Capstone Project- The COVID EDITION

Welcome folks. This is a story of victory, glory, headaches, and heartbreaks. I would've named this site ShitIsAlwaysComplicated.com but that would've been too long for a website name, so I just went with the company name instead. I'll try to be as longwinded as possible so I can drag this out! Just kidding. This is the story of a senior Capstone project made during one of the largest crises in history.

Location Recording

Part 1 of this series is the Location recording project. This was done around January 2020; I'll call this time period B.C. (Before COVID). All of the schools, restaurants, and public places were operating normally at this time and the whole world wasn't wearing masks like one big Mardi Gras event. In this assignment, the task was to record a live band in a live setting ( stage, outside venue, bar, etc. ).

January 25, 2020, 8pm EST, Cleveland State University:

With a bit of searching around I ran into ,Derreck and Dom, a cover band who usually has guest artists come and sing while they play. I offered to do a video project along with what I recorded so that way I could offer them both professional audio and a "Tiny Desk" -style video of their performance. Come to find out, I knew absolutely nothing about interior design or video recording!!

Needless to say the video didn't come out too great but the audio came out nicely. We recorded at an open mic hosted at Cleveland State University. I used the Shure sm57 for the vocalist. To capture the Derreck on his Korg electric keyboard, I used two D.I. boxes going into the console. Then for the drums I used the Audio Technica Drum kit along with a pair of Octava MK-012s for the overhead mics.

Audio Visual Project

In this tutorial I show how to record into the FL Studio playlist. I frequently get this question from newer FL Studio producers and recording artist so I figured this could help out a lot.

July 3, 2020

I originally planned to capture audio by using a splitter to send my Mic to my interface and a Zoom H4n recorder. I found a more convenient way by capturing the official audio through Edison, a native FL Studio plugin, while my screen capture software recorded from my computer mic. I used Adobe Captivate to capture my screen and do Zoom edits. Then I used Premier Pro for cuts, audio syncing, and finalizing. Overall it was a fun experience and I hope you all can learn a bit from it.

Mixing Project

The other assignment was to mix the song Paralyze by Joe Clifford. It has a total of 56 tracks to mix down. I decided to mix the project in the FL Studio. This allowed for less processing power while using my Waves plugins.

September 19, 2020

I started this project by getting information on the song and doing cleanup. I found the general tempo, organized all of the Audio Files, cut out the unnecessary audio clip spaces, and placed the drums, guitars, orchestra, and vocal tracks into separate groups. I looked for any unnecessary bleeding of other instruments on tracks; in result, I placed a gate on the Toms and Snares.

Next I went to work on getting a good balance in volume and panning. I went to the outro because it had all of the instruments playing at once. I figured this would be good place to get an idea of where what elements should stand in the mix. I took all of the tracks down to -11dB then began to raise my levels accordingly. I started with the drums and once I felt a good balance I raised levels on the bass tracks. Next I worked the guitars and then the orchestra until the sound felt right.

I placed a high pass on all other instruments besides bass and drums at around 80Hz. Then went back to EQ balance of the piece. I worked on each group ( drums, bass, guitar, and orchestra) separately. Cutting out any irregularities or mud with then EQ and then adding accordingly. I never like to add too much EQ. I feel people often ruin a good recording by overcomplicating their EQ attenuation. I simply listened to what needed to be more present and raised frequencies accordingly while occasionally comparing it with the rest of elements in the mix.

Next was dynamic control. I worked on my Drums sub-master channel first because I wanted them to be the base for my levels. Next I added compression to the vocals. After getting the main and harmony vocal tracks in the right pocket I moved on to my sub-master channels. I added a multiband compressor and waves SSL Chanel rack plugin to add more warmth to the overall mix.

Remix Project

September 22, 2020

This remix is sort of like a follow up of the Mixing Project. The assignment was to take two or more elements from the song, Paralyze by Joe Clifford, and remix them into something else. I took on this assignment in my own style and decided to try my hand at making a lo-fi/ pop version of the song. This was also done in FL Studio 20.1. I snipped a loop out of the Overhead mics, filtered it down, recorded my own midi drums over it then exported it as a drum loop. The longest part was syncing the vocals to my drum loop. In some places I had to manually cut the audio and place it instead of just warping. Stretching them out gave the singer a more mellow tone, allowing me to continue with the process. After that I just built around it by adding my own chords, melodies, bass, effects and automation to spice it up. What I wanted to avoid was having the static composition arrangement that usually comes with Lo-fi songs. I still wanted it to maintain a bit of the energy from the original song so to kind of move things along I decided to Transpose it up to a semi note to C# major in the outro and include the background vocals in the end.

Sound Alike Recording

This was a fun one because I was able to use Tri-C's beautiful studios at the Creative Arts Center. This was in July 2020 D.C. ( During COVID). I wanted to try my hand again at doing a video alongside the audio. That way I could give the talent involved in the recording some good promo content. I did my research ahead of time expecting to record a whole production but with added restrictions I had to choose my battles wisely. Due to COVID , studios and recording rooms were reduced to only one person at a time. The engineer and talent were not to be in the same room at all so everything had to be set up ahead of time. With this in mind I decided to split the session up into three different sessions Keys/ Bass, Drums, then vocals.

Keys and Bass

July 10, 2020

My singer choose to do 'Wasted' by Summer Walker a song from her album CLEAR. CLEAR was recorded live so we decided that would be a perfect pocket for the instrumentalist and vocalist I choose. The keys and bass were played by Derreck Spiva. I didn’t have time to map out the fluctuating tempo so we had to record with the original song in the background. Derreck is a superb player so he managed to pull it off fine. I recorded into two D.I.s and saved his midi performance so that I could choose a different instrument if needed. The console we recorded into was the TL Audio M4.

Drums

July 14, 2020

The drums were done by Robert Moore and recorded into the API 1608. I choose to use this room because of the Pearl Prestige Session Select Drum Kit. The 20" kick and 14" snare went well for the R&B vibe feel I was looking for. So I was very careful to make sure my cymbals and percussion met the same criteria; for this I used the 10” Sabian Splash, a pair of 13” Zildjian K High Hats, 18” Zildjian K Session Crash, 20” Istanbul Mehmet Ride.

For tracking I used a pair of Octava MK-012's for the overhead Left and Right. I used the Audix D6 for the kick, two SM57s on the snare top and bottom, and two SM58's for the rack and floor toms.

Vocals

September 28th, 2020

Ahhh, as always things must be complicated. Between hefty Covid restrictions , a tight studio booking schedule , and an artist that keeps to rescheduling the day of the session ( when there are NO OTHER TIMES AVAILABLE!) this may have been the most simple but complicated part of the assignment. After some trails and tribulations I was able to find another singer. She goes by the name, Celestial Waves. I transferred the project over to FL Studio and recorded the vocals at my project studio through my Mackie Big Knob interface and MXL 990. Then that was the end! Finally ! THE END!!

All Audio versions of the projects are available in the Project C playlist. I hope you all enjoy and be safe out there!