From Livermore to Liverpool...

Yes! I am finally off to England :) I am very excited for my trip and extremely excited for the Beatles Museum in Liverpool! I leave tomorrow morning. I am also seeing a musical on Tuesday which I am going to use for my last performance paper in MPA 295...

My video project is going so much better than I thought it would! I have straight through music now which is great, but I didn't feel really proud of it until Tuesday night when I played it on some speakers for my friends. It still needs some work, but at least I'm happy with the end product :))

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone and have a fantastic break.

11.14.11

Monday of this week, we worked on Redrum in Reason. I personally love Reason because of how user friendly it is and how well it works with ProTools.

First, we created a Redrum, a Reverb, and a Distortion all UNDER the Mixer which was highlighted aqua-marine meaning it was selected. This ensures that the wiring will all be correct.

In Redrum, there are 10 different channels, or sound slots that you can populate with whatever sounds you want from the immense sound bank. There are familiar buttons like the Mute and Solo and a nice "audition" button up at the top where you can hear what each sound sounds like. There are 2 sends on each track called Send 1 and Send 2 that go to the effects you chose at the beginning. There is Pan Left and Right which is nice when dealing with over heads and tom rolls. You can adjust the velocity and the length of the sound as well which pertains to ADSR. Next is Pitch and Envelope, Tone with choices like Bright or Dark, and Start which directs the starting point within the sound.

Redrum is cool because it uses Samples rather than sine waves.

How does one go about finding the samples in the huge sample bank? Simply click on the little folder button at the top to Browse Samples > Reason Factory Sound Bank > Redrum Drum Kits > Exclusive Drum Sorted > OK! Then use the up and down arrow buttons to click through the samples.

There are 8 different patterns and 4 different banks for sounds and kits. Like Boom, click the "select" button under each sound to tell it where to input on the tabs. You can only see 16 beats at a time however. So, if the loop is 32 beats, you will have to use the beats selector switch to toggle through.

The red LED light will flash above the beat that is playing at the moment. But if the beats that are being played are more than 16, you wont be able to see any flashing red light.

One can change the dynamics of the hits with the soft, medium, hard options. This is the key to drum programming!

Lastly, you can change the speed of the beats from half time, double time, triplets, etc. and the resolution of the beats.

11.16.11

Malstrüm is the next instrument. Malstrüm has 2 oscillators that can be assigned to 2 different sounds and settings.

This instrument in Reason is awesome because it can emulate different resonant frequencies and formants of different instruments including a human voice. What this means is that the formants of instruments like the voice, violin, guitar, bass, drums, etc. are all different based on the way they are constructed.

The Malsrüm also has a cool Portamento knob that acts as a glissando.

Next was the NN-XT sampler! You can browse samples in this instruments by clicking the folder looking button > Sound FX > Digieffects A or B > OK.

Each of the folders A and B have awesome realistic sounds that would be great for our projects.

Thoughts

I am excited to be using Reason and getting reacquainted with the instruments and settings! I added some Reason drums to my project, but drummer Drew is going to help me fatten that section up. Bobby also really helped me on my project by playing guitar on the end Vacuum section! I love it.

Thanks Boys!

I have so many voice overs to help with when I get back! I'm kind of excited though. I really love the music dept. and I am hoping that we all get into 307 :(