Category Archives: progress journal

Synchrony

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I’m having a creative phase right now! Several things have lined up —

We’re finally settled into the new house. The seedlings I brought over from the old house are doing well. The plants and I are putting down roots.

I’ve been meeting with my Discord group for about a year! Because of this group I’m getting more consistent about working on music. It’s great to have some people to report back to every 2 weeks.

I JUST installed some software that I purchased 6 months ago. Now I’m exploring these new plugins.

I hit # 500 on my Random Note compositions, and decided to kick it up a notch by entering the latest ones into FL Studio, at least in sketch form. Because of this I’ve been spending about twice as much time on music every day.

These little compositions were interesting enough that it gave me the craving to make videos again. My previous video editing software is gone (motherboard from previous computer died). It was called Movavi and much as I loved it, its latest upgrades have gone off in a direction I didn’t like. I decided to bite the bullet and purchase something different. I picked Pinnacle Studio because it’s a one-time purchase, NOT a subscription model. It’s by Corell and I’ve had good experiences with their software. …So I’ve been struggling with learning Pinnacle Studio for the past 2 weeks. I made a sort of test video and now I’m working on a “welcome back to the channel” video.

A couple days ago I installed Audacity 3.0 on my new computer. This version of Audacity is a little different than what I worked with 5 years ago — it saves projects with a different file extension — but otherwise very similar. The interface looks the same. …I had been putting off this decision because I wanted to force myself to learn Reaper, or, the new Audacity with the new interface and features. But I finally decided to just take it easy on myself and stick to the familiar. As soon as I started editing a sound clip in Audacity I got such a wave of nostalgia. Memories came flooding back — layering and transforming sound clips in a journey of discovery. It’s a safe and familiar place. It surprised me to get such a strong emotional reaction to some SOFTWARE. But wow, it’s good to be back!

Here’s Tantacrul (Martin Keary) talking about the latest changes to Audacity. I have such positive feelings about Martin so I will definitely try it some day.

And just for nostalgia, here’s the video that came out when I was first learning FL Studio. I still think this song is a banger lol

 

Mixing “Snow at 2 am”

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My random note composition on Saturday became “Snow at 2 am”. I worked at the piano for an hour, then took the composition to the computer and worked in FL Studio and Audacity for several more hours — 5 hrs in total.

I wanted the piece to sound like one of those schmaltzy Hollywood arrangements with a piano and a string section. In FL Studio I had a piano part and a string part in separate stems, and varied the relative volume. Bring up the strings here, back them off there.

However, when I brought it over to Audacity, I wasn’t happy with the way the instruments came forward / receded backwards, and I re-sculpted the volume

I was happy with that, put it away, then listened to it later and didn’t like it at all! I guess the lesson is to keep the stems separate, and do the dynamics later, at the end? That way if I want to undo / redo, I can make the changes in one location. The way I have it now, I would have to make changes in both FL Studio AND Audacity.

What about like this? Say for solo piano with a string section.
Record the piano in FL Studio, “flat”
Record the piano in FL Studio with the kind of expressive dynamics I imagine
Record the strings in FL Studio “flat”
Record the strings with expression and dynamics
Give Neal the “flat” threads in Ableton
Give Neal my attempt at a mix, and a verbal description