Rock & Roll 101

June 27th, 2024

Shea is not coming to lessons today.

June 20th, 2024

Shea is unable to come today.

June 13th, 2024

Bruce came in instead of Shea, and we backed up Shea's song to a drive and then chatted about music.

June 6th, 2024

Shea went through her recording one last time and tweaked the flute and some other things, then we exported the file and ran it through the mastering site bandlab.com/mastering

May 30th, 2024

Shea sat at the controls and we made some tweaks to the mix, mostly increasing the volume of her vocals at one place.

May 23rd, 2024

Shea wasn't feeling up to lessons tonight.

May 16th, 2024

We recorded two vocal tracks in shaes lesson today. Next week I'm going to show her how vocal tuning works.

May 9th, 2024

Tonight we recorded an acoustic guitar part over Shea's song. We decided we'd redo the vocals next week.

They're not sure yet whether they want to continue lessons in July.

May 2nd, 2024

She brought her flute, and Bruce brought his electric. They had created a counterpoint part which we added in the instrumental sections of Shea's recording.

April 25th, 2024

We added drums to Shea's song, but then realized we had added them already later in the song.

We then talked about the arrangement of the song some more, and where to take the drums out, etc. I suggested she think of adding a solo instrument, maybe her flute? in the instrumental part.

April 18th, 2024

She isn't feel well today, so she cancelled.

April 11th, 2024

Here's the mix from today:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4p7fpu7bsdy8ump8svspc/shea-01_mix-1.mp3?rlkey=1onnr1ug7ld9kc9g6qtaoqi4n&dl=0

We added some drums and percussion sounds today.

April 4th, 2024

We added some bass parts and modified the percussion today in lessons.

March 28th, 2024

We continued with recording. I listened to two of her reference songs and explained what I was hearing in the arrangements. We then searched Freesound.org to locate some percussion sounds. We played around with their placement in her track before running out of time.

March 21st, 2024

We continued with our recording, first talking about bass and my approach to teaching it with the numbered scale one through six. We then talked about the role of 4 and 7 in a western-style scale. These two notes are added to the pentatonic to give it leading tones.

We then recorded pads and looked for sounds that suited the song.

I recommend she find a reference song that is an arrangement she likes so we can note instrumentation, style, etc.

March 14th, 2024

In Shea's lesson today we re-recorded the piano, set it to tempo, and then she laid a temporary vocal track down too.

March 7th, 2024

Today in Shea's lesson we recorded, first trying on piano, and then mic'ing the acoustic piano and recording there. We didn't have time to do any edits or punch ins.

February 29th, 2024

February 27th, 2024

Shea played through her song for me, and we talked about melody a bit, and arrangement ideas. I suggested she write our a chord chart for the song so we can begin recording it next week. Also, mark down the tempo, and anything else that will short our time to be recording next week.

February 15th, 2024

Shea will start Thursdays next week.

February 13th, 2024

We tried to just find our way getting started today, and I showed her around my Ardour music software a bit. We decided by the end that we would work on an actual song in the lesson time, so that she can see how the recording process typically works.