G’day,

It’s been another big weekend of gigs including the Sydney Rd Street Party with a great turnout and massive sets from the bands, including an 18-piece jazz big band which filled up the console. More info at brendanmullersound.com.au or facebook.com/brendanmullersound.

This week at SAE my group booked in a session in the D-Command studio to finish off the Terminator scene. It was great to have all the parts come together quite quickly, and then start to focus on how to guide the audience’s attention for each shot. Some sounds were pulled right down or muted to achieve this and I think it worked quite well. For me the biggest challenge was achieving a dynamic experience for the audience while maintaining professional and usable output levels. While I’m very happy with the overall result, and the levels are safe, we didn’t really get the dynamic impact that we had in mind. This is something I’m very interested in learning more about, and I suspect that it may come with a more refined understanding of the ‘dynamic illusion’ that good music production also strives for, using changes in tone rather than actual volume.

Another concern is that I mainly reverted to using the keyboard and mouse for the majority of the work in Pro Tools, without using the D-command very much. Our main focus was on the product and it would have slowed things down considerably to introduce a new workflow as it’s still quite unfamiliar. There is a great opportunity here for me to build a new skill set so I might look at booking in some studio time by myself to get across it.

The music production pitch came up really nicely. Fadain tracked some electric guitar layers which add a fuller colour to the track, and help to lift the post-chorus instrumental. The group seemed to really dig the vibe of the song, but I think it’s worked out best that we’re going with the late-90s post-grunge angle as I can see that coming together a bit more easily.

I  met up with some of the guys from the Film course to do some location recording on one of their projects. Overall I didn’t get as much out of this particular session as I’d hoped – it was a fairly abstract set of static location shots that didn’t really require a dual-system audio setup. However, it was a good dry-run for me to manage the recorder / boom / headphones and cabling on-the-run, and I discovered that the practical workflow needs a bit of careful forethought to be effective. I’m signed up to do another session in a few weeks so I’m keen to see how that goes.

Thanks for reading!