July 7

Still sort of waiting on people to get to the same place. Everyone is finishing their reading and whatnot this morning, and I can't really start doing a lot of recording without some collaborative help. Today Erin and I started working on Lady Gaga's The Edgy of Glory, because we want to work more with recording audio, and it would provide an opportunity to record multiple layers of harmony. The musicians and I really want to do an acoustic arrangement, which would be fun for us, but we want to be sure not to leave out the comp sci majors. What I assume is that we'll work on the musicy stuff, and then have them help us get it all recorded and mixed down. That's how Jordan and I worked for Friday, and I think it went fairly well.
This afternoon I will track down Jordan and make him take a break to help me get my saxophone samples finished. I would like to experiment with the options on how to manipulate that sound, and what my options are.
When it comes to making synthesized instruments I am a little unsure how to decide which instruments we want. It's much easier to manipulate a sound to replicate something than it is to make decisions without any inspiration. When we're talking about virtual instruments that don't necessarily exist already, there is a pretty wide gray area. I think for non musicians this is somewhat daunting, but maybe even more so for musicians because we are so accustomed to pre-existing instrumentation. Hopefully when I start recording my saxophone samples I will have a clearer picture of what I will want.
It is also sort of tough to decide on instrumentation for a piece that doesn't exist. As we're all going to be creating different instruments, it's hard to tell at this point what sort of piece we will be creating. Will we have any melodic instruments? Will we have any percussive instruments? Will they all be string-like sounds? Will any of them be decidedly synth sounds? Without knowing this, composition is tough. Hopefully when we brainstorm on these questions we will be able to come up with a few instrument sounds that would go well together, and each group can work on one or two of these instruments.
I'm also waiting on more text to read. I tend to work exclusively on the chapter material when I get it, because it's not as fun as playing with the software so I like to get through it as quickly as possible. The problem with that though, is that I finish before the rest of the team and then am without any collaborators to work on any of our projects. This is probably not an issue in a classroom setting, but is a little tricky when we are relying on having other people around to help us get moving on various projects.
All in all, things are rolling along. I'm learning a TON about the software from all the reading and especially the covers we've done, so I'm excited to see what we create next.