Personal Projects..

I spent most of today working on my own songs. It was a ton of work but really rewarding at the end of the day to know I had finished my creations. The first song I worked on was with a couple of my friends, Alap and Chirag Patel. I wrote all the music to it and we called it, "Because we're Hindu"...because they’re Hindu. After we finished that up I put down the vocals to the other song I had been writing the music to called, "The Shout Out Song". This song is basically a shout out to a bunch of my friends. The final and personal favorite song I finished writing was "Freestyle Creation". It features Chirag Patel and my friend Josh Sheets.

Recording Session

This was my third visit with my mentor, I was finally ready to work the mixing board and actually record a band from scratch. I first had to set the studio up as usual which took about 40 minutes. I was really nervous to make a good impression on the band. They had paid money to the recording company and were expecting a great product. Luckily everything went great! I ended up feeling really comfortable around the band and everything went smoothly. I would have to say the actual mixing that goes on after everything is recorded is the hardest part. I wanted everything to sound absolutely perfect and I made sure it did. The entire process took over seven hours but in the end I gained a ton of experience got a big part of my final product done.

First Day

Today was the first day in the studio. I was extremely excited but not completely prepared for all the work that was about to be laid in front of me. I met my mentor, Robert McClure, and he began to show me around the studio. Our first stop was the mixing room, a sound proof room containing a huge mixing board and a wide range of equipment. I found the mixing board to be by far the most impressive piece of equipment in the studio. It contained 32 track sliders and dozens of features such as gain, phantom power, reverb and many buttons that I could not identify. Next we went out into the main recording room. There were three stations set up, a booth for the drums, a booth for the vocals and finally a guitar or keyboard booth.A band was going to arrive in 30 minutes and Robert began to show me how to set up for a recording session. This was a lot of work! Among other things, I was given the task of labeling each track slider, plugging in every mike and piecing together the drums to the bands preset likings. He told me that having the studio set up in advance was one of the main responsibilities.I spent the rest of the session primarily as a shadow to Robert. He would give me little task along the way and explain everything he was doing so that eventually I could implement it on my own.