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a short example of the cabaret

The SSL still shining bright as always. Till next year sunshine <3

New cabaret production is coming up. this time there are a lot more musicians :O

Summary of the year. Exciting Journey

The year has gone past pretty fast and it was incredibly busy. When first entering Lasalle I was sure of it to be a school where you could put it in the effort but once in a while slide and skive through things. NO, in this school it is impossible. You have to pay for every mistake and every skipped class that you had. In year two we looked more into technical aspects of audio production and we got a chance to feel what its really like to be in the music industry. From setting up concerts to managing our own studio projects, from creating sound systems for studio and live sound reinforcement to being artists in the computer music composition class. Anyway, lets get to the point. Out of the not so busy classes last year, this; year 2 literally turned into a non stop, occupied year with assignments and projects of different sort to test our creativity, knowledge of audio and problem solving skills. I already mentioned that this year was much more technical than the previous one, but let me get through the classes that we were put up with this year so you have a better understanding of what challenges we were put up through in a particular area. So, we had 4 modules that remained the same from last year, which are live sound reinforcement, audio engineering class with Justin, Critical listening lab and research and writing which we only had for half a year. In addition to the existing classes, this year was added by: sound reinforcement practicum where we had to set up concerts in the Singapore Airlines Theatre at Lasalle and manage the 3 main aspects of a show, that are 1) setting up of stage, 2) running monitors or using a console to control the level of different instruments in the artists wedges/monitor speakers on stage for them to be able to hear themselves whilst performing a show 3) running the Front of House (FOH) console for the audience and mix the show.

Acoustics Class

Acoustics class was another big part of this year. In this class we learned how different materials reflect sound, affect the venue, which materials are more resonant than others, which materials should be used in order to soundproof you venue. Besides materials we also learned about reverberation time and how it can enhance a venue for live sound, used “space designer” plug-in to create artificial reverb for a song. Learned how to use other software to calculate the resonant frequency within a room. We also learned how to analyse musicality of a performance, understand what stereo image is, describe sound reinforcement systems and analyse effects that were used. We also got a chance to design our own studio and with a main audio recording room, drum booth and a vocal booth. We had to calculate the budget for it, how much all the materials would cost, which console would be the most appropriate to use, etc. It was definitely a useful class but there is still much to learn about acoustics and calculations of sound in a space.

Musicians corner during Journeys cabaret

Journeys Cabaret that we got a chance to work on. what an exciting and tiring journey it was for us. rigging speakers, managing artists, making sure that the musicians are set..

Our sound crew ready and happy that the production is over during bump out.

Productions and Technical Drawing

One of other interesting and surprising classes that we had this year is a subject called technical drawing. In this class we had to fathom into the details of stage planning and drafting. In semester one we busy with drawing the 4 concepts of hand drafting. The basis of technical drawing is the so-called ‘orthographic projection’. It allows us to take a three-dimensional idea and express it on a two dimensional piece of paper as a measurable drawing. It can be very useful when you are designing speakers for a show or even a whole system. Creating a drawing using orthographic projection enables a construction crew to accurately build the required objects. The easiest way to visualize an orthographic projection is to imagine a glass box containing an object (such as a model of a car) in which each side of the glass box corresponds with a view of the car and is parallel to that side of the car. This results in a view of the car in which each side could be plotted onto the piece of glass parallel to it without perspective. The shape plotted on each side plane of glass is an orthographic projection. It would have width, height and depth. Often, an orthographic layout contains unnecessary and repeated drawings that are later eliminated from the draft to make the final version of the projection. This is especially true in scenery, where we are rarely concerned with the bottom or back of an object. Also in this class, we studied the use of a scale ruler, which is widely used in all kinds of theatre productions and concerts. A scale ruler is one of the best tools a stage planner has to eliminate errors, which may occur during production. In addition to the study of scale ruler, big part of the year was spent about studying different stage plans. There are 3 main stage plans: ground plan, elevation and section. A section is a cut through an object that exposes its interior, it can be used to show the internal construction of an object. The easiest way to visualize a section is to imagine a knife slicing through the object like you would slice through a loaf of bread. The knife cuts in a straight line, revealing the interior cut plane, the viewer sees a profile of the true size and shape of the object. Elevation is the other stage plan that shows the views of walls or object that are perpendicular to the ground. The main plan is a ground plan. A ground plan is a horizontal section cut though an entire set. Ground plans show designs in simplified ways that allow to be easily read. Generally the cutting plane of a ground plan is take a shoulder level for an actor on the ground. The scenic ground plan states heights by dimensioning them. The stage floor is usually taken as the base for all height measurements, it is known as 0 level. Heights above the 0 level, such as stairs leading to a platform, are dimensioned in mm preceded by a plus (+200,+300,+400). Heights below the 0 level, such as structures in the orchestra pit are labeled with a minus. Overhead items are indicated with dashed lines. The minimum height under an overhead obstruction is noted with the word “clear, as in “overhead pipe +3150 clear under). In addition to this complicated and technical information my class and I also discovered different stage names. There is arena stage, thrust stage and proscenium stage. There more than that, but these are the three main ones. Besides the different plans if you are doing complex theatrical shows such as a musical, you must include your master ground plan. On one sheet it shows all permanent scenery such as wings or portal and all drops in their lowered position as solid lines. It shows every piece of moving scenery in its playing position on stage with dashed lines. Careful control of dashes is essential for clarity. All of these plans and stage must be drawn either by hand or via a program called Autocat or Vectorworks. Vectorworks is a complex tool for stage planners. It includes all kinds of measurements. By the end of the year we did end up drawing a complete stage plan of the creative cube located in Lasalle. The stage plan included: ground plan, elevation and section. Even though it may seem that technical drawing does not have much to do with audio, but the knowledge I gained in this class is essential for anyone who wants to work in theatre productions and plan production management. It is also important for the stage crew to know what all the + and – mean when they walk around a production and set up. Weather its lights, sound, costumes, props or cast. We are all part of one big team and we must know the basics of each other’s work.

Mixing on the Vi4

Sound Design for Theatre Class

Now lets get back to audio stuff. Unfortunately one of our lectures from last year James had to leave Lasalle due to unknown reasons and was replaced by a highly knowledgeable lecturer from SOTA (school of the arts), Dirk Stromberg from America. This guy is a total live sound geek, you can see the obsession in his eyes when he speaks about live sound and different tools. Dirk is a perfectionist and wants everything to be given a 100% no matter how small or big the task is. This year we were involved a lot with theatre and production. We even had a specific class called sound design for theatre where we were going through different aspects of theatre sound such as, sound effects, cues, microphones that are used in theatre and microphones that are used for field recordings. This class was taught by Dirk. We learned different miking techniques and production techniques from him that he personally used in various productions. Our first project was Location Recreation. We had to use miking gear available to us in the studio or our own and record so called hard sound effects. It was truly a creative process as we had to come up with a little story that could be imagined by a potential listener. My choice of space was a fencing hall. My idea was to recreate sounds of blades and battles that happen during fencing training and put it into a story. To be honest I did not quite succeed with what I wanted to do with my sound recreation. In my mind I wanted to tell a story of fencer that is preparing for a competition but it ended up sounding like more of a space with a bunch of fencers in it that are just having an ordinary training. I did get some good sounds of blades that almost sounded like Pirates of the Caribbean, but I could have done a better job with steps and other hard effects. Speaking of effects, in sound design there are different types of audio effects that can be used to recreate a sound of something. For example there are hard sound effects that include footsteps, cars driving past, people shouting, sounds of crickets at night anything that is natural and does not have an artificial addition to it. Some hard effects however can be used as Foley sound effects. The art of Foley is something that can be deceiving but cunning at the same time. For example, I need a sound of someone breaking his finger. The actual sound of someone breaking a finger is not very exciting; you would need something that is more exaggerated. For example, recording someone chewing a piece of raw spaghetti pane and the boosting the frequency of about 1khz o your EQ would sound like someone is breaking a bone. Foley is using sounds of something else that associate with your objective target sound. Another type of sound effect that we studied is ambience sound effect, these are just noises present in the background of main sounds to create an atmosphere of space. Digital sound effects is another aspect that was covered during the year, it is the use of synths and artificial sounds to represent an action or a visual movement. For example using a synth, that contains different waves of signal such as pulse, sine wave, and triangle, could create a million different sounds. One of the uses of synths that is highly used in movies is sound of a blaster. In this class we also got a chance to try out another type of Digital Audio Workstation(DAW) called QLab. This software also allows its user to create cues for show and use them during a theatre, radio performance. You load your sounds into the program and according to the scene that you are encountering you play the right sound. The handy thing about QLab is that all the cues are loaded in sequentially so you have no need to browse around through your playlists like you would when using ProTools or other DAW’s designed for recording, mixing and mastering. QLab automatically switches to the next designated sound that you need to use. Another project that we got a chance to work for was Radio Drama. During this project we were split into groups of 6 and had to come with sounds and cues for our Radio Drama. The drama that we were doing was Flash Gordon. My job was to create the sound track; I was pleased with the role of a composer and created a song with the use of Logic Pro X and massive synth. Sound Design for Theatre class was definitely a useful class where I gained a lot of information about how to décor a show in terms of audio.

Mixing and Mastering Suite at Lasalle College of the Arts

#studio #mixing

Computer Music Composition Class

The class I perhaps enjoyed the most this year and that is because it does not only combine technical aspects in it but also involved a lot of creative work, is computer music composition. As a fan of electronic dance music, it was especially interesting for me to find out about different tools used when creating electronic music at home. We had a pro tools class last year where we learned about the most popular DAW in the industry. This year our lecturer Hector went through other popular DAW’s in the industry such as Logic Pro and Ableton Live. We started off with Ableton Live and had a couple of assignments including synths and learned how to create our own sounds using TAL Noise Maker. TAL Noise Maker is a simple synth that contains 2 oscillators with 5 parameters of waves such as saw wave, pulse wave, noise wave, rectangular wave, triangle wave and sine wave. It also has a master oscillator where you can combine the two oscillators and manage their levels. It has a second synth, a envelope editor and a control window. Of course TAL Noise maker is not the most powerful synth Plugin in the world, but it has all the major basics that helped understand the way synth plugins work. Besides Ableton Live that took up an entire semester, in semester 2 we moved onto Logic Pro X. It is a matter of personal preference which DAW’s you are more comfortable using. For me, I found that Logic Pro X is the best choice of DAW. First of Logic is created by Apple and if you are mac owner, it will not be to hard for you to guess how certain tools work in Logic. It is simple and does not require much technical understanding like you would in Pro Tools where it is essential to remember the hot keys and it is like you enter an entirely different OS when using it. One of other advantages that I found about Logic is that it has a lot more useful Plug-Ins than Ableton Live or Pro Tools. I would not say, that Ableton Live is an inconvenient DAW, I am just not too interested in its interface and the sampling of tracks option in the first window make things a little bit complicated for me. But lets get back to the projects that we were faced with. Towards the end of the year I started realizing and cherishing every moment that we got to spend creating something. Even though there was a lot of work to do I figured out that the more work you have the more involved in the process you become. Such as with one of our projects called synth sound-a-like we had to remix Ray Parker Jr.’s Ghostbusters into a synth sounding composition. It was very hard at first to come up with ideas, but after sitting over the project and pondering about my creative ambitions, I came up with an idea to turn it into an EDM remix. In my opinion, it wasn’t too bad. Our last project was to create a soundtrack for a movie trailer. The clip was given to us by our lecturer and it was a one minute long cut of the Tron movie trailer. For this project I used all the knowledge that I gained throughout the year and lasalle and came up with a dark sounding, G minor sound track that represented the game theme of the movie and the action intensive battles between the heroes. In computer music composition class I discovered various creative aspects of the digital audio world and the nuances that one must take care of when creating electronic music. I learned about synths and the use of MIDI.

Digital Audio Production Class

The last new class that we had this year and the most difficult one in my opinion is Digital Audio Production class. In this class we studied core technologies and tools in digital audio. The in-depth view of digital audio processing and MIDI implementations provide the students with the essential knowledge that can be used in our future careers. We were taught how to troubleshoot issues and implement complex workflows appropriate to the task at hand. Digital Audio production consists of many complicated parts, such as basics of programing to understand the numbers of bits, bit depth, sample rate, dithering and many more complicated ideas of digital audio. Digital audio is basically a representation of an analog signal in a digital workstation such as your computer. Different recording devices and transducers convert a kinetic signal into an electric signal, which is then picked up by your computer and is converted into a digital format. That way your computer can read the information about the audio signal that it just received. The information includes amplitude, frequency and sound pressure level. Throughout the year each lesson which was once a week was devoted to a particular subject in the digital audio. In total we covered things such as fundamentals of digital audio and digital audio processing. Digital audio processing is your 32 bit and 64 bit formats that different components such as your plugins support. 64 bits is basically higher resolution of processing but it requires larger amounts of memory. Different computing bit depths requite different operating systems. For example a 32 bit CPU will not be able to run a 64 bit operating system, but a 32 bit CPU will be able to run a 32 bit operating system which then will not be able to run a 64 bit application program. However, nowadays all the big suppliers change their bit numbers to 64bit as it is becoming the new standard. For example a 64 bit CPU will be able to run both 32 bit and 64 bit operating system and then the operating system if it is 64 bit will be able to run both 32 bit and 64 bit application program. Besides digital audio processing we also studied plugins and learned about which plugins can be used with a particular DAW. For example there are formats such as AU(audio units), VST(Virtual Studio Technology), DX(DirectX), MAS(Motu Audio System), RTAS(Real time Audio Suites), TDM(Time-division multiplexing), AAX(Avid Audio Extension). Besides digital audio found out a lot of things about audio interfaces. An audio interface is a piece of hardware that expands and improves the sonic capabilities of a computer. They also give its user an ability to connect various instruments and professional microphones to a computer, so that the signal then can be recorded in a DAW. An audio interface also converts an analog signal to a digital signal. But these are the basic aspects of audio interfaces that people have at home. Besides simply recording a microphone, some audio engineers record bands and orchestras. These recording included complicated runs of cables and devotion of numerous channels. When recording more audio inputs you start to deal with things such as your audio chain, impedance, ways to expand your audio interfaces to allow to intake more channels. That is when we started learning about AES (audio engineering society) and EBU (European broadcast union). These organisations started developing more complicated protocols to run digital audio data. For example a serial transmission format for a stereo pair of linearly represented audio data. With more channels to be recorded, you still need all channels to be clocked and synched no matter how many channels are being recorded. We also learned about DB25 pinouts, which let you carry up to 8 channels of AES/EBU. Typically the cables used ‘break out’ to xlr connectors for individual audio sources. Another complicated topic that was covered during class was Pulse Code Modulation (PCM). PCM is the basis of digital audio production; it is a digital representation of an analog signal that takes sample or cuts of the amplitude of the analog signal at regular intervals. The sampled analog data is then changed and represented by binary data. Every bit or every digit has approximately 6dB of dynamic range. PCM also includes different types. There is L(linear)PCM, D(differential)PCM, u-law PCM, A-law PCM. We also learned such crucial definition of things such as Nyquist frequency and Aliasing. The Nyquist frequency is the highest possible value that an audio system can represent; it is half the sample rate. For example if the sample rate of your audio interface is 44.1kHz the highest frequency that will be represented is 22.05kHz. Human ear can only hear frequencies of up to 20kHz so 22.05kHz is more than enough. But what happens if we need to record a sound that is higher than the Niquist frequency? Aliasing occurs. Aliasing is a process during which a frequency above the Nyquist will be represented as a different frequency within the Nyquist. The formula is such: nyquist-(input-nyquist), if our nyquist is 10kHz but our input frequency is 12kHz aliasing will occur and will be represented as 8kHz in our recording. Digital Audio Pruduction is the most technical class that required a lot of concentration and patience.

#niquist #aliasing #digital audio production

The two babies used for the recording of Basket Case for Sound-a-likes

#fender stratocaster #les paul

Recording Sound-a-likes in year 2 and MTV projects

Besides new classes we also continued with our studio class that was led by our head lecturer Justin. This year we continued working on the SSL and had a few exciting projects. Like last year, this year we also had one sound-a-like project where we were split into groups of 4. The song that we chose to work on this year was Basketcase by Greenday. We were very lucky with the equipment that is available in the studio as most of the stuff the recording techniques of the original would not have sounded good without the same equipment. Luckily the studio microphones and guitar amps were very similar to the ones used in the original recording of basket case. We organized a meeting with a couple of level 1 students and arranged rehearsals for them. It was good to see that the music students were also involved in the process. For the guitar recording we used two guitars, a Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson Les Paul. The amp that we used was a Marshall amp. We miked the amp with 3 microphones, 2 directly at the speaker and the other one in a room about 4 meters away to get a natural reverb. The guitar recording was successful indeed. The unfortunate part was the drums as we could not get the right explosive sound out of the symbols. Nevertheless it was a good recording and we all had a good experience. Our second most important project of the year was the MTV project. We were once again split into groups of 4 and given artists from music level 3 to work with. We got a chance to work with a singing couple Aqid and Gail to record their acoustic duo. The mix was later mastered and given to broadcast media students to create their music video. It was an exciting project that took up a lot of time and energy. Throughout the first mixing session I spent 11 hours in the studio and still felt like the right result wasn’t achieved. We then booked another studio session and more or less managed to balance out the dynamics. It is important to let other people mix as well when working in a group as your ears wear out very quickly and you start to adjust your ears to the mistakes and not the other way around.

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