Month: May 2016

Today I started my next project with Debby at Stricker Auto. We didn’t do too much today, but I did do inventory of the oil and oil filters and then organized some papers by date and invoices by their numbers. I wont be at her shop for 30 hours total in the week, so the remaining hours I have left will be devoted to working on my new car. I will add those updates as the project progresses.

This week has been crazy busy. (In a good way!) I have been taking pictures like crazy and its really great! Monday was awesome because Mike, (a worker at the Reserve), and I went out and we put photo points in different areas of the reserve. A photo point is when you put a steak in the ground and then take pictures from North, East, South, and West every few months or so and then you compare the differences in everything that the pictures reveal. Its really cool. Yesterday Mr. Woodberry told me to go out and take pictures of this really cool overnight education center on the Reserve and it was so peaceful and it was really really cool. Today I did my own photography around the reserve and explored on different hikes.

Yesterday at TBeats I actually got to press record since Brandy was working on her own song and there were no other engineers in the studio. It was pretty simple just pressing record and then play, but I did learn quite a few helpful keyboard shortcuts and other tricks that will help me save tons of time. For example, when recording a track that will most likely take more than one try to get right, you can simply change the recording mode to playlists and set it to loop and it will automatically keep every take you do for that section without having to create a new track every single time. Then you can listen to each take and drag individual parts that you liked most into the main mix or just use the take that sounded best. That is probably the most useful thing I have learned during my entire project. We also touched a bit on how analogue recording works. Later today we will have hopefully our last guitar session. If we are able to finish all of the guitar this week, then we will start on vocal harmonies, vocals, any extra synths or other sounds we might want, and finally mixing (which I’ve learned takes a ton of time). The attached picture is basically the remote control for protools. The red button at the bottom is the record enable button and the button next to it makes the track play so you can record onto it. This is located on the far left of the mixing console.

My final video project will consist of a video interview with my mentor, along with stills of some of his professional pieces, after that it will move to my work with time lapsed videos and stills of smaller projects that I have worked on. Questions will be answered after the video. After thinking about it I decided that the video game portion will not be displayed in my final because I am not sure how others parents feel about first person shooters. But just so everyone knows what to expect that is what I will be showing.

Along with wrapping up the art video that I will be sharing as my final project I have been playing around with the software for other things. This week my side work has been making real videos flow with every shot, angle, and scene. It is way harder to get things involving a moving camera to work with each other without an annoying choppy look to it.

Today, I saw a newly married couple. They were wearing traditional clothing on their wedding day.

 

Too busy for the last week, being tired every night and passed out right after dinner. First I have learn how to change a 110v(home-use) motor to a 220v(industrial use), because one of my customer required to have a lower price but for a company, so I tool a home use swing machine but changed a motor that could fit in a big company, usually a company use sewing machine requires more power. And today I have sent 3 different kind of sewing to a new altering company, they do help customer to sew their clothes in order to fit them, and they asked for a current source specially, it was not the kind we have at home or any company. I spent more than an hour at his company and help my uncle to make it right, and finally I got it. By the way those machines we assembled last week, it really was a long week and a lot of work.

 

We delivered three machines today. We needed to check every part of them before we delivered. It was a big day

I’m back. After a busy three weeks of work abroad I’m back in the US. I got back last night and will start my new position tomorrow. So lets go over what I’v been doing for the past two weeks. Well for the past two weeks I was in Luxembourg. I was at a company called SES, you can look at my previous posts to learn more about them. For a week an a half I was in the vendor management department what they do is manage all the things that need to be purchased with company money. While I was there I had meetings with all the people in the office where they would tell me what they do and how they do it. Each person had a different categories of items that they were responsible for. For example there’s travel and entertainment which is responsible for flights, car rentals, all expenses occurred while traveling, and the company credit cards. Then there was someone who did all the day to day items that the company would need. Then there were the people that deal with the big ticket items. While I was there I also consolidated a bunch of excel files for them. Then for two days I was in corporate development. More specifically the Mergers and acquisitions department. This was very interesting because they showed me some of the tools that they have to value other companies. For these two days I had an assignment to research two companies and deliver a short report on them. I can’t actually tell you any information about it because it is “Confidential” and could be considered “Insider Trading”. But now I’m back in the US ready to start a company called Nurses and Co. working in the marketing department.

 

Yesterday we recorded some of the guitar parts for the album. It was really nice because the guitar player who came in knows music very well as opposed to some of the other musicians who were good at their instrument, but didn’t know music very well. This made for an extremely easy and quick day yesterday. We were able to lay down a rough take for three of the four songs. I have found that recording rough tracks first can be a very helpful way to record because, even though it may take more effort and time in the begining. It helps us to better visualize what that particular instrument is going to say in the song and strain out any bad ideas that don’t really fit in the mix. In some cases, such as yesterday, we can even use some parts from the rough in the finished product. We have also been experimenting with different micing technics to get different sounds from the instruments. For example, last week we used an XY pattern which I learned at TBeats for micing the piano. The XY pattern is when you cross two microphones to make an X shape. This gives you a stereo field. When we recorded guitar, I used a Shure SM58 dynamic microphone on one end of the amplifier cone, and a Rode NT1-A condenser microphone on the other end of the amplifier cone. The combination of the crisper and cleaner SM58 with the heavier and thicker NT1-A worked very nicely.