July 21st and the last few days

So the last few days I have been working on getting good loops for the sax recordings that Elizabeth did. First, I tried it with Audition, but that went poorly. I got loops, but they sounded awful and I was really unhappy when I thought I would have to use these. Then Dr. Burg brought the macs down and we got some decent loops with the software on those machines. However, a few of the samples still had pretty noticeable clicks in the loop and I was still a little unhappy about it. Then Dr. Burg brought down SoundForge and I got working on that. I really was happy with that software. After figure out how to deal with a few problems I ran into, I got a good loop for all of the sax files. I'm pretty happy with them. There is still a little "fluttery" sound to one of the files, but I think that they are about as good as I will get with them. Elizabeth also recorded some slap-tongue samples, and we got all of that into the sampler in Reason. It is a pretty decent sound, and I'm pretty happy with it. Depending on how an actual song sounds with this sampler, we might want to add a medium length set of samples to the machine, but that probably isn't a big deal.

Yesterday, I stayed home because of some back issues, and I was hoping to get some of the sakai work I need to do done, but that didn't happen like I thought it would. I plan on getting those done with tomorrow if I can.

Also, Jason brought in his recording device today, so I think we all plan on going sound hunting in the afternoon to try and get some cool sounds to use in a sampler. Early this morning, before Jason came in, a few of us were discussing some interesting ideas we had for potential pieces we could play for the showcase. I thought that it would be really cool to record a bunch of sounds that we can make vocally, like beats and whistles and hums and anything else interesting we could think of, and form that into a song that we could play at the showcase. Elizabeth jumped onto that with her own idea of recording a bunch of sounds that we run into in our daily lives here at Wake Forest, and put all of those soudns into an interesting composition with perhaps a little bit of background music to keep it interesting. I feel that something like this would be the most interesting and unique idea that we could bring to the showcase. It would clearly display the point of the class, we could add in the cello, voice, sax, and quena recordings that we have and add them into the song, and we could end up with something that is truly interesting.

Anyways, that's what I've been up to lately!