Week 1 (8/22)⌗

Monday⌗

Wednesday⌗

  • The pre-test results were promising. You know a few things already.
    • If you haven’t completed this, let’s spend a few minutes and do it in class.
  • Sound and hearing slides

Homework - Due Friday: Post a recording or video of one of your favorite songs or pieces of music that involve some type of audio production. Find some aspects of the piece that you would like to learn how to recreate in this class. Write a paragraph describing why you like it and what you would like to learn from it. Submit both to D2L

Friday⌗

  • Listen to a few of your songs

Week 2 (8/29)⌗

Monday⌗

Wednesday⌗

Project 1: Arranging Clips (Due Friday)

Friday⌗

  • Questions about project?

Recording Techniques

Project 1 Due

Week 3 (9/5)⌗

Monday⌗

Labor Day - No Class

Wednesday⌗

  • Projects are graded - make sure you follow the directions here to export and render your project. You have one week to resubmit the project for credit.
  • Look at Top Design Firms article about radio ad script writing.
  • Ad examples - how do these ads conform the the article we just read?
  • Spend the rest of class writing your script.

Project 2: Unreliable Product Ad - DUE 9/16

Friday⌗

Week 4 (9/12)⌗

Monday⌗

  • Record during class time if you haven’t booked time yet.
  • Editing
    • Each student must edit their own commercial.
    • More tips for editing in Reaper
    • Eliminate empty space between lines to get the “fast talking” effect of a radio ad.
    • Demonstrate zooming into the waveform to more easily see silences.
    • ripple editing
    • Add fades between edits if they’re not automatically there.
    • condense your ad to be 30 seconds long.

Wednesday⌗

  • Digital Audio
  • More recording in class if necessary
  • Reminder about razor editing with ripple mode - very useful for cutting out silence and speeding up dialogue
  • Create two folders for your sound effects and music. This way you can have control over the mix of your dialogue, sfx, and music independently.
  • Sound Effects + music beds
    • Finding sound effects
    • Listen back to the ads from a few classes ago, what types of sound effects do they use?
    • Examples could be transition impacts or swooshes between character lines. Some scripts will have specific needs for effects that illustrate locations or products, like chirping birds for outdoor settings.
    • Add sound effects to separate tracks
    • make sure your music and dialogue work well together, listen to the examples for how the dialogue is timed to the music
  • mixing - background music should be much quieter than dialogue, around -30 dB is a good start.

Friday⌗

  • Listen to the ads in class
  • Catch up time for any behind students

Project 2: Unreliable Product Ad DUE

Week 5 (9/19)⌗

Monday⌗

Wednesday⌗

  • Reaper FX Guide - EQ Section
  • Spectrum - good cheat sheet
  • Find three sounds from freesound.org
    • full spectrum
    • high spectrum
    • low spectrum
  • What happens when two tracks are in a piece of music and share the same frequency range?
  • Do this basic music mix - download
    • set the levels so that nothing is clipping and everything can be heard easily
    • find the tracks that still can’t be heard, what other tracks are masking those?
    • Add an equalizer to the masking track to try to “carve” out a space for the other track to be heard
    • i’ll do a mix in class and you try to recreate it as closely as you can

Friday⌗

  • Continue with mix from Wednesday
    • Build mix with volume levels
    • add EQ to help with masking

Turn in what you did today to D2L

Week 6 (9/26)⌗

Monday⌗

  • Dynamics effects
    • ReaComp, ReaXComp, ReaLimit, ReaGate
    • What elements in our mix are still not sitting correctly that could use compression?

Wednesday⌗

Time based effects

Friday⌗

Week 7 (10/3)⌗

Monday⌗

Wednesday⌗

Sampling + MIDI

  • Any questions about the mix project?
  • How sampling transformed music | Mark Ronson
  • Who Sampled - covers and sampling
    • In-class project: based on who sampled, find three of your favorite sampling uses from who sampled. Why do you like them? Please describe how the artist used the sample and what it was about the original recording that made the artist want to use it. We’ll have a few people present at the end of class.

Friday⌗

  • MIDI History - some history on the problem MIDI was invented to solve.

Week 8 (10/10)⌗

Monday⌗

  • No class for Native America day

Wednesday⌗

  • Grades returned - make sure you are following directions. Ask questions if you don’t understand.
  • MIDI Intro

Friday⌗

Week 9 (10/17)⌗

Monday⌗

  • Create at least a 2 bar loop today, we’ll go over how to extend it more on Monday.
  • You can redo your loop project, this time with MIDI, or do something new.
  • Add one or two samples from freesound to your composition
  • Spend some time making loops, share with the class at the end
  • Use any of the effects we’ve learned so far: EQ, compression, reverb, delay
  • You can route your MIDI track to effects sends with the effects routing tab.

Wednesday⌗

Friday⌗

  • Review multi-velocity layers and round robin sampling.
  • Review sending drum parts to effects sends.
  • In class work on project

Project 4: Drum Programming and Beatmaking - DUE October 26th

Week 10 (10/24) - Synthesis⌗

Monday⌗

Synthesis and MIDI

Wednesday⌗

Friday⌗

  • Spend around 10 minutes playing with the synth playground to figure out how LFOs work. A few people can share their sounds.
  • Show tone generator with scope and spectrum analyzer.

Week 11 (10/31)⌗

Monday⌗

Wednesday⌗

Friday⌗

Week 12 (11/7)⌗

Monday⌗

  • in class work on project

Synth composition

Final Project proposal - see D2L

Final Project description

Wednesday⌗

  • in class work on project

Friday⌗

  • Veterans Day - no class

Week 13 (11/14)⌗

Monday⌗

  • Listen to Synth projects

Wednesday⌗

  • In class work on final projects

Friday⌗

  • In class work on final projects

Week 14, 15⌗

  • I class work on final project

Week 16⌗

  • Final Exam Presentation: Friday, December 9, 8 am - 10 am