Saturday 14 March 2009

Break Starts

I got my pre-March Break stuff wrapped up without much incident or injury. Our school is doing Footloose for the musical this year. Hello gay 80s plastic pop. I am getting into the idea of recording the kids singing their songs, using my Pro Tools-equipped laptop. They are working really hard, and the music is quite challenging to learn, so getting a quality recording rather than the traditional "videocamera one with crowd noise all through it" recording would be awesome.
Friday I took my laptop in, but only got the music teacher playing "Holding Out For A Hero" in a fairly distracted fashion (he was directing the harmony girls, who are learning their parts) and the girl who is learning the lead melody wasn't there, so he sang part of that too. He wasn't near the mic, so it didn't pick up well (though him flipping pages and telling the girls where the rests fell did) so I took the laptop home and tried singing the melody of this teenage girl/Bonnie Tyler song written by Jim Steinman to give the recording a lead vocal until I can get all the girls to do their thing. Pretty funny to have me singing it. Wrong octave, wrong gender. It's here.
Another good thing is that continual and annoying problems with my laptop and the way I had Pro Tools configured on it pushed me to finally open the instruction manual and learn a couple of things to set differently so it would work much better. I thought I was allocating lots of resources for Pro Tools, but actually I was allocating all the resources just for the effects, most of which I wasn't even using. Toning down the computer resources allocated to effects made the lap top record and playback much more smoothly.

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