How to be Pro!

As I type this, I'm uploading the latest batch of samples I've been cutting for this project called Hoopfighter.

This project has been in "concept" for a long, long time according to a close friend of mine who is the creator of the IP.  They've gotten quite a comic strip started online. I'm helping out with Sound Effects for the next phase they're building: a short animated series.  I've been told the plan is to start releasing episodes as early as next April.  Check them out on Facebook and join the following so you can stay in the loop on when episodes are released!

I've been doing an awful lot of documenting my own personal stuff as well as stuff I've been doing for this project just to keep track, which led me to that template I designed for managing field recording sessions with the Zoom H4N.  (you can find it here on my article "Got Zoom?")

Universal Audio has AMAZING documentation and their manual provides a session recall sheet on page 35.  I love my 4-710 D.  In fact, I've used this beast so many times I've lost count (thankfully I keep session logs), but I just started backing up my paper logs back to digital domain and storing them in PDF's along with my other session logs.  Thanks to the power of Photoshop I now have this master template for doing session recall sheet "digitization".  Click on the image below to download the .PSD file.

Here's a few tips on how to edit and navigate this photoshop file.

Layout contains the altered session recall sheet from UA's manual.

Channel Notes contains text layers for each channel of both the top and bottom recall layouts.  Simply double click on the text layer and start typing your information about that channel.  What mic was hooked up, whether the mic's pad or roll-off or other switches or pattern select was used.

Session Title contains the upper text layers,  double click on the "TITLE" layer and start typing out the title of the session.  It also houses the date text layer, and the engineer text layer.  You can change your studio title as well.

Notes area is something I added in.  there's 2 vector lines and a text layer for adding in further text information about the session.

Dials which you can see all the layers of in the image to the right, contains an easy way to create the dial drawing information.  Simply select the hard circular brush (or default brush Photoshop uses).  and make the brush size small enough to your liking.

As you can see above, I started painting in on the appropriate layer.  The easiest way to keep a clean look, is to click once and create a dot at the center of the dial with the brush tool, then hold Shift and left click at the outer edge of the dial to create a straight line from the last "click" you made.

My finished example below from one of my earlier sessions.

So there you have a free Photoshop template, and a basic walkthrough of how to use it for your own sessions.

This isn't all I've been up to.  I've made session time log templates, material checklist templates, Sample archiving templates, etc... etc...  I've spent just about as much time building documentation as I have actually recording and producing audio material!  Imagine that...

Other news, I've been working off-and-on for a DJ friend of mine helping him change aliases and start a new "brand image" building marketing material and video work for his music.  Check out VRTRA on facebook and show him some love!  He's got an EP he's working on right now.  I actually mastered his track "IDGAF (Original mix)".
We've been back and forth with development of the text logos and stripping out a "zebra" design he originally had made by another artist and wants to shift gears to a more edgy look.  Here's a look at the progress and changes I've done just iterating through some design requests.

 Some alternate text banners he decided against.

After a week or so He decided the Zebra head wasn't the image he wanted, but he liked the idea of fractals and wanted them to shape the V as his logo.  I had a couple of issues with this as getting the same way I designed the fractals as BG fx for the Zebra head don't work with text well, so I had to imrpovise.

After some more chatting back and forth and letting him know my difficulties with getting the same geometric shaped fractals to work with the V, I took some more creative liberties to develop some different looks for the V.

Just some super rough ideas for a background V shaped fractal.  I've designed my fair share of fractals with Apophysis and just started manipulating them in Photoshop to get the V look.  But this still wasn't what he envisioned so I took a new approach with the Geometric shape fractals I had created with the Zebra head.

More news to come with several other projects I'm involved in.  Shot video and assisted a photographer friend at a Wedding over a month ago.  I should be getting the footage and some photos to post up for the work we did soon.  Lots on my plate!  Also, if you haven't already, go back in my blog and check out my article on the latest commercial project I did music for: SIMple is as Simple does not.

Stay fresh friends.  As always, I appreciate any and all feedback, so feel free to comment below.  My question to you all is: what do you think o the V logos, which is your favorite? Do you think any of these make for a good logo design for a DJ?

The Little Engineer That Could

Holy crap what a crazy year it's becoming!  Just thought I'd upload this and share with everyone:

Let me start back last Tuesday when I received two new pieces of gear:

 

The big white box is my brand new Universal Audio 4-710 D and the 2nd is an Art HeadAmp6Pro.  I also got a grip of cables to patch in the new connections. Speaking of patching...

In the rack:

RME Audio Fireface 800

2x DBX Pro 48 point patch bays

Korg DTR-1000 Rack tuner

Radial JD7 Injector

Line 6 Bass POD XT Pro

TC Electronic G-Major 2

Mesa|Boogie Triaxis

Furman Power Conditioner

Monster Powercenter Pro 2500

Running the patch bays into a 

16x4 Livewire stage-box.

The cat on the bench is Xena.

Had to solder the last 4 connections of my stage-box snake to replace the XLR connections with 1/4" TRS.  Good thing my memory served me well from last time,  big thanks to my dad for helping make it quick!

With that done I was able to finish patching in everything properly.  Minus a few extra cables I still need to make all my routing complete.

Recorded 2 guitar tracks. Channels 1+2 are the first recording.  I'm recording the JD7's direct out as well as a mic on the amp.  The same is repeated for the 3+4.

Routing looks like this:

The metal test song was maybe 10-15 minutes of work even with the drums.  Speaking of drums Troy and I also tested out the 4-710 D on a full drum session.  I'll have a seperate post soon with a special little video update I plan on building this week in between all the other projects i've got going on...
Now that I mention it, the work i've been doing for clients has been keeping me EXTREMELY busy!  After finishing the t-shirt logo design I quickly moved on to designing the graphic wrap for a custom arcade box a friend of mine and guitarist from Trials and Memories has been building.

Arcade top design and the box underneath houses the electronics.

I received this project's details and started to do research and finding source material for the original old-school games he wants to have featured.

While I started work on this, it had to take a seat as a bigger project building 11 video reels and prepping video and photos for an upcoming event took front and center of my attention.  In fact, today I just met with the guy who has been putting the event together.  It's going to be HUGE!  I have all 11 reels done rough editing and just have a few key movies left to find to fill out the rest of two reels with.

On top of that I'm also putting together session and product documents for a huge endeavor I'm setting out to start next month - building a sound effects library of my very own!  Starting with impacts and small objects - this was exactly the reason I ordered the UA 4-710 D, the Art HeadAmpPro 6, and purchased the Zoom H4n recorder.  I also picked up a set of contact microphones.  I've got several pages worth of documents I'm putting together not just for sampling sessions but also for designing various music cues.

I've put a ton of research into the project and based on the markets I've seen there are quite a few websites that offer cheap alternatives to the expensive A-list names like Sound Ideas, Sony, Digital Juice, and others that offer the largest collections but at the highest prices.  Let's talk about this for a moment.

Right now video-games and interactive media make for the largest revenue stream topping even the Film industry.  That being said, the video-game market is about to experience an explosion the likes of which it hasn't even yet begun to feel, thanks to a few key ingredients.  Unity, Unreal, and a few other "complete game engines" have poised themselves very well in the development communities touting the ability to instantly and freely download their game developing tools and allowing people to start developing their very own game using their AAA quality game engines, did I mention they're FREE?

Let's start with Unreal Engine.  Epic Games have probably the most attractive property for developing a game as their licensing agreement allows you to freely download, install, and use their UDK tools to build a game using their engine without paying them anything.  Not only that, should you commercially publish your game they don't ask for any percentage of the revenue cut until AFTER your first $50,000 US.  That's pretty enticing to a start-up game developer, an indie DIY group, or even someone like a student or hobbyist who's always dreamed of wanting to make their own game.

Unity offers two versions.  The basic is Free and allows you to start developing right away.  You have the option to upgrade at any time to a paid version, which takes care of licensing for authoring your game on just about any platform you'd dream to have your game on.  Granted there are stipulations like having to buy individual licenses for specific platforms, take a look at their site for more details.

On top of that, Unity has a built in Asset store.  A complete internet based hosting service that not only allows any developer registered and logged in to Unity to buy assets and immediately put them into their game, but also publish anything they create onto the asset store as well.  They take care of hosting and bandwidth and all that complex stuff and split the revenue your content generates 70/30 in your favor.

Unity is quickly becoming the center of quite a bit of attention.  In fact, big-time digital production house Massive Black  was featured in a recent article in 3d world magazine.  The huge expose on them building a complete game demo in just 2 months to show off Unity's capabilities of supporting a AAA title (And Massive Black's amazing digital production prowess) can be found on 3d Artist Issue 36. 

Keep in mind, I've been running this blog for my personal opinions and experiences and sharing my own thoughts, I'm in no way endorsed or backed or even requested by any sort of company to discuss or "sell" these products.  If I've piqued your interest, you really should research these tools BEFORE you commit to anything with them, and make sure for yourself that whatever you pursue will be your best option.

What does this all have to do with sampling sessions and sound effects?  Well, I've got not just one, but possibly two HUGE projects I may be project managing and producing come May.  I can't share much at the moment as I.P. is still being discussed.  But I can promise you all one thing,  should these projects get the green-light.  There's going to be a lot to update on this blog!

As always, I welcome any and all feedback!