MMS 172

Final Project

THE PLAN

The plan/s mentioned in the pre-production page of my portfolio remained the same. Many of the things I did from the MultiTracking activity remained— especially the acoustic treatment setup (you can see the setup here). My final project for this course is my take on reciting Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" as it has become my prayer for the last few months. At first, I wanted to do the whole poem, but needless to say, it would have been too difficult for a newbie like me, hence I decided only to do the first and last paragraphs since those two are the only parts of the poem I can relate with. Below I will discuss my equipment—and how I utilized it—and a few insights from the activity alone.

THE EQUIPMENT

The Headphones

My headphones are the SAMSON SR950, they are the closed-back version of the SR850. I chose this because reviews said it is better for overall listening and mixing headphones compared to its competitors. These became a huge help in monitoring my recordings since I cannot afford studio-grade speakers.

The Microphone

My Microphone is the Audio-Technica ATR2100X. It is a dynamic microphone and the most premium compared to my other equipment. I decided to invest in the microphone the most since most of the sound that will be recorded is done by it. The quality of my recordings are purely reliant on this device.

The Audio Interface

The Audio Interface is my biggest purchase regret. Going through the allotted time frame of the activity I realized that I did not need an audio interface as much as I thought back then. To me, at least, it did not make that much of a difference when using it. Also, I thought it added more digital noise during recording sessions.

These three work coordinately when recording audio materials. I plug the microphone into the audio interface using an XLR cable (the cable that is together with the microphone in the image above), then I plug the headphones into the audio interface using the dedicated 3.5mm audio jack adapter, then I connect the audio interface to my laptop using a USB type B to USB type A cable. Plugging everything into the audio interface makes listening to yourself while recording easier. It provides you the opportunity to not immediately save your recording and listen to it afterward. With the use of that system, you can immediately restart your track recording when mistakes are made.

THE FINAL OUTPUT

THE DAW(ing?)

I used Audacity, a free DAW software available on Windows or Mac, as my DAW. If you are wondering what a DAW is, DAW stands for "Digital Audio Workstation" and you can record, edit, and master/produce audio with it. In a simpler explanation, a DAW is the Audio equivalent of Adobe Premiere. My knowledge of using a DAW is probably worse than anyone, so I only did minor tweaks to my recordings. As you can see below I sectioned the paragraphs into three tracks and just stitched them together to make it sound like one straight recording. I also did some noise reduction and amplification on each track. All three tracks were amplified to 26 dB.

How to reduce noise using Audacity

First, you need to look for a flat line among your tracks. Then you need to press "Effect" and choose "Noise Reduction and Removal" in that section where you get the noise profile of the selected area so the computer/audacity gets to know which type of sound waves it will reduce. Then after doing all that, all you need to do is to apply the reduction format to the entirety of the track. You do this by clicking that topmost part of the track bar and then going back to "Effect" and clicking "Repeat Noise Reduction" to apply it to the chose track.

My output is fairly easy to replicate even without the equipment I have. I wished I had known more about these things before I took the course. To be honest, I had a hard time reflecting on I did great during the timeframe. Especially looking at it now as I write all this, I might as well expect a low mark from it at the end.

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