Madalyn Schimpf

 Happy Shocktober! For our second recording project this semester, we recorded scary stories to be aired on the college radio station for their Shocktober series! The spooky story I recorded was adapted from a post by Reddit user ErlendJ called The Writing on The Wall! The music track is called Suspense Scary Music composed and recorded by Oak Studios (https://youtu.be/tJkQs5xEhPU) The Writing on The Wall Audio

  This past weekend, I helped my boyfriend record a voice acting audition! We did the recording at our apartment so we had to do our best to make the recording sound good. We turned off the AC in the apartment and we actually turned off our refrigerator for a little while as well! Though we turned off everything we could, unfortunately there was still some kind of audible electrical hum in our recording. Thankfully, I was able EQ the frequency out of the recording without ruining his voice! Unfortunately, I can't link the audio for this project because I do not have permission from the writer of the script!

  This semester, instead of having in person concerts, we are having a few virtual concerts! The first concert is coming up pretty soon, featuring The 78's! The 78's provided us with audio stems for a couple of their songs as well as video footage to go along with them! The first thing I did to mix the song was balancing the levels of each track. I made sure that the two voices had a nice blend and that the vocals were in front of the two guitar tracks. I also made sure that the loop pedal track (which provided percussive sounds for the track) was not buried! There was also a kazoo solo that I automated to become more forward in the mix while it played! All the tracks already were recorded with reverb on them so all I added was EQ to a few tracks such as the kazoo and the female vocals and a bit of compression on the loop pedal track! Unfortunately, I can't link the audio to this adventure!

I'm back in the game this fall with the first recording project of this semester! We started out pretty simple for this first project! We wrote and recorded a PSA to be aired on the college radio station! My PSA is a reminder to all students how to keep themselves and others safe this fall and that masks are required on campus at all times! I first found some royalty free background music to set the tone of the announcement, and used that music as the basis for my tone reading the announcement! After recording my own voice, I cut out some pauses and lined the clips up with where I thought they sounded good. I did some volume automation on the background music track so that the music would get quieter while my voice played. I finally added some EQ on my voice to make it sound more appealing! The music I used is called Good Times by Podington Bear! Take a listen and tell me what you think! PSA Audio

As I'm sure this goes for many students at the moment, all of our classes have been modified to an alternative delivery with the health pandemic. That being said, I have had to find new ways to go about practicing the skills I'm learning in my classes! This past week in my Audio Recording II class, we had to mix some STEM tracks! However, I don't personally have access to any of the software or hardware that we use in class. Instead, I had to use solely a DAW, and one that I had never worked in before! I downloaded Reaper onto my computer and got to work! Thankfully, Reaper is quite easy to figure out if you're good at working in Pro Tools!

Earlier this month, we began our sampling project in Music Technology II. In one part of this four part project, we headed into the studio to record samples of drum hits! In this portion of the project, our goal was to record multiple different kinds of drum hits on each piece of a drum set to have varying velocities of the hits of the drums. The reason why we wanted to do this is because we would be using these samples to program an empty Kong device in Reason. If you are using a MIDI controller on the Kong device, the pads on the controller detect how hard or soft the pad is hit. The hardness of the hit is the velocity we were talking about. So if we program different sounds for different velocities (the hardest hit being in the highest velocity range and the softest hit being in the lowest velocity range, etc.), then the sounds that we can make by playing a Kong device will be more accurate as to what playing an actual drum set would sound like!

Last Wednesday in my Audio Recording II class, we set up a drum recording session! For this recording session, I was in charge of the interfaces in the booth. I was responsible for putting the microphone cables into channel inputs on the two interfaces we worked with, and making sure they were in the correct channel so that everything in the booth corresponded with what was in our ProTools session. Prior to the setup of the session, we decided what microphones would be used for each different part of the drum set and what channel on the interfaces the microphones would be going into. This activity taught us the importance of proper microphone placement and the effect that microphone placement has on not only the quality of a recording, but also the entire recorded sound!