Week 3 asignment

Hello fellow Courserians,

I’m Mircea Oculeanu from Bucharest, doing week 3’s assignment for Coursera’s Introduction to Music Producation.

In the following few minutes I’ll try to explain the concept and the practicalities of automation in Ableton Live. First of all, why do we need automation in any D.A.W.  Automation is where you decide a parameter – any parameter – should follow a certain pattern which – depending on the D.A.W. you use  - you can draw this pattern. These automated patterns of the parameters could lead to immensly creative sounds but there also used for simple tasks too – let’s say adjusting volume in certain regions of the audio.

I’ll go back to Ableton now, and try to demonstrate how it’s done. You basically  draw a pattern that Ableton reads and follows and we are talking about volume for a track but you cand also do the same with the cutoff in a synthesizer and so on.

I tried to do things as basic as possible because I read in the forums that many of ‘’us’’ courserians J are really beginners in this beautiful domain – music production - . So I’ll try to show you the steps to automate the volume envelope of a basic track.

As you could see, I’ve played a few notes with the keys in my laptop – my midi controller is coming next week J - and. After pressing Tab I’ve changed into session view because the mixer there is more handy. You have one global recording button in Ableton that you must hit and, while playing those few notes again I’ve modified the volume with its respective fader.  Press Tab again to return into arrangement view and you’ll see your automation. A simple and efficient implementation.

That’s a basic presentation for this kind of operation – the automation – but you must note that you can do this with any knob/ function in the modern D.A.W.’s. You practically make a knob/ function move over time in order to obtain variation in sound, volume, envelope, etc, anything you can imagine. Of course, there are several different implementations of the process. Even in Ableton there’s another way of ‘’drawing’’ an automation that the one I’ve just showed you. In fact instead of using the mouse to draw the volume fader you can do the same thing with one knob from your midi controller.  There are certain D.A.W.’s that have separate knobs for recording automation – on every track. Or, you don’t have to record it live – as you’d do on a mixing board but you can simply grab a pencil – the function in the respective D.A.W. – and draw the envelope you want to create.  For any of these scenarios you’re left with the possibility to edit anyone of these envelopes later in the process.

Thank you for your time and understanding.

Week 1 asignment

Hello Courserians,

I'm Mircea Oculeanu from Bucharest, Romania. I'm doing the week 1 asignment, recording an electric guitar or bass without an amplifier example for Coursera's Introduction to Music Production. We'll look into ways to do this when we are supposed to do it without an amplifier.

First of all, let's recall what a microphone does in a similar situation. As an input transducer, the microphone translates the movements of the air into an electric signal. Though the principles are different, the pickup of an electric guitar does quite the same with the oscilations of the guitar strings, namely it produces an electric signal.

image from HowStuffWorks.com

We'll use microphones in all sorts of situatians but the same aplies to recording guitars. Why should we be interested in recording the guitar - be it electric or bass guitar - directly into a line input? Well,  not long ago, the primary means of recording the instrument was to plug it into an amplifier and mike the cabinet; everything else was seen as a poor substitute for the sound of a real amplifier. And there were some reasons for this :) too, back at the time. If you're still not convinced by the sound aquired this way, you can get your guitar recording through a real amp later in the process in order to regain some of the dynamics you feel you're losing by recording directly. And, speaking about home studios it seems obvious why we're interested in recording a guitar direct in our D.A.W. - let me mention just the neighbours.....
Let's now remember that the pickup of an electric guitar is also a transducer, only it's functioning in a different way, that is it converts the oscilations of the guitar strings into voltage variantions. But, based on this principle, the signal is too weak to get it directly into your D.A.W. and, more important, the impedance is too high for the majority of the inputs available into any home studio.
In this situation we'll probably use an audio interface:

I chose this one simply because it's the one I've got and use. As you can see there are 2 inputs on this interface, one with phantom power - witch we don't need right now - and another one for guitar. It also has a ''special'' button tha allows you to monitor directly what you're playing, in real time. Did anyone say ''real time''? Exactly, we are hear facing one big problem of direct recording! The latency. Witch can be simply anoying or distracting and can get you out of the groove. The latency is simply the time necessary for the signal to complete the complete path of our workflow, namely the time necessary for the electric signal of the guitar to get through tha audio interface - that amplifies it to the line level and also converts it from analog to digital - futher on into the computer - and into the D.A.W. - and back till it reaches the speakers or the headphones. With all the eforts made with fast processors and so on the latency still exists, and there are couple of things you can do to diminish it but that's the subject for another presentation: :) so let's stay focused. In case your audio interface does not have the direct monitoring function we can use :

Ta daaaa!

That's the idea that the engineers came up with: the D.I. box. 

What this thingie does is very important because, first of all, makes the transition from the 1/4 TS cable - that can be very short in order to keep the level of noise down - to the balanced XLR cable that gets to the audio interface or to the mixing board. The second and of the same importance: it matches the impedance with the line input of your mixer. So we can now take the XLR out and plug it to our audio interface or directly to the mixing board. That means we can use a longer cable - the XLR cable will not increase noise and the signal loss will be minimum. Some of these D.I. boxes have a through output - parallel output - so you can monitor your playing in real time. As Loudon beautifully puts it in his video this parallel output lets you even plug into a real amp in order to hear the sound, but that's just the case when your neighbours are friendly :)...

And don't forget or I'd rather say never forget going all the way down with the gain knob when you plug or unplug the instrument or any of the cables! it really can heart your ears :)...

I hope u Courserians enjoyed my little example and I 'm waiting forward to hear from you.

Thank you