Class #2

" Music Education people are generally quite crap at this stuff " James Humberstone

Today's class was all about recording live sounds with microphones. This involved plugging audio interfaces into the computer, and microphones into these audio interfaces, then recording sound and fiddling with it in GarageBand!

Tech stuff

Audio interface: Connects professional microphones, instruments and other kinds of signals to a computer, and output a variety of signals as well.

Dynamic microphone: Good for capturing loud and strong and direct sounds, making it ideal for recording instrumental parts. They are also quite cheap.

Condenser microphone: Good for capturing more delicate sounds and higher frequencies, making it ideal for recording vocal parts. These mics are more expensive.

What we did in class

We broke off into groups and connected up the audio interface and dynamic mic to create an a capella like track. This is what our group came up with...

Not a great a capella track haha but we figured out how the whole connecting mics and such worked. From the track, you can hear how the dynamic mic refines and focuses the sound. We also learnt a few random garageband tricks on the way:

• Sound check: check to the loudest level. All frequencies should stay in the green level - orange and red are a NO GO! Play with the gain knob to fix this.

• Use the monitor button to hear yourself and others through the headset as you record

• Sounds: use effects on your recording

• Command D: add a new track same as previous

• Command shift 4 space bar: screenshot a chosen page

• Command ,: system preferences

• In system preferences, make sure: - Output Device: Build-in Output / Input Device: Audio Interface

• Use the EQ filter to filter out unecessary background noise that may've occurred.

Then again, we broke off and did the same but with the condenser mic. Here, Mitch and I decided to create a podcast...

In this track, the condenser microphone clearly has a much greater range of picking up frequencies in our voices. Even towards the end, you can hear Lucy in the background saying "yeah Mitch"; because the condenser microphone captures more frequencies, it also picks up background noise.

At home fun

I've really enjoyed the first two classes so far, and wanted to kinda mesh the two and create my own track that has MIDI loops and recorded tracks. Unfortunately I don't have a dynamic microphone at home, so I had to use my crappy apple headphones haha. But here is what I came up with using completely GarageBand!