My project in the works

I have chosen to put my best foot forward for creating a blog post about my project in the works prior to it’s completion. Although reflection and improvement is an important process, I intend to post about my project now and once more when it is finished. I believe this is the best way to get my thoughts across, instead of scattering these into separate posts and losing a sense of a clear picture that includes all details of the process.

The first major process of my project has been completed, creating a series of (what turned out to be a sum of 13) videos that will form the bulk of my ibook resource aimed at giving young, beginning musicians the awareness and simple tools they need to begin creating, engaging and exploring their own journey to become the musician they dream of. I have chosen 5 areas to divide the resource into, which are music theory, learning to play music, performance, songwriting and creating original music, and recording music. The aim with this project is not to go too far down the rabbit hole of any of these areas, as I can not possibly assume that every viewer will have the same musical goals and inspirations as myself. Rather, I am aiming to give the viewer some essential skills and awareness of these skills, while leaving the door open for their own journey based on the instruments they play, the music they enjoy and the motivations they have for becoming a musician.

Here are some screen shots from the video series that is now ready to be utilised :

The tools and processes I used reflect the AV skills we have learnt not only in tech in music ed, but the other classes I have this semester which include these skills. The best camera that I have access to is my iphone XR, with the best source of audio for recording my voice being a Shure SM57 I loaned from the con. I used a single loud clap at the start of each recording to sync the voice audio from the SM57 track and the video from my iphone camera. I was also able to record my guitar as a DI into my laptop while filming the musical tutorial sections and blend this with the sound of the guitar in the room. The guitar tracks all have some plugin guitar sounds that I use from Toontrack, which when blended with the sound of the guitar in the room create the illusion of playing an amp in the room on camera.

I used iMovie to edit the videos together, which included creating a “branding” intro of the ‘theme song’ for the project (which is the example piece created during the soundtrap recording tutorial pictured above), and of course a background (red curtains) and text signature for all videos. Personally, the soundtrap recording is something I enjoyed making, the production quality on that is arguable the highest, as I did some research and discovered an application called soundflower which allows direct recording of computer sound while doing a screen recording on quicktime player. This video also taught me about the audio MIDI setup on mac computers and about how to combine sources of audio. I was able to combine the sound of my voice being monitored and recorded through the SM57 microphone coming through the soundtrap, along with a DI signal of my guitar also coming through the monitoring and recording functions of soundtrap. Lastly, I captured the sound of using a soundtrap drum loop, as well as capturing direct playback of the project with the vocal, guitar and drum tracks together. Yeah, I highly recommend soundflower for Mac users, it is a life saver when you combine it with the manipulation of your Audio MIDI setup on a mac.

Here is a screenshot of the logic project containing some of the audio recordings of my voice and the guitar tracks from some (not all) of the videos I created :

Mitchell Davis