Been a Long Time Since We Rock 'n Rolled
I am now a proud graduate of the Remote Recording Workshop taught by our friend, Professor Patrick Grant of NYU. Learned a lot of stuff! Among other things, the course provides us with a direction for development, if we choose to follow that path. Prof. Grant presented some basics of the physics of sound and implications for recording. The practical work involved learning to record and contribute digital clips to an audio project and upload them for collaboration. The most common recording platform in the class was Ableton Live, which happens to be what I have been using, though not a necessity for collaboration in this way. Naturally, I have been thinking about how to move forward in general with this project, and what we choose not to do is as important as what we choose to do, especially since our time together is so limited. A few quick thoughts:
Next Zoom discussion: next week (sometime in the range of March 9-11th). It is really difficult to make a concrete plan in light of Covid and the ongoing everything, so it would be good to get some input from you.
Possible next steps:
Review and/or introduce home recording concepts. For some of us, this is old hat, while for others it represents a seemingly insurmountable challenge. It would be great to get everyone to the point where they are able to record with decent quality, even if that just means stopping by here to record a part. You'd better get a vaccine first though, you pestilent human!
Read and discuss sections of the textbook referenced in the RRW course, which is "Audio in Media" by Stanley Alten. I don't really have time to study this on my own, but with others as a team activity, we could make this more interactive and answer the questions we need answers to as a group.
Write the spec! As you probably know, I am a software developer, so playing to my engineering strengths, we could forge ahead and design our somewhat novel performance environment(s). In fact, my pipe dream may be wildly unrealistic, so it would be good to discuss what is real.
Try Jamulus. Tom Ed and I attempted this a few weeks back. It would be interesting to play with this and try to get something interesting going on. I don't believe any of the real-time online collaboration tools is able to meet the rigors of playing anything with a beat, but I am open to checking it out.
Demo of Ableton and the remote recording approach taught in the RRW course.
Introduce the next piece.
Live-vlog from my studio of me re-wiring and rearranging things. Right now it is a crime against ergonomics.
I hope everyone out there in net-land is staying safe and well. Stay tuned for more details on the upcoming Zoom call. I did not record the last one due to tech issues, but I will record the next one.
Anyone have any hot vax tips?