Recording Samples for Presentation/Demo

 Date of recording: 11/12/09

 Date of processing: 12/12/09

Total Duration: 3 hours


As part of my module (Computer Music Systems) I have to do a presentation on a piece of music creation/editing software. Aside from doing an overview of the system I have to perform a demonstration showcasing the abilities of the software. The Software I'll be presenting is Pro Tools 8 and I decided to do a short demonstration of its Elastic time/pitch functionality. Demo showing the ability to shift transients and pitch of a piece of a audio fluently with minimal (hopefully none) artifacts.
To showcase this functionality I had to record a piece of audio which has deliberate mistakes in them (this case timing). This was easily achieved by playing the guitar to a click track most of the time but ignoring it at other times.
I used a classical guitar for the recording. I used a large diaphragm condenser microphone running straight into the soundcard. The song in the recording is a extract from the animated movie called the 'Laputa: Castle in the Sky' by Miyazaki (Ghibli studios) and the composer is Joe Hisaishi.

I chose a suitable tempo (95bpm) and arming the click track I hit record. I played it through once and I stopped recording. Judging the length of the track I went back re-recording the track several times (to get the best performance). However I was unable to get a take I was happy with (excessive string noise, weak notes & chords etc) I decided to break it in halves and record the separately. Unfortunately, when it came to joining them together they sounded unnatural and forced. I took an hour off and decided to tackle it again. I took few takes the full length of the extract and finally I managed to get a recording I was happy with.
The only processing the guitar track needed was slight boost on the gain (roughly 4~5dB) just to bring it up to normal level (peaks hitting 0dB or just under). There was no compression applied (that will probably be done at the presentation).

For the drum sample which is supposed to accompany the guitar, my initial idea was to record acoustic drum and process it at the presentation but due to time constraints I used one of the drum loops inside Logic 8 to save time. I chose a sample that I liked and which I felt fitted the guitar track and I loaded it into Sample editor. Here I highlighted a snare (downbeat) and I shifted it so it will go out of time. Idea is to for me to correct this at the demo section of the presentation for Pro Tools using Elastic audio.

Once I was happy with the results (samples sounding good but out of time), I aligned next to each other to see how they sounded together. There is a snare misplacement early in the song plus guitar comes in little late. Drum is fine through rest of the song except the guitar goes way out of tempo near the end which will be corrected in Pro Tools.
I bounced the faulty track in WAV format and I transferred them to my stick drive ready for the presentation.