Advanced Multitrack Production

Since my background is in music education and not audio production I was missing a pretty crucial piece of the application when I applied for this program, a portfolio of previous audio work. So technically I was accepted conditionally with the idea that after this semester I can submit a portfolio of work from my classes this semester. My Wednesday class, Advanced Multitrack Production, is the class that will help me build this portfolio. The class is actually primarily for undergrad seniors in their last semester but a lot of grad students take it as an elective.

The class has several projects that involve recording music onto multiple tracks. What that means is that each instrument is recorded to it's own track, either on a computer or onto magnetic tape, so that their levels can be adjusted individually when mixing them down into a final stereo mix. Essentially it's doing what I hope to be doing with the rest of my life. That being said it is by far the scariest class I'm taking this semester. There's so much awesome gear available to us to use for these projects and I don't have a clue what most of them do. Hopefully this class and some additional outside research will help me figure that out.

This week we learned about Durgin 114. That's not a sweet audio doo-hickey, but instead the room on UMass-Lowell's campus that serves as the "live room," that is the room where we'll be doing the recording. It looks like this:Now what we learned is that when this room was designed, it was built primarily as a critical listening classroom, and secondly to function as a live room. In the picture above, the wall behind the piano that's covered with grey fabric actually conceals about several thousand dollars of monitoring equipment (fancy speakers and power amplifiers). The panels along the side of the walls help to absorb and diffuse sound wave reflections so that you only hear what's coming from the speakers. The panels toward the back of the room have surround speakers in them, so that we can listen to 5.1 mixes. Apparently it's one of the best listening environments in the country.

Today's T: Bears eating berries on yellow