Skills Update 3: 3/16/18

Final Skills Update: 3/16/18

By the time I had finished my twenty hours of independent study, I found that my process ended up a little disjointed, which while not necessarily bad is definitely interesting to me. It felt between my first two weeks like I had actually completed two mini assignments, which I suppose I did. For the first half, I studied voice editing with Adobe Audition, but I felt like I had learned what I had set out to do in not a very long time, so during the second week I switched over to a music focus, learning how to work a synthesizer for my music tracks.

I set out to learn how to use Adobe Audition because throughout my past (not so much anymore, unfortunately), I spent a lot of time making videos for YouTube, and no matter what type of video it was or how long it was supposed to be, I was always unsatisfied by the quality of my voice recordings. I spent many hours when I was younger learning how to edit my voice best in Audacity, mostly wrestling with the noise remover settings to find an acceptable balance between sounding robotic and leaving in a ton of background noise. Of course, there never was a good balance because of the way I had recorded my voice in the first place.

In the years after that, I started messing around with a professional DAW, Ableton Live, to make music, and I found that most of the tools I struggled with in Audacity were very simple in Ableton. Compressors and equalizers adjusted in real time with intuitive UIs, and after getting over the initial hurdle everything felt easier.

Sometimes, though, Ableton seemed a little too heavy to work on a simple voice recording, like hammering in a nail with a sledgehammer, so that was why I wanted to learn Audition, to see if I could use it as sort of a middle ground between the lacking Audacity and the power-suite of Ableton. To that end, it actually seemed like a program that would have fit that bill perfectly, had I learned it earlier. When learning Adobe’s specific implementations of equalizers, compressors, and noise removals, I kept comparing them to Audacity and Ableton, feeling that while the tools were certainly more useful than Audacity, learning an entirely new workflow and fiddling around with perhaps-not-quite-as-good plugins were not worth the extra bit of light-weightiness that Audition held over Ableton. I’m glad that I studied it and know more about it if it ever comes up, but I do not think that I would ever use it over either Audacity or Audition.

What I also learned in this portion was that I do not handle long streams of tutorials very well. When sitting down for hours with the express purpose of learning software, I found myself either getting distracted or simply not retaining all of the information. What tutorials are useful for, however, is informing me about functionality I didn’t know that the software had or sometimes that I even wanted. Otherwise, though, I learn much better by using Google to find out exactly what I need when I need it. Unfortunately, this meant a lot of my gathered materials went to waste.

It is not surprising, then, that the materials list for my second phase, synthesizers, is much shorter. I know the basic workflow of using Ableton Live, so I only needed tutorials in the specific synthesizers. Learning the operator (a simple synthesizer built into Ableton) was enjoyable, as although I am no good at making synthesizer sounds that actually sound decent in a song I had a ton of fun making the sounds knowing exactly what I was doing. Even with just the stock plugin, I was able to create a halfway-decent bassline to a beat that I had tinkered with previously.

The much more interesting synthesizer, however, was Massive, which proved to be an overwhelming process. If I could start this assignment over again, I would pick synthesizers as my whole topic. As it was, I was able to understand how to work Massive but I have an incomplete knowledge of the plugin at best. My compromise, then, was to adjust presets to tweak them to how I wanted them to sound. Using this technique, I spent a large chunk of time creating a rap beat solely from Massive and a drum pack I found online, which you can listen to from this link or from my skills charts. This ended up being a ton of fun, as I was actually working on something productive rather than toying along with tutorials. I spent an absolutely massive (pun intended) amount of time week two working on this, which I was dreading due to not working a lot over Spring Break, but it turned out to be super enjoyable.

Like I said, I wish I could have studied synthesizers from the very start, but I am happy with what I was able to accomplish in the limited amount of time I spent on it. I will mostly likely return to Massive in the future to learn the rest of the plugin’s functionality, but honestly music for me is just a hobby, more like a toy. It was nice to sit down and focus on it for a class, but that large amount of time is hard to dedicate for no particular reason, I find.

Overall, this project was a moderate success for me. I learned a lot of things over the course of my time, although some more useful than others. I was happy to actually produce something and experiment a little bit. I wish I could have been more accurate with my time estimates for everything, but even as it was I had a great time learning to do something I was actually interested in doing.

Skills Log