From A Student's Perspective: Working on the Production of 'O Berkley, Where Hart Thou?'

"Wow" is all I can say about my experience working on "Oh Berkley, Where Hart Thou?". I was excited going into this- but even more excited when it was over. The hands-on experience was like no other. I was able to hook up all our gear (one Millennia 8-channel pre, one Focusrite 4-channel pre, two Digi 8-channel pres, and all the Pro Tools gear- two 192's and the CPU). We delivered our microphone splitter the previous day and the theater crew had installed it into the audio system before we arrived. We brought a dozen nice studio mics to augment those supplied by the theater. I set up all the mics that were being used on stage, a couple room mics for the choir and four room mics to capture the audience. I was also responsible for striking the mics and setting them back up as needed while the show was progress. I actually felt like a big time sound guy. The show was at the Poway Theater for Performing Arts which is a beautiful venue. It was especially nice to get out of the classroom with some of my fellow students. We all got in on the action, the other students were running the video side of the gig. For me, this show was so helpful in learning about what it takes to put on such a big production. The time it takes to make everything run smoothly was a real eye opener. And thanks to all our hard work, preparation, and dedication to making every little detail perfect the show ran seamlessly. For any future students who have an opportunity to be part of something like this, jump on it. It is an amazing experience and everything I learned is invaluable.

Mike DiBernardo
Associate Degree in Recording Arts
The Recording Arts Center

RAD Students do Remote Record (and Video) at O Berkley, Where Hart Thou?

Four students in our Recording Arts Degree (RAD) program were tasked with the job of remote-recording and multi-camera video taping O Berkley, Where Hart Thou? at the Poway Center for Performing Arts this past weekend. The sold out theater enthusiastically cheered on an all-star line-up of San Diego's best country, folk, rock and bluegrass musicians as they recreated the Grammy Award winning soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Performed "Grand Ol' Opry style" around a shared microphone, legendary songs such as “Man of Constant Sorrow,” “In the Jailhouse Now,” “Oh Death,” and “I’ll Fly Away” received modern updates from the likes of host Jeff Berkley and Calman Hart (a.k.a. Berkley Hart), Steve Poltz, Gregory Page, Shawn Rohlf & the 7th Day Buskers, Dennis Caplinger, Robin Henkel, Lisa Sanders, Jeffrey Joe Morin, Robin Adler, Cathryn Beeks, Matt Silva, Tom Brosseau, The Lovebirds, and John C. Reilly and Friends.

TRAC students Colin Tedeschi, Jorge Caballero, Danny Trujillo and Mike DiBernardo brought seven video cameras and a full 24-channel Pro Tools HD system with them to the theater to document the night's performance. Arriving at 2:00 p.m. the day of the show, the audio recording system included our own 40-channel Jensen transformer-isolated mic splitter which gave us independent control of microphone gain for each channel. Studio West Engineer Henrique Landim provided assistance with the audio setup and recording.

On the video side, we set up five HD cameras around the theater, including one in the balcony, two in the sound booth, one in the house, and one on the stage. We also had a roaming HDV camera backstage and two stationary cameras hidden on the stage. Students placed and operated the cameras guided by editor/shooter and TRAC ally Kigh Sturdevan. The students who participated in this remote project will be graduating from our Recording Arts Degree program in about three weeks, each student earning an Occupational Associates Degree in Recording Arts. This hands-on project is part of their requirement to complete the program and we're excited to hear the final mix with the multi-cam edit. Stay tuned for links to a few cuts from this show - we'll post them once they're finished!

TRAC Alum News - Alfonso Wong Completes Project for Daniel Obst Advertising

We recently received an inquiry from Michael Krewitsky at Professional Sound and Music, who was looking for a qualified and polite Pro Tools user / student to help him with a request from a client. Daniel Obst Advertising wanted to create a continuous-play reel of their most popular advertising jingles to be featured on their website. Alfonso Wong, having demonstrated his skill and professionalism on several other off-site projects, was a natural choice for the job. Here's what he had to say about it:

The agency had all of the sessions built in Digital Performer; I bounced them into Pro Tools multiple mono so there were 2 tracks, left and right. We used the workspace to audition all the tracks he wanted to use and then we dragged them into the regions list of a new session. I wrote down the names of all of the songs and gave Dan a copy so he could think about the order he wanted them in. I later transferred all of his sessions to my hard drive so I could work on them at home. The next time we met I had arranged the songs and done edits on them, and he had some additional editing and ordering requests. I cross-faded the end of some jingles so that they would start on the first beat of the next jingle, and then Audiosuite-ed the levels of all the jingles so they would all be at the same level. I used two stereo tracks because he had some jingles that faded in while others faded out. Then I made a master fader track, added a brickwall limiter and dither to it, bounced out the reel and converted it into a .wav and an mp3. I then transferred the session that I had created on my hard drive over to Dan's hard drive so he could have all of the edits and everything in the region list just in case he wanted to switch things around. We ended up with a 5-minute reel, which Dan seemed pleased with.

And here's what the client had to say about Alfonso:

Delightful, professional, blazing fast, exceeded expectations...Alfonso is a contributor, not just a button pusher.

Congrats, 'Fonz! We're proud of you! Keep up the great work!

Listen to the reel here.

Countdown to the Degree Program - A Pictorial

We're very excited for January 9, 2012, when we will welcome 9 students to The Recording Arts Center for a 10-month Associate Degree Program in Recording Arts! We'll be posting 1 photo per day to show you all what we're doing to get ready...follow us on Twitter at @TRACSanDiego to see the pics!

Pro Tools 10 classes start on January 7, 2012!

We're excited about all the new features included in PTX! Here are just a few of them...

• The option to use 32-bit floating point processing
• Multi-format audio and multi bit-rate audio in the same session
• Significantly improved audio cacheing via RAM - allows for record and playback from network drives, raids, and previously unsupported USB drives
• Realtime fades and the integration of stereo interleaved files
• Regions are now referred to as "clips" throughout the program
• Avid Channel Strip plug-in included on all Pro Tools X systems
• Dynamics and EQ processors from the renowned Euphonix System-5 Console
• Clip-based gain, up to 36db change per clip in the edit window
• Improvements in Audio Suite functionality (handles now included when processing and multiple Audio Suite plug-in windows open at a time)
• Built-in iTunes and Sound Cloud support

We've scheduled an accelerated session of Pro Tools training for the first of the year, starting with Pro Tools 101 on January 7 - 9. Click here to see the full schedule or here to register!

4 Basic Tips For A Better Recording

Have the entire band tune with the same tuner
Tuners can vary in their accuracy, so having the entire band tune with one tuner is a great way to ensure A = A for everyone. A hand-held tuner is about $30 bucks, but in a pinch Pro Tools comes with “TL InTune”, a plug-in tuner that can suffice. Have your musicians tune every 30 minutes to be sure tracks stay consistent.

Tune the drums before recording
Drums can – and should – be tuned. It isn’t difficult to Google your drum kit model and find out the “default” note to tune each drum. Drum Tuners can cost as little as $60 bucks and can stop a $700 kit from sounding like a $200 one. Without a tuner, drums can be hand-tuned by ear and feeling the amount of tension around the circumference of the drumhead.

Record to a click track
A performance that’s very close to perfect can easily be edited to perfection with built-in Pro Tools editing power to snap the performance together. Beat Detective and/or Elastic Time can help maintain the groove of drums and align the beats with the click and tempo meter. Then Elastic Time can be used to warp the bass performance to the drums. Basic editing – simple copy and pasting or nudging – can always be used to ensure the entire band hits on a downbeat or finale of a track.

Use a DI with your guitar and bass
Some amps don’t translate well through any microphone. Recording through a DI allows you to mix amp modelers like Eleven or Chrome Tone with your amp signal to beef it up. This helps to minimize the bleed from other instruments or the buzz from a noisy amp.

Brandon Papsidero
Engineer, Studio West of San Diego
Instructor, "Signal Processing with Waves"

Congratulations to Our First Avid Media Composer Certified User!

Michael Gervais, a TRAC student from Los Angeles, recently attended our Avid Media Composer Certification course. At the end of 5 intensive days he took the Certification Exam and passed it with flying colors! Congrats, Michael!

How to Clean Up Drum Recordings

This article outlines a few ways drum tracks can be cleaned up and better prepared for a mix.

Kick
Placing a gate on your “kick in” microphone (the mic inside the kick drum) is useful, but many times the snare still bleeds into the track. Gating the kick in track to open and close off a side chain input can fix this problem easily.

If you have a subkick track (using the Yamaha Subkick microphone), make a mono aux send from that track into in internal bus. If you don’t have a subkick track, duplicate your kick in track and create an aux send from that. Be sure that this track doesn’t contain any snare bleed using an EQ if needed.

On the original kick in track, use a C1 Gate plug-in, or another gate that has a sidechain option. Select the internal bus that correlates to the aux send previously made.

Now the kick in track will only open when the gate is triggered by the alternate track, and since that track has less snare bleed than the kick in track, the snare bleed no longer comes through the gate.

Toms
The toms are notoriously problematic when it comes to bleed from cymbals and snares. Using a gate with a sidechain can be helpful, but sometimes manually editing the track is the best option. Solo each track and gently create fade ins and fade outs around tom hits, making sure the transition between hits is natural. Any unnatural side effect from the editing should be avoided.

Cleaning up tom tracks will help give the cymbals (from the overhead and rooms) much better dimension and clarity. It will also allow for significant compression on the toms without changing the overall snare and cymbal levels in the mix.

Time-aligning tracks
When a drum is hit, the direct microphone picks up the signal first, and the overheads pick up the signal just 3 to 4 milliseconds afterward, since the sound takes longer to arrive.

For a mix with significant overhead level, nudging your snare and tom tracks just enough to align with the overhead signal might improve the sound of the mix, just by correcting small phase correlations. Zooming into the tracks can confirm the measurement in milliseconds.

You may want to try another stylistic technique, adjusting the timing of the room microphones for effect. How do they sound aligned directly with the overheads, versus 20 milliseconds later? Or 40?

Brandon Papsidero
Engineer, Studio West of San Diego
Instructor, "Signal Processing with Waves"

VENUE D-Show is in the house!

VENUE D-Show has arrived at TRAC!

VENUE 110V and 210V classes start on November 1st, 2011.

Mark and Gary are at Avid HQ in the Bay Area this week to pick up another console, the VENUE Profile, so we'll soon have two full VENUE systems here in San Diego for your hands-on instruction. Find out more about Venue classes at TRAC here.

Avid Media Composer and Pro Tools for Game Audio

Avid Media Composer - TRAC is now an official testing location

Jesse just finished up another session of Avid Media Composer, leading his students through exercises on capturing media, enhancing audio, creating motion effects and more. He was also able to administer the certification exam at the end of the course, since TRAC is now an authorized testing location (and, for a limited time, we can offer the exam at no extra charge!)

Pro Tools 130 - not just for Gamers anymore!

Anyone interested in improving their editing techniques in Pro Tools will benefit from this class. If you've taken Pro Tools classes with us in the past, you know that we run at a pretty fast pace to get through all the material covered in each book. While Pro Tools 130 does expose you to the workflows involved in producing audio elements for the video game environment, much of the class focuses on editing techniques. This makes it a perfect way to reinforce the Pro Tools editing skills you learned in 101, 110, and even 201.

TRAC Alumni Do Full Live Record for Johannes Linstead

On June 22, TRAC alumni (and current Studio West interns) Hunter Levy, Henrique Landim, Joel De Witt and Alfonso Wong set up and ran a live sound session for spanish guitar virtuoso Johannes Linstead. The guys ran the FOH (front of house sound) and did a full live record of Johannes' show with Pro Tools HD. They took one Digi 192 that had 16 inputs and 16 outputs, 2 Digi pres (for a total of 16 pre amps), a 4-channel headphone amp (for monitoring), a few select mics from Studio West's mic locker, four DI (direct input) boxes for the guitars and bass and a Mac Pro Computer.

Here's what they had to say about the gig:

Recording live shows has an added edge to it because you can't afford to have anything go wrong during the record. There are no re-takes or punch-ins. You are also in an environment that can lend itself to surprises! For example, feeback in the house sound would mean you have feedback in your recording as well. In this case, we were recording a full band all standing within a few feet of each other, so mic placement was very important to reduce bleed from other instruments as much as possible. This record went very smoothly, and I think everyone had a lot of fun and worked really well together. -- Hunter Levy, TRAC alum and Studio West Intern Program Manager

For this live record we utilized a nice selection of mics from Studio West, including SM81s for cymbals, SM57s for snare and congas, a spaced pair of AKG 414s as drums/percussion overheads, a couple of KMS 105s as audience mics, a Sennheiser 421 for the bass and a SM58 for the vocals. We also utilized a couple of JDIs for the acoustic guitars and a Countryman DI to get a clean signal from the bass. All the microphones were plugged into a splitter, which sent the mic signal both to the live mixer and to Pro Tools. The live performance was recorded through a couple of Digi pres into a Pro Tools HD9 system. The Pro Tools HD rig (Digi pres, 192, Mac Pro, Headphone amp, etc.) was set up at one of the corners of the stage, behind black curtains that separated it from the backstage area, and was only illuminated by the computer screen and one blue lamp, so we dubbed this area "The Blue Room". After setting everything up and doing the mic and sound check we were able to press "record" and enjoy Johannes' amazing show. I was really impressed with the group's ability to tell the stories of the places they'd traveled through their music, making us feel like we were actually in those places as they were playing. All the band members were very nice to us and seemed pretty happy with the gig, not only because of the enthusiastic audience response but because of the sound quality, which made us proud of a job well done. It was a really enjoyable experience for me as a live music enthusiast and as an aspiring Recording Engineer! -- Henrique Landim, TRAC alum and current Studio West intern

I really enjoy live sound so it was a great experience to set up for the show as well as record it. The musicians were all very easy going and extremely talented so it was great working with them. Johannes was also kind enough to give each of us a signed copy of his CD. -- Joel De Witt, TRAC alum and current Studio West intern

Congratulations to Our Newest Pro Tools 9 Post Production Experts!

Congratulations are in order for Martin Fitrzyk and Sal Agostino, our two most recent Pro Tools Expert Certification graduates. Both Sal and Martin completed the 310-level Post Certification in Pro Tools version 9.

(Pictured at right, L-R: Sal Agostino, TRAC Instructor Mark Kirchner, Martin Fitrzyk)

Sal is a long-time TRAC alum who started his classes with us back in August of 2007. He is the Media Studios Supervisor for audio and video at Sea World here in San Diego and he has been putting his Pro Tools chops to good use on new summer shows such as One Ocean, Believe, and Blue Horizon.

Martin is an independent sound designer, post production editor and production sound recordist based in Los Angels. Having composed music for years, Martin is no newbie to audio production. Recently, however, he's been using the skills acquired in his post certification training to land jobs in film and television commercial work.

TRAC Goes Video

Mark, Gary and Jesse retuned from Avid HQ recently...a little tired, a little battle-worn, but all proudly waving their Media Composer Instructor certificates! Which means...TRAC will begin offering video editing classes in April 2011!


Avid Media Composer is the industry standard video editing application used in making Hollywood film and television shows..and now you can use it t home. If you've wanted to learn the art of video editing, this comprehensive 5 day class covers all the fundamentals. And as a registered TRAC student you can purchase a full-featured copy Avid Media Composer software for $295!

Pics and Tunes from Audio Recording Techniques

For the last round of Audio Recording Techniques we recruited the talent of TRAC Alum Sarah Dorrian, who sang and played guitar as students and interns from Studio West learned about micing, routing, patching and more. Listen to her track here. Next, they were joined by our "house band" (Peter Dyson on drums, Henrique Landim on bass, Hunter Levy on guitar and vox) who covered The Undertones' "Teenage Kicks". Listen.

News from NAMM

Peter and Mark visited NAMM yesterday expecting smaller crowds...only to find the place was still packed! Mark took a beta version of Avid's new User Certification Exam and got through the 100 questions in 30 minutes (the bar has been set!). Avid's plan is to redesign the certification process so both the video and audio sides of the house follow the same rules...we'll be posting news here and on the site about the new criteria and new levels of certification, so stay tuned!

TRAC Alum Records Debut EP at Studio West

TRAC Alum Hunter Levy is the singer/guitarist of San Diego-based heavy rock band Chanauk, who recorded their debut EP in Studio A of Studio West last week. The band chose engineer and TRAC instructor Kellogg Boynton to record and mix the project, based on his reputation and extensive Pro Tools expertise. Here’s what Hunter and the band had to say about the recording process:

“While most engineers use a direct signal for recording, Kellogg utilized a collection of microphones that gave me a great sound - big, growly and thick, it really provides a solid foundation for our songs.” -Rob Jones, bassist

“The best equipment combined with Kellogg’s knowledge at the helm enabled me to really dial in great clean and overdriven tones. This was definitely the most comfortable and non-intrusive recording experience I’ve ever had.” -Tyler Alvord, guitarist

“Kellogg was a very compassionate and welcoming engineer. It really helped having an engineer that understands the difficulty of having to record first out of the whole band. I also didn’t expect to be able to get such a great sound from my kit, which is optimized more toward a live setting.” -Nic Gentilella, drummer

“I love recording guitars at Studio West because they always turn out professional, especially compared to recording at home. You know you’re at an awesome studio when the studio owner’s wife brings you pastries in the morning.” -Hunter Levy, singer/guitarist

This Holiday Season...

...is in full swing! TRAC is celebrating 5 fantastic years of training and our home base, Studio West, is about to turn 40!

This past Friday, Our Man Jesse got the chance to watch a live set by Plain White T's in Studio A (that's him in the back row, 3rd from left). Here's how it went:

The band performed a 3-song acoustic set for an intimate gathering of 40 fans, closing with their biggest hit, "Hey There Delilah". The session was also streamed live over Slacker Radio and recorded for a potential future broadcast.

The five-member band brought in three acoustic guitars and a ukulele, and shakers and tambourines for the percussionist. All of the instruments and voices were recorded in to Pro Tools HD 8 at 24 bit/96Khz and returned to Studio A's SSL 4064E Console for mixdown. Each vocalist sang through an SM7b microphone except for lead singer Tom Higgenson, who sang through a U87 into a Teletronix LA-2A. Every microphone was routed through a Neve 1073 Preamp before being sent into Pro Tools.

Check Studio West's site for more photos and info!

TRAC alum returns to help fellow students

Dan Stelter, who joined us for several Pro Tools classes, Audio Recording Techniques (ART), Signal Processing with Waves and The Art of Mixing, will come back in this week to play for our latest group of ART students. The students will prep Dan's session, practice micing techniques and routing, and track some tunes. Stay tuned for photos!

TRAC catalog now available for download

Click here to download a .pdf version of our catalog, or give us a call at 858 592 0556 and we'll snail mail a hard copy to your door!

Classes added for October

Additional sessions of Pro Tools 210M and Pro Tools 220 have been added to the schedule for October....

If you got your Operator Certification in Pro Tools 6 or 7, PT220 is the course you need to get up to speed with version 8! We'll be meeting October 29 & 30 to discuss both Music Production and Post Production topics.

And if you're looking to get your Pro Tools Operator certification quick, we put another PT210M on the schedule for October 26 - 28 so we still have room for you!