-DOH"). This is the unmastered version that will be tweaked and adjusted for the final CD, but this represents all the work I have done for it; after this, it's out of my hands. I had fun working with Jungle Boss and fully enjoyed engineering their song. Last I heard, they liked the final product, and I liked the final product, so that's a job well done in my book. As always, I would love to go back and fiddle with little bits and pieces here and there throughout the song, but I absolutely believe that this recording can hold its own without any more input. I hope Mr. Kevin Kent, audio intern and mastering engineer, agrees with me and finds this song easy to master.

On another note, the new quarter has arrived. My Music Composition class is sadly no more, but I took the opportunity to start down my own path for my education. For my first eight credits, I'll continue in Advanced Audio and finish out the year, and for the remaining eight, I have undertaken an independent learning contract which I have entitled "A Study of Film Sound". The title is self-explanatory: I'll be reading two books ("The Foley Grail" and "In the Blink of an Eye"), writing what I learned from them, and applying their discussed techniques and insight to my own projects. One such project is doing all the soundwork for an animation piece entitled "Moon Diary", the story of which is centered around the final seven days of the moon's life. It should be interesting and challenging since I have never done this sort of work before. If that gets finished in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. before the end of the spring quarter), then I will possibly be composing music and/or recording sounds for my own short piece.

Advanced Audio will be taking a lot of my time as well. We have three major project assignments this quarter: 1) The Drop-In - Take a familiar song and add a new instrument in such a way that it sounds like it was always there, or at least should have been; 2) Multitrack Mix 1 - record and mix a group in the allotted two weeks; 3) Multitrack Mix 2 - record and mix a group in the allotted four weeks. Also, in week seven, we'll be taking a field trip to Seattle to tour some professional studios.

Both these programs should be fun, but all in all, a very full quarter to round out the year ::

UPDATE: Due to some weirdness with Office Live, my .mp3 is not being uploaded correctly. I'll have the file working as soon as I can.

UPDATE: The uploading process has been fixed, so the music should play normally. Don't worry about what the player displays for the run time; it's actually over 6 1/2 minutes.

Jungle Boss - Original Cut

:: So here we have the raw session of Jungle Boss, the group I'm recording for the Evergreen CD Project. I wanted to put this up not to have people critique it and say, "Oh, at this part I would do this," but to have a control in this recording experiment, so someone can go back after hearing my final mix and say, "Hey, you did this and this and this and it sounds good," or even, "I didn't hear this, that could be changed."

That being said, I do hope this sounds decent as is. It's always easiest to start with good material and just polish it instead of having to clean up parts first. We did get some magic at the end with the outro jam; that part was totally uncoordinated and spontaneous, but sounds pretty sweet. This is Austin, Colin, and Kyle with "Jungle Boss" ::

File Vault

:: I'm now working on getting all my files consolidated in one easy-to-locate source. If you look at my links section in the right-hand column, you can see a new link titled File Vault. This links to another website of mine that hosts all my music and audio work in nice neat Flash players. It's a work in progress; I'll continue to post new work on here first along with my stories and descriptions about that work's creation.

Here is the link again, for redundancy's sake:
http://musicianator.Web.officelive.com/default.aspx ::

From last year

:: Here's just another clip from a project last year in Intro to Audio. I recorded with Digital Performer and never got around to mixing or even bouncing any rough copies at all. So, here's a rough copy. I didn't do much to it, and I had to use some crappy earphones for monitoring, but at least it's not rotting away on my long lost hard drives and server folders and whatnot. Hopefully I'll soon be able to put up some clips of all my ORIGINAL sound files, just raw audio with no mixing or anything, so you can actually hear how I've changed them and mixed them to turn into the songs I've posted so far ::

When engineers attack!

:: This is a truly unfortunate recording right here. This was my tenth week project from fall quarter, and it's...well, it's not something of which I'm entirely proud. But hey, it's something I've done, and I feel a certain obligation to my few loyal readers to post it on here.

So basically the band that I was going to record didn't show up. No big deal, whatever. My partner Max and I were basically forced to record ourselves. The parts you hear are the only parts there are: me on drums, me on piano, me on vocals, and Max on bass. The drums were miked with the M/S setting on a Shure Viper overhead and a spot on the kick; the piano was miked by setting the Viper to stereo and adding in a cardioid to try a real M/S stereo miking position; the bass was done with a single large diaphragm in front of the amp; and the vocals were actually achieved by me strapping on a binaural headset (Dr. Normar) and walking around as I talked. Enjoy ::

A whole new world

:: No, it's not about Disney (sorry all you Aladdin fans). It's the creation of a scene in an alien world using sound alone. This was our first project of the winter quarter for AAPW and focused on using our acquired skills creatively. The idea was to have a scene in mind first, then create that scene with any sound sources available to us. If you want to listen to the clip first and figure out what I envisioned, what I used to create the effects, or just want to create your own version of what this alien environment is like, then I suggest you click play and close your eyes right now, before I explain. I encourage you to NOT read on until you have listened.

The original scene I played out in my head and later on in the computer is probably fairly obvious: a conversation between two alien creatures. To get the alien language, I wrote out a simple (and fairly strange) conversation and translated it into Spanish. I don't speak Spanish, so I had to use an online tool (freetranslation.com, very handy) to do it for me, and since you have to pay for idiomatic translation, I had to stick with a really rough literal one. I then recorded myself speaking both sides of the conversation and used a pitch-shifting tool in Pro Tools to differentiate each side and thus create two separate characters. Although they already sounded nothing like me, they still sounded human, and definitely still sounded like really bad Spanish. To overcome this, I simply reversed each segment of speech to result in the sound you hear in the recording. If you play this backwards, you will actually hear the Spanish words (although the conversation itself with be spoken chronologically backwards).

As for the ambient sounds, those were recorded in a previous session for a totally different reason. Those sounds were part of a noise composition for a student in another class who agreed that in return for recording her piece, I could use the sound clips for my project. The setting I created with these sounds for the alien dialogue was, hopefully, a spaceport bar. The bubbling and occasionally squealing sound represents some sort of drink with fuzzy creatures in it which are eaten as the liquid is drunk (like a worm in a margarita I suppose). This was originally a Dremel drilled against a pop can; a plug-in turned it into a delicious beverage. Way in the background of the noise, there is a strange reverberated squawking that was my flight announcer for the spaceport; this was simply a synth loop with some EQ and reverb used to throw it far away acoustically from the listener. The most obvious of the sounds is the spaceships themselves, swooping overhead. This was achieved by recording a bass guitar through a distortion and a wah pedal and then using simple volume and panning automation to bring it in and out of the picture. I will hopefully add some pictures of my miking setup later on when it's not midnight; for now, you'll have to just envision it all as you listen to my acoustic scifi ::

A turn for the strange

:: After fall quarter, I decided to drop American Sign Language; it was a great experience, but not really what I wanted to go to school for. I needed a more focused direction for my education than that. So I talked to Terry and was lucky enough to slip into an open spot in his other program, Music Composition Intensive. Although there is plenty of music theory, this class takes more of a look at contemporary methods of composing music. Our first project was one for prepared piano (for examples, look up works by John Cage). The basic premise of this form is not to focus so much on making sound by striking the keys of the piano (although that can certainly be part of the piece) but by manipulating the strings and/or body of the piano to create weird tonality. Felt can be woven between strings, mallets can be used to strike them, small iron rods can be placed across them, whatever results in a sound that the composer likes. My first (and possibly only) prepared piano piece is entitled "Schrodinger's Cat"; if you know the term, then you may be able to figure out the meaning behind each of the four short "movements". I recorded this with a Marantz PMD660 in stereo using two EV RE15's, both about a foot away from the strings at a 20 degree angle to them, one pointing at the bass section nearer to the single-strung notes and one at the treble section by the curved indent in the body ::