#today i'm learning

[thebrittanator]

today I’m learning: networking while inexperienced and introverted

this is going to be geared toward the entertainment/film industry because that’s where I am right now, but I’m sure some of these things are true across multiple industries. I’ve been to two film festivals now so I know at least a little more than I did when I started:

everyone else wants to meet people also

if you walk into any event that has networking potential, you’re not walking into a stranger’s birthday party with the people they’ve known since childhood. and people there don’t see you the way your impostor syndrome does, they see you as a potential connection. they’re going to be treating you all the same ways Pinterest tells you to treat them - be friendly, be interested, find common ground, make plans to hang out later. it’s amazing how much easier it is to meet new people when the interest is mutual.

you’re not as fake as you think you are

if you’re like me, you may be a little paranoid about projecting only (or at least mostly) the positive things or making people feel like you’re using them. but the fact is, everyone else is doing the same thing. and somehow in the end you still end up expressing genuine opinions and having fun.

the same rule for making potential new friends anywhere else applies here: you don’t owe anyone your entire life story. find simple and honest ways of addressing the things it would be complicated to explain. if you’re brand new to the field and/or out of work, say you’re looking for new job opportunities and you’ll get across both the facts and a good outlook. if there’s a stupid reason why you learned a valuable skill, it doesn’t invalidate the skill, so there’s no need to present a disclaimer (having a funny story with a healthy sense of self-deprecating humor is nice though).

don’t expect people to ask you deep personal questions; they just met you too. and if they do, there’s no need to indulge them. you just met.

make note of the pros and cons of everything that’s presented

politics can get complicated if you’re in a situation where you’re expected to present an opinion on something you didn’t like while one of its creators is with you. at film festivals, this can happen a lot. it’s good to find both positives and negatives about every project that’s being presented so you can contribute to any conversation you might end up in. particularly in the arts, sometimes the things that made it not align with your tastes are completely intentional, and if the writer conveyed exactly the message they intended, it means they’re good at what they do. separate your opinion of a project from how well its creator executed their intent. they are two different things.

don’t say anything you don’t agree with

you want to find people you mesh with, and you don’t want to work with people you don’t. don’t seek out situations you don’t want to be in. yesterday I bonded with a director over the films we both disliked and an actress over a shared love of what I call entry level nerd media. if I had pretended that my tastes were more indie than they were, I would have wasted my time chasing people I wouldn’t enjoy working with and missed out on both of those highly satisfying conversations as well as potential new friends and/or important connections. the actress and I are in Gryffindor and Ravenclaw respectively, by the way.

be intentional about social drinking

common sense stuff. if it doesn’t fit with your beliefs or your lifestyle, you’re not missing out on something necessary, but if it does, it can help. it does not, however, help you to put yourself into a state where you’re not 100% in control of your words. by whatever healthy, moral, and legal means you prefer, find the best balance of confidence and self awareness you can.

you can, if need be, get business cards printed at a FedEx Office store. don’t create that need.

if it’s the day before an event and you just realized you forgot to print cards, it’s not too late! design something on a site like canva and take it to get printed as soon as possible. people hand out business cards like candy because it’s a much faster way to give someone your contact info than entering your number in their phone. it’s worth getting it done.

however. services that specialize in business cards are WAY CHEAPER. and they’re printed on better paper. if there’s time, do that instead.

a good way of offering someone your card without coming across as either too businesslike or too casual is saying you can give them your contact info!

follow up before it gets weird

this is, admittedly, one I’m still working on. it can take me a long time to decide how to word an email or text message to someone I don’t know well, so I have to set aside much more time than I think I should. but either that or just sending something simple is better than not keeping in contact at all.

this may be a quirk of the entertainment industry, but instagram is incredibly helpful as an easy follow up tool. follow people you want to follow, and if you have the time, go to the link in their bio and leave a comment if they posted about the event. we’re all on social media anyway so it puts you both at least next door to your comfort zones.

have fun and go make some friends!

[thebrittanator]

did you know: the solo French horn sample from EastWest Hollywood Orchestra only sounds loud and brassy all the time if you’re not using the mod wheel? because I discovered this a few seconds ago and cackled like a villain who just came up with the perfect world domination plan

[thebrittanator]

today I’m learning: how to make one (1) decent melody line on a MIDI controller

welcome to my newest blog series where I will 1. publicly broadcast how much I don’t know what I’m doing and 2. work on fixing that

not to go all Pinterest recipe blog on you, but a little background: I’ve spent a huge portion of my life learning how to write good music using pencil, paper, an instrument, and Finale. it served me well in songwriting and in college, but the film music world is much more digital than what I was trained for. however, I firmly believe that it’s never too late to pick up a new skill, and this wouldn’t exactly be the first time this millennial has had to learn new computer skills in a short amount of time.

so now that I have a bit of time on my hands, I am picking up a new instrument, which is this little punk right here:

I chose the Midiplus AKM320 because 1. it was cheap, 2. it’s portable, 3. it had decent Amazon reviews, and 4. it has a mod wheel and I need to learn how to use those.

today’s goal: enter an expressive melody the way an instrumentalist would

method: get Logic Pro to ignore how hard I hit the keys and only record what I do with the mod wheel.

what is velocity? velocity is (trust me I just googled it to be certain) a measurement of how fast you hit a key. on a piano, if you hit a key faster and therefore harder, the note is louder. the same goes for most MIDI controllers (including the one I have now). by default, the music you enter onto your computer via a keyboard is going to reflect how you played the keyboard, i.e., velocity sensitivity is on.

however, what if I don’t want that? what if I want to either bang on or halfheartedly press all the keys with reckless abandon?

I got a very good tip that if you want your mockups to sound realistic, you need to enter each line as if you were the instrumentalist you’re imitating. and that’s going to have an impact on how you use velocity. if an instrument’s sense of expression comes from the intensity of how each note begins, velocity is everything. keyboards? guitars? percussion? you’re all good. but for instruments that continue to affect how a note sounds after the initial attack, like wind and string instruments, velocity is only a small part of the picture, and you may be better off not using it at all.

project open: a single cello section track, on which I am entering a melody I wrote a few years ago with a lot of expressive potential

google search 1: turn off velocity sensitivity midi controller

best results: a reddit thread saying “most synths have adjustable velocity modulation parameters” and all I need to do is find them

thanks, reddit, for telling me to look for settings when I ask about where to find a setting 

so let’s have a look around Logic, shall we?

my one sample library (which you’ll hear more about in later posts) is EastWest Hollywood Orchestra, which runs in Logic using a program called Play. immediately after I bought this library, I start hearing all about how Play absolutely sucks. unfortunate, but good to know that if I struggle with it, I can blame the program and not just myself.

I did some exploring with Play, and unsurprisingly, did not find a place to adjust velocity sensitivity. I doubt most people who find this post are locked into using Play, but let me know if you want screenshots of what I did find.

next: under Logic Pro X - Preferences - MIDI, we see this screen:

it’s absolutely useless to me. however! this:

is something I’ve been meaning to look up later! so let’s come back here in a later post.

next, I went to the bar on the left and expanded the track menu

a velocity limit! this looks promising! I click and drag the numbers so the limit is 100-100 and start playing. suddenly nothing works.

ok, so maybe that means it only recognizes notes that you play at velocity 100, which... must have its uses? I expand the range and keep playing, and more and more notes come through. I then set it back to default. oh well.

btw, where it just says “Velocity:” on the above menu, it looks like a way to raise or lower the velocity by a certain amount to every note you play on that track. could be worth checking out later.

I then collapse that menu and start working my way down

and this is where I find the most useful thing: MIDI FX

I click on that button and it gives me a menu which includes velocity. when I select that, it opens a window with a graph - velocity in vs. velocity out.

it’s not quite what I was looking for, but it’s definitely a way to change how much impact the way you play has on what gets recorded. if you’re familiar with compressors, it’s basically a compressor.

so I spun some knobs for a little while, and here are the settings I changed it to:

it’s not a straight horizontal line, but it’s a lot closer than a perfectly diagonal one. now, when I played notes differently, they all came out sounding just about the same. mission sort of accomplished!

now that I am free to control the volume entirely with the mod wheel, I am free to practice entering melodies with that technique. as soon as I figure out the best way to share my results in a post, I will.

have a better solution? let me know!

[ohmyquadchelle-blog]