Epiphany, Kreines Changes, and String Quintet Sounds

The Epiphany

Last week I had an epiphany. It is completely in my ball court to make the most out of my grad school experience. So the last couple weeks I've been attempting to take the time that I had been wasting on Netflix, video games, random depths of the internet and to try and make some strides in my knowledge and experience in the field I want to succeed in: music production.

I've been reading through a book that my classmate Robert gave to me, The Microphone Handbook by John Eargle. The information in that book has brought some light to some confusion I had during my previous work for Digital Worlds on the Race to the Top project. The knowledge I gained from the first couple hours of reading through the book would have improved the quality of my work ten-fold if I had read this prior to starting at DW. Like many things in life, we'll learn on the fly and will constantly have those "facepalm" moments where we think, "if only I had known this a year ago!"

To get back to my epic epiphany, I just made the realization that I need to take the bull by the horns to better myself, rather than just going with the flow.

Kreines Changes

Over the first few days of spring break, I continued my transcription project for Joe Kreines - the one I intended to create some recordings of for the purposes of this independent study. After putting some significant time into the project, I did some math and figured that just the notation end of the project would take about 200 hours to complete. I put some thought into whether or not this project was worth 200 hours of my time, considering the amount of time that this would take away from school and further myself per the epiphany described above. After much deliberation and counsel from those whose input I undoubtably respect, I decided to call Mr. Kreines up to cancel my work on the project until further notice. Which brings me to my third heading....

String Quartet Sounds

The cancellation of my work for Kreines has put me back a couple weeks with my intentions of this independent study (completely the reason why I'm doing work and posting on the blog whilst I am on spring break). I've exported the midi tracks from the first project I worked on for Kreines, a string orchestra piece that touches on a few Scottish Folk melodies. I've figured out how to map automations of Kontakt within Logic and how to change articulations (sustain, pizzicato, tremolo, etc.) on the fly. As I continue to make my edits of the various controllers of the midi signals, I will post some audio samples for you to review.