Rhythm N Rhyme

“Rhythm n’ Rhyme” is a 6 man hip-hop band that includes; drums, bass guitar, pianist, and 3 vocalist. They are based out of Las Vegas. They perform local shows around town during events.

            The recording process of recording the band was done at the Art Institute of Las Vegas in Studio Suite A. It took seven microphones to mic up the drums. Everything else only needed one microphone.

            All the microphones from the drums were routed through patch a, inputs one through seven. Patch a in the studio is and patch b are automatically routed to the mixing board. The overhead microphones were positioned high and in the center of the sound source using the “ORTF Technique.” Then the snare, hi-hat, and toms were positioned with the close distance technique.

            The bass was set up with a DI Box and an additional microphone to get two separate recordings. The bass was also routed through patch a on inputs 8 & 9. The vocalist and the pianist were all routed through batch b on inputs 17 to 20. After every musician was routed properly, it was time to start adjusting the levels of each instrument and vocalist.

            Once everyone was at an appropriate level, it was time to record. The session took about two hours. The band started off with a warm up before they really got into the grove. They recorded six songs in total. Prior to recording, I directed the videographer to get several wide shots and close ups of each member of the band.

            After the band was finished, it was time to tear down the equipment and clean up the studio back to the way it was before we got there. I postponed the mix session for another day.

            Recording and mixing the session were done in different days. The recording was multi-tracked through the Solid State Logic Duality Mixing Console. The mixing was done at another studio that provided Pro Tools along with an acoustical mixing environment. I recorded all the instruments and vocals raw so I can enhance it during the post mix session.

            While I was mixing, I had to take out as much bleeding from other instruments as I can without disrupting the harmonic tones. I then added a little compression and filtering to most of the instruments and vocals except the hi hats. Not much mixing was needed as the bands recording came out great.

            After mixing, I synced the audio with the raw videos and started to edit the bands song. The video editing was done though Avid Media Composer 8. The editing took a little over 4 hours to complete a rough sequence. I then took critique from another eye before starting to finalize the edit.

            Overall, this process of multi-track recording, mixing, and editing took a long time to complete. It was a big musician-recording project that helped me understand how a band works. I learned a lot about how I should mic each instrument, and also a lot about how to filter out any unwanted bleeding noise.

Roy Jones Jr Fight Academy

The Roy Jones Jr commercial was shot during a professional boxing fight event outside of the Sunset Casino. I was hired as a videographer to get footage at ringside before and during the fight. The event was about four hours due to disruption of rain. I was camera b during the recording of the fight. The fight took place September 20^th, 2014.

The commercial consisted of a 30 second montage of the fight that took place during the event along with Roy Jones asking the audience, “Do you have the heart of a champion?” It took several revisions before the edit was considered screen lock.

            Once the commercial was in screen lock, I recorded a voice over to complete the final touches it was missing. I then mixed in Roy Jones Jr’s voice over, along with the voice over I recorded, and his mp3 song called “Heart of a Champion” into an appropriate level.

            Overall, this was another great learning experience. Being able to work with celebrities and film ringside was an opportunity I could not let pass me. I obtained this position from a last minute phone call asking if I can fill in as a videographer because the first man couldn’t make it. Ever since then, I have been receiving calls to do simple camera work.

Editing a Music Video for the First Time

                Lovers Land is a music video project I sequenced and edited. The director of photographer gave me the opportunity to cut and edit the raw footage they shot during their video shoot. I was hired as an editor from a producer named Seantu Miles who is a good friend of mine. The artist that was involved with the music video is Kay Renee featuring Saint Maurice.

                Prior to editing this music video, I was giving a specific date to finish the project so that Kay Renee can promote her new single for her album she is currently working on. I went through several of revisions with the client to understand what they were actually looking for.

                My process of editing this video was pretty simple. I gathered all the raw footage and organized them from wide shots, to close ups, to group shots and so on. Then I synced every shot to the actual music called “Lovers Land.” Once everything was synced correctly, all I had to do was follow the story board that I was assigned. Along with the story they were trying to portray, they also wanted certain people who were family members to be seen on this video. Who doesn’t want to be in a music video?

                After editing and sequencing the whole music video, I titled the footage and then gave it to the after effects and motion graphics artists to make finalizations to the sequence I delivered. Overall this was my very first music video I was able to work on. Given the opportunity to work with Seantu Miles, Kay Renee (who is Nikki Minaj’s background singer), and Saint Maurice (who acted in the Disney channel) gave me a boost of confidence early on in my career. This video was edited and produced early 2013.

White Zombie: Midi & Synth Sound Design

For my midi and synthesis class, I was assigned to sound design a short film with synth module processing. Before I was able to do such, I had to learn a little brief history of synthesis and also how to use the actual synthesizer machine to make frequencies splurge all over the area.

                The project I chose was a royalty free based project which allows me permission to use their production and make changes to it without getting in trouble. The film I chose was called White Zombie, a 1932 horror film. I stripped out all of the audio and attacked the project step by step.

                First I needed my pre-production list set up and organized properly. So I made a foley and sound effects cue sheet to determine what sound needs to be placed at what particular frame. Once I finished my cue sheet, I was able to proceed forward to my next step of the production which was recording and capturing the sounds needed to design this project.

                Since this was a horror film, I started synthesizing heavy frequencies along with other modulated sounds to create a sound that is similar to what you may appear to hear as if you were watching in real life. I also made some outrages sounds that may sound like it came from Star Wars far into the future. But once all my recording was finished, I was finally able to move on to mixing the sound levels to an appropriate threshold for the audience to be comfortable with.

                This sound design project was a bit difficult because I was still learning how to synthesis frequencies and learn how to design sound for film. Yet, this experience helped me learn what I needed improvement on.

Big Bucks Bunny Sound Design

                In my digital audio 2 class, I was assigned to sound design an animation called “Big Buck Bunny” which was a royalty free project that students can use to show their skill set. During this project, I was instructed to make a pre-production sheet which consisted of my foley cue spotting notes and anything else needed before I started recording, such as sound effects and other instruments.

                This was more of my earlier years in college at the art institute of Las Vegas Nevada. So I was still learning the whole production process on how to approach the assignment. Luckily I had my own studio equipment at home such as a laptop, monitor speakers, an interface, condenser microphone, midi keyboard, and software to record.

                During my pre-production process, I was obligated to list every sound I seen in the animation while it was muted. Basically I had to strip away every single original sound from the video, and recreate it using my own music scoring, sound effects, and foley recording effects. After I finished my pre-production list, I then went on to record in my room. Although my room wasn't the best acoustic environment place to record in, I had to make way with what I had available at the moment. During that time, I was not eligible in checking out Studio A.

                After I finished recording and gathering all the sounds that I needed, I then went on mix and adjust the volumes on each track to make it blend it smooth. Prior to mixing, I went through several revisions with my instructor, to see what more can I do to the project, because at the time I was complete clueless on what to do next with the little experience I had in post-production during my freshmen year of college.

The Night of the Living Dead. Digital Audio 3 Project

                The Night of the Living Dead is an archived footage that I re-mastered. The film is about over an hour length feature that we had to cut and edit down to 42 minutes. Of course this process was done with a big production group. This assignment was for my Digital Audio 3 class. In this class, our task as group as was strip all the audio from the movie, and recreate everything from scratch. From the sound design, to the foley, to the music scoring, to the adr recording. We had to recreate the sound.

                Before we started any recording, we had to go through a pre-production stage. Each member of the group was assigned a specific position in order to accomplish our task at a reasonable organized time. After we assigned positions, we were able to start our spotting notes, which is basically a category list of different sounds that we needed. We then also formatted an a/v script for our voice talent that we then hired to help us with replacing the original dialogue.

                After we finished all our recordings, we then started adding any special ambient effects and music scoring to give emotion and character to the movie. It is a zombie movie, so we had to spice things up and add intense, creepy, and scary types of sound. Once all the production was completed, we then went through our final step, which was to mix and master the whole entire project.

                Mixing and mastering are two different jobs. Mixing has to go first before mastering. We went through several revisions before we were able to get the precise mix we were looking for. This process took us in total about 11 weeks to finish as a group. The only difficulties we ran into were communication with other group members, and meeting specific deadlines each week which was showing significant progress.

Field Of Sound

              

This is my field of sound project. Here I worked with a group of 4 students to capture video and audio at a certain location using different boom micing techniques. I first scripted out what we were going to shoot. I then established each student’s role in our project. I had two camera men, and one guy in charge of the audio. After I had my production crew together, we found student actors to be a part of our project.

                We shot a couple of interviews and also a music video. The point of this project was to capture audio at a specific location. So we mic’ed up each actor with wireless lavalear microphones and also used a boom micing technique to get the ambience sound of the room which we all call room tone. We also switched from different locations to experience different room tones.
            Working outside is always difficult, whether we were recording video or recording audio. We always ran into lighting problems with the sun or outside ambient noise such as traffic, airplanes, or the wind. Fortunately we were able to adjust to the problem. This project was a great experience for my team because they were all freshmen’s at the Art Institute. So I was able to teach them a few techniques I had already learned from my previous classes.
            Coming into this class, I was already a senior, so I knew most of the techniques already. It was just a matter of practicing and applying it. The students I was working with did not have a clue what to do, but after the 11 weeks of class, and practicing with me, they were able to do all the techniques we applied by their selves.