Unit 5 and 6 Journal + Evaluation

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Recoding took place on the 20th, 21st and 23rd of January, Recording the music video took place on the 18th of February, mixing and editing took place on the 18th till the 21st of February.

To start off, our band decided to record rhythm guitar first at 156bpm. After many failed attempts of recording it, we decided it wasn't working very well so we chose to record drums and rhythm at the same time for the demo version.

The only issue that came with recording drums and rhythm together, was that the drums were coming through the recording of the rhythm guitar. We noticed this straight after we had recorded the vocals. We then made the decision to plug the rhythm guitar into interface to restrict any background noises.

Unfortunately after we recorded the rhythm guitar we had to re record the drums as we didn't set the levels to the right setting.

We hen decided to put both guitars in a bus to add some reverb to them. We also wanted reverb on the vocals so we put that in an individual bus because we didnt want as much reverb on the vocals as we put on the guitars.

Once we'd recorded everything, we noticed there were quite a few gaps in the song that we wanted to fill. We decided on putting a synth solo after the chorus to make things more exciting. We thought this worked out well although we noticed it sounded a bit random only having one section with synth so we decided to add in small synth bits to other sections to balance it out a bit.

After this we started on the guitar solo, this took quite a few attempts as we were having issues with the speed. Eventually we got it done by plugging the guitar into the interface as when we were recording in the actual studio room, we were having issues with the speed.

Once it was time to mix the song ourselves, i decided to pan the drums on the track as you can see below to balance the sound out more even on the overhead mics. We used 2 Sm-57 mics on the overhead of the drums, we used a D1112 mic on the kick drum, and both guitars were plugged into the interface. We used a condenser microphone for the vocals.





I also individually added automation on the track, for this i mainly focused on the vocals and rhythm guitar as you can see below.


As you can see i added EQ to the synth and both guitars. The guitars and vocals mainly have reverb and a compressor to make all of them sound balanced and well put together.


Evaluation

Personally i thought this unit was pretty challenging but enjoyable at the same time. I did learn quite a bit about editing on logic, i learnt how to do automation and EQ and how to put them onto instruments. I also got to experiment with different instruments such as a synthesizer. And experiment with different types of reverb on logic, my personal favourite was the Spaces designer reverb.

Next time, i'd like to be more up to date with tasks, for example get tasks done quicker and plan them out next time rather half doing tasks then moving back to them after getting halfway done in another task. I would also have liked to done more research on editing a music video and next time i would have liked to add effects into my music video. I also believe that recording the song took longer than it should've due to the fact we had issues with the timing for guitar and vocals, we also had the issue with the rhythm guitar coming through the drums recording where we had to redo a lot of things, next time in order to prevent this, we should plan sessions out.

I do believe that filming the music video went successfully as it only took one session. I also believe that mixing the song went well for me as it took less time than i expected. What helped as well was there was plenty of recourses on different techniques to add to instruments, like reverb and automation. 

My band used another student to film us on stage at the arena, unfortunately the iphone quality wasn't amazing but i do believe everything turned out fine. We used Adobe premier pro 2021 to edit the music video. Next time i'd want to use another editing app, since Adobe premier pro was very glitchy and took ages to load up, it also was pretty complex to use, there wasn't a lot of guidance on how to edit clips and add effects in. Unfortunately, because of this i wasn't able to add any effects onto my music video, which i would've hoped to do but will have to do it next time.

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