My First Mix (d'awww)

This is my first ever mix that I've done for a friend. The original mix of this was done in low fidelity audio and simple MIDI and given to me in stems from garageband. I decided to put it through the ringer. Hope it sounds good! Props to my good friend Jon for the composition.

Excited to post my very first ever finished semi-professional mix. I received the audio stems and MIDI for this song in the form of lackluster garageband fidelity (actually from garageband) and decided to rework the entire song into something grand.

I learned a great deal about mixing by working on this transformation. Parallel compression on drums adds an extra nice bite (thank you prefader sends). Separating a single bass into low and high frequencies spreads out the sound. Routing different guitar tracks with different frequencies and timbres to output busses was essential to workflow. Careful use of effects and processing meant night and day in terms of quality. Learning to fine tune your ear, to take breaks from the consistent sound of your work, and to objectify the shit out of your mix was paramount to making a successful end product.

Pretty much loved every second of it. Anyone have some potential songs they need mixing? Let me at ‘em!

~MJ

Rebooted and Resynced

The site LIVES! After a hiatus from blogging for a while due to school, an internship, and a job, I have finally returned to the updating world in a rather exciting and unpredictable point in my life right now.

I graduated from Pyramind…well for the first time. I plan to return next year picking up Logic certifications and very advanced Pro Tools certifications.

(I’m the head in the very back, middle on the right)

Until then I will be throwing myself out there in the sound world, doing small projects for independent and indie developers of games and short films. In the meantime I will be doing a lot of my own personal sound projects and game implementation.

Some cool shit I learned this year:

Reversing the sound of a balloon popping is an excellent gun noise

Best way to get a juicy guttural squelching sound? Either plop your hands into some Mac n’ Cheese (using a U87 of course) or take a sledgehammer to a pumpkin and play with the guts after.

Using reversed reverb is a great way to make a normal voice sound unworldly or monstrous. Reversed reverb wouldn’t ever exist in our world, so to hear it is indicative of monsters or aliens.

Xform is a godly plugin.

Actually using sounds from field recording is incredibly satisfying. It means you get to say “I made that sound,” rather than “I processed and manipulated that sound,” not that there’s anything wrong with that either!

Accurate footsteps are harder to create in Foley than I excepted. Running sounds on concrete? Don’t actually run, STOMP on that concrete as hard as you can!

Clip gain is both very dangerous and very enticing in Pro Tools, use with caution.

The pencil tool zoomed in up really close actually changes the shape of the waveform in Pro Tools, and is a lifesaver for clips, blips, and pops within sounds. I treat it as a video game, finding something irregular or wrong in the audio, pinpointing it, and DESTWOYING the incorrect transient by smoothing it over.

Stay tuned for more frequent updates! I’m going to try and go for a monthly basis at this point.

Happy New Year! See you 2013, you were awesome. May 2014 be ever open to new discovery.

~MJ

The Future is Now

School was a huge bust.  Therefore I decided to graduate.

I went back to Northwestern University with the impression that I would finish my writings and papers, wrap things up, and take some really compelling classes.  What I came back to was none of these things; the classes I wanted to take: Mixology, Sound Design for Media, ASL lessons, and Post Production Audio, were not offered this quarter.  Over the course of the first week I had these constant feelings of “I do not belong here” and “I’m really unhappy,” so I did the only thing that seemed viable to me: waved two distro classes required to graduate and be done.

…and I’ve never been happier.  I have my future all planned out for the year.  In January I’m going a sound design school called Pyramind Studios located in San Francisco.  I had a tour there just yesterday and I was pretty sold upon walking in the place…it was absolutely stunning, quite literally a sound dev’s dream:

Not only will I get the real learning skill sets of multiple DAW systems, I will learn how to mix/master and record all of my projects, compose and create new music across multiple genres, and learn interactive media sound implementation (THAT’S VIDEO GAMES, PEOPLE!).  I’m really really excited, finding something you are passionate about and investing on it is probably the single greatest thing ever.

It’s simple advice, but ohhhh lordy does it go far.  More projects will be posted upon creation, updates to follow.

Typing this with a huge smile on my face,
~MJ