For this final project, I continued to stick to my pre-production plan of creating a walkthrough a-log of what goes on in the life of a full-time BAMS student at UPOU. To give a brief background, I produced a synthesis, or a glimpse of this work in my Assignment #3—a shortened version of my life, or what I would usually do in an ever-so casual day. 

Below are the equipment and assets that I have used and implemented in this final project. The bold texts are the ones I have added as changes from my Assignments #2 and #3. 

Hardware:

• Microphones:

  • Maono AU-PM461TR USB condenser microphone

  • iPhone 11 built-in microphone

• Speakers:

  • Logitech H390 USB headset (Home setup)

  • Baseus Encok DO2 Pro headset (Portable recording setup)

Software:

• Digital Audio Workstation (DAW):

• Tracktion Waveform (Free)

Location:

• AMD AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G PC rig (Home setup)

• Asus X507UA Intel i3 laptop (Portable recording setup)

Sounds:

• My own voice

• Foley elements:

• Alarm sound (from phone)

• Keyboard typing sound

• 3-in-1 coffee sachet shaking

• Water pouring

• Messenger notification sound

• Spray of perfume

• Shower sound (faucet)

• Ice clanking in a bottle 

• Background music (BGM)

• MIDI Soft Piano Plug-in by LABS

Circling back to assignment #3, I used stock audio for the BGM. For this one, I have utilized a MIDI plugin to somewhat replicate the same Lo-Fi calm theme I was going for in my walkthrough. Other than that, I also replaced the ice-clanking stock audio from the previous assignment with a personally recorded one. 

As mentioned, I still gravitated to my plan of doing a walkthrough as a full-time BAMS student. However, there were noticeable changes that heavily affects the scriptwriting process. And this part of this blog is the best way to dig deep about it.

"After quite some thought, but potentially a subject for revisions in the near future, I thought of recording a walkthrough of what goes on in a day of a college student's mind—something new and relevant, as far as I'm concerned in my timeline and upbringing. I conceptualized executing this as a 5-minute poem, poetically explaining my routine of what I typically do in a day as a full-time student.

--To go in-depth, this will include narratives of things that I planned to do for the day: things I get to do and not to do, occurring thoughts in my "academe" journey,  personal life realizations, and as a growing individual in general. However, if I plan to do some shifting in my approach, I might also do it in a conventional style of casually doing a story-telling method about my day. "

Without beating around the bush, I have decided to follow the last sentence of my words last Assignment #2—casually doing a story-telling method about my day, instead of going for a poetic and deep perspective in my writing. I did not include deep narratives of pondering realizations about life takeaways or my academe journey, but focused more on the "day-in-my-life" aspect itself. In addition, I was originally targeting a 5-minute mark; but upon finishing my script, with my word-count fixation that I thought would reach the goal, my output just clutched enough for 3 minutes. Also, the mere fact that my script here was already initially laid out significantly helped me enough to provide a foundation for this final project. 

Moving on to the recording session, this is where things got compromised. Although it is tantamount easier to just continue what was already started, I have decided to re-record all of my recordings from Assignment #3, in respect of Sir Al's feedback from the same assignment. Admittedly, this was a factor in compromising the schedules in my timetable, such as the re-recording process, instead of just tweaking the recordings in post-production or adding additional lines in my script. However, I had no regrets as I can say that things went better on my end, production and post-production-wise.  I also got lucky as this unit was just a 1 hour-ish ride from my place to undergo the recording process again. 

To further explain, the feedback from my Assignment #3 was that my audio was boomy. I thought of just tweaking it in the post-production phase but was not getting the audio quality that I wanted. The thing is, my first recording session for this project (recording of the added lines) was that I followed the same technique I did in Assignment #3, where I was 2 inches, yes, too close, to my microphone (even with a pop filter on) thinking that my audio was mellow and good enough for the Lo-Fi vibe I was going for. I think of it as I achieved the vibe, but there was a great drawback that made my audio too boomy. Going for the second shot, I followed what was said in materials to record 5-6 inches away from the microphone, and lo and behold, I greatly pondered that it is better to do things well in the production phase than trying to tweak it in the last phases of post-production. Such a simple act made a huge difference. 

Concerning my recordings on the DAW, I have downloaded a free VST plugin, specifically the MCompressor by MeldaProduction, where I have chosen the Noise Gate preset to cancel the minor background noises in my dry recordings. I used it in my previous assignment, and have decided to use it again. Crowdsourcing this plugin from YouTube, it was easy to maneuver it as the notch was needed to situate to the left until little to no noise could be heard. However, I still didn't go all the way out, as doing it caused some static noise to arise. So, I left some little allowance, which had a tradeoff of very little noise but majorly less noticeable than before.  

Other than that, I amped all voice tracks to 12.50 decibels, noticeably higher compared to before of 3 decibels, ensuring a clear and audible voice throughout the recording. I also used a High Pass Filter (HPF), and applied a threshold of 179.0 Hz to lessen the low frequencies of the recording and eradicate the boominess. 

As I lacked resources in the rental unit, I have decided to record my foley elements in my home set-up where everything is readily accessible and viable. As for the sound of mimicking the shower, which will be shown later on, I have used my iPhone 11 built-in microphone due to the portability and convenience issues of the microphone. I do plan to buy a USB cable to Type C port, in an attempt to connect my microphone to my devices soon. Below are the raw foley soundtracks: 

For the tracks above, I recorded many attempts of them in one recording, so I could pick the best snippet that could make the final cut. Some of them had common denominators where I had to amplify their individual gains according to their needs, in order for me to hear the sound of foleys better. A good example would be the water pouring, and what I recently added, the ice clanking, as the dynamics were pretty low on the dry recording. I removed my pop filter while recording all of them, to ensure that all sounds created by the foley are registered to the microphone well. To note, I did not use a real perfume and instead used linen spray as that would probably lead me to nasal overload + to not waste any perfume :D

Other than that, the main feature I was religiously using for almost all of the tracks is the crossfade and edge fade, as this greatly helped to make every track have a seamless transition from one another, amidst the piecemeal recordings I have compiled in the DAW:

As for the shower and notification sound, I set them to a different track and used a Low Pass Filter with the cutoff set to 7289.4 Hz and added a compressor with a threshold of -20.7 dB to remove the plosives (sudden gush of water from the faucet and high sound pings of the Messenger notification sound) and even out the range between the softest and the loudest part of both foleys. I manually tweaked parts of the compressor as well, to adjust what I think best sounded for the clips. Seeing the picture below, I did not use the preset "Drum Room," but manually adjusted it, just did not change its name. 

For the background music, to compromise my use of stock audio last assignment, I utilized a MIDI Soft Piano Plugin by LABS, that allowed me to create my own BGM. I first used my keyboard as a MIDI virtual input, then applied the plugin to the track. I improvised the BGM by randomly pressing 4 keys that I thought sounded good then looped it until the end of the audio track. This part took me a while because I never played any instruments before aside from flute, but managed to produce a decent one—sufficient enough for the Lo-Fi vibes of the audio blog. Below are the tools that I operated with, where I made use of a 65.5-sized Natural Reverb with a 2.01-second delay—plugin that came from the DAW already. 

As mentioned earlier, I mainly used the compressor, HPF, equalizer, reverb, and noise gate, to ensure the dynamics, clarity, and consistency of my audio tracks. Adjusting the dynamics was important for tracks that I recorded either too quiet or too loud, yet I still prioritized the recording session more so that I would be able to lessen any changes in the production part. Re-recording the vocal tracks might have been taxing, but it was worth doing it as this led me to have an easier time making them sound richer and better in Tracktion.

 Basically, I tried to maintain a proper voice level upon recording and a precise distance every time from the microphone, which made mixing a lot easier and a lot more cohesive to hear, definitely a significant change now. However, I tweaked and went more into the tweaking of the foley elements, as compared to the previous assignment, as the notification, spray of perfume, ice, and shower foleys were more critical-sounding as compared to the other foleys I have recorded before.

During Assignment #3, I thought to myself that I already did a presentable and decent job in working with my tracks. But after the feedback from Sir Al, this made me eager to make my overall voice track sound better than ever. In hindsight, I genuinely wondered how I was not able to realize how my previous clips sounded too boomy, but now, this was remediated and I think I did a fair job of practicing the correct recording and mixing techniques. Before, I was dumbfounded about what knobs I should turn, even now honestly, but I became a tad bit more knowledgeable about the fundamental plugins and what they are for. Although I pat myself on the back for creating what I think is a passable and sufficient output, I will still take this as a learning curve to discover more techniques, production and post-production-wise. 

If I may also add one thing, it is how I would emphasize how I was struggling to find the correct keys to play on the piano to hit the mood I was trying to evoke in this audio blog. I kept juggling my thoughts about whether I would create my own BGM through recording or going all my way out using the MIDI/synthesizers—considering that I have little to no relationship with the piano, aside from wanting to learn it as a kid. Overall, I consider this final project an opportunity for learning and a product of wanting to do better with audio.