Week 1

June 8th, 2011

The first day of the project was a bit overwhelming... I came in and was lectured on pitch, frequency and sound waves in unfamiliar softwares Reason and Sonar. My team was thrown into Reason, Sonar and a lot of technical difficulties. I remember being frustrated that the keyboard wasn't registering in Sonar and the sound were not working only to find out the speakers were not properly connected. It was challenging to learn all of the settings for Reason and Sonar because we were learning so quickly in order to catch up to the full-time students. I personally felt that the settings were not hard-fast rules. I felt like even if I remembered how to set everything up technology was not on my side. The truth of the matter is the first day was all trial and error. I left the lab enthusiastic for the next day to be easier.

June 9th

Today I worked alone and took cues from Erica and Elizabeth and watched youtube videos on Sonar. I also prepared for Friday's group session. Jordan helped me setup Sonar with Reason and I wrote down all the settings and sent it out to Erin and Percy to ensure that we didn't waste group time.

June 10th

The biggest feat was made when Erin and I recorded a track using vocals and keyboard. Erin came up with a melody and I sang on vowels. Our recording is very short and I fell flat, but I was happy we put something down. We asked Percy to listen to it and he thought that it was a step in the right direction to reach out final project. I am so proud of the team and how seamlessly we work together, although working with technology can be frustrating at times we feed off of each other and learn new things. Erin and I looked into Finale and we learned we can play our song into Finale. We had to learn this the hard way when we had Sonar and Finale up at the same time and Finale was playing a delayed playback of our piece this was very confusing but Dr. Burg cleared things up for us. Jason came in and talked to us about the pre-sets on Reason and how to make a drum beat. This was interesting and I learned about the things in a synthesizer. All in all the first week was not bad at all I learned a lot and can't wait to compose the final project.