Saturday, March 03, 2007

Texas - Day 2 (Waco)

I made it to Waco. Got in Friday morning about 1:30am. Checked into my room but couldnt fall asleep until 3am. It was possibly the coffee that was consumed in route from Austin to Waco.

Yesterday was a fun day. The conference/intesives began. www.beepcon.com So much to learn. There are a few people here who are genuises (genius to me probably means a much bigger nerd to you.)

Info from Yesterday
The Workings of Synthesizers - What Tone Ocilators are, what Filters do, how the Amplifier fits into the signal path, the purpose and abilities of Envelope generators, how to use their attack, delay, sustain, and release (you can also assign Envelope generators to the filters if you're interested.) Then we got a bit into LFO's (low frequency modulators) which are really sweet, then onto Low Pass and Hi Pass filters and Filter resonance. We concluded this session ended with us combining different ocilators and creating some of our own sounds. A lot of fun.

Reason (session 1)- Reason is basically a software prgram emulating a lot of rack MIDI gear. A lot of rack MIDI gear is expensive and takes up a lot of room. With reason, you don’t run out of gear or space (unless you overload your CPU.) It allows you to create loops, use samples, and make a lot of cool sounds that would cost a lot of money to make if you didn't have the software capabilitie. This is a cool program.

Building your sound library - This session was listening to 4 really smart* people (*see genius in paragraph 2) talk through how they build their sound library that they use for creating the music. All 4 of these guys had a lot to say. Great ideas... dont want to bore you...

Dinner - had dinner with Jack from David Crowder Band. Very nice guy. Extremely laid back.

Ableton Live - Program similar to reason. I have never used it before but I think I could like it more than Reason. Seems to have a bit more features I would use and it also will run"with" Reason and work inside of it (or vice versa - did I spell that right - i have nevr typed it before)

51 moments in the history of the keyboard - this was way cool. We were basically ran through the history of the keyboard and took a survey view of how the keyboard has developed since the first musical telegraph in 1874 (invented by Elisha Grey - in case you were wondering.)

Ended the night with a survey of microphones but that didnt start til 10pm and I was wiped so I don't have much from that. I sing into microphones... and they work.

Sleep - sleep was good. I like rest. The 3 guys in my room are cool and they dont smell bad so all is well.

Maybe more later.

Shannon, I haven't gotten any thumbs up yet but I feel like today is the day.

Diana, I love you.

Jeff, well, I love you too...

until next time,

-Jason

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I want to jump in the SHOWER! Ah, the memories. Thanks for getting me a towel, and bookmarking your blog on my laptop. See ya soon! And get me the details for April!!!!!! And some of your worship stuff!!!!!!!

-Vinny AKA Aliasunknown

Kylah Jean said...

ok, so that was awesome the whole workshop for synth's... I just felt like I was in my acoustic and hearing aid classes. CRAZY that every word made complete sense. See there is a reason I left raleigh to go to baltimore, so I could understand your blog more! hope all is well. you all are very missed. I hope to come see you all soon! tell your GORGEOUS wife hello!