End of Trimester 18T2

Here we are again at the end of another trimester. I am surprised just how fast a trimester passes.

Looking back over this trimester, there were good and bad points. What I would have liked to have had more class time is mastering. For me, I would have been happy to ditch the Kontakt instrument scripting classes and have mastering instead. We spent an exciting two hours at a mastering studio which has changed everything I thought I knew about EQ-ing. As a result I now approach EQ totally differently, and for the better too!

This trimester I have worked with a team both audio and interdisciplinary on the Yagan Square project. I was fortunate to have my work for Yagan Square finished early as I spoke to the team early on and made it clear what was needed, made all the relevant media available and finished it promptly while the workload was light. The audio assets were produced, manipulated and processed to meet the requisites of the Yagan team. The Yagan Square team were helpful and communicated well. The same went for my major project, Synthwave project. Dan was easy to work with and communicates well. Thankfully, both projects came in under or on budget, at least in audio, which shows I got something right.

Both projects I worked on this tri required learning contracts and I feel we addressed them appropriately in both preparation and completing them to specification. We also participated in two audio podcasts which were eye opening. The guest speakers called themselves ‘grumpy old men’ but resembled dotty old nanna’s knitting club actually (wink). Seriously, it was another learning aspect of an audio engineer even if it was tedious. We spent a lot of time arranging microphones for optimum performance, repairing, cutting, processing and adding music to the final production which will be hosted on iTunes. The podcasts were riddled with plosives and I was a little surprised that the guest speakers, audio engineers, should have known better than to eat the mic. I watched one unnamed lecturer, resting his lips directly on the mic whenever he spoke. We were arranged as a team and each of us had roles in the recording and production of the podcasts. We all made mistakes but learnt from them and remedied them.

Mastering for me was very interesting as it was Bob Ludwig, the mastering engineer, who got me interested in audio back when I was fifteen. Bob Ludwig has a way of mastering that I like, he keeps the punch but is anti-loudness wars so his mastering typically sound impressive (eg: Crowded House – Woodface). With mastering I learnt many aspects from repairing, time aligning, equalising, compressing and manipulating the stereo image and the instruments or vocals within it. What surprised me the most is how much the final mix changes during the mastering process. One interesting part of mastering was referencing your track with one that you like the sound of. You then process your mix to be similar to your reference track. It wasn’t easy for me but this is the first time I have been mastering so I guess I need a lot of practice.

When I look back over the trimester, I can see so many things I still need to work on to be as good as I aim to be. Compression is still a dark art but I am starting to get a handle on it, room for improvement there. There are areas I haven’t covered but still want to, such as recording brass and stringed instruments.