Well, I’m slowly getting to grips with this blog site. Going to be doing some extra customisation to it in the next couple of weeks if/when I can find time. Hopefully that’ll attract more people into reading this. With that out of the way I’ll start.
The first semester of my second year started this week (thank god!). A very bizarre reaction from a student when commenting on actual work, many of you may think. However for those reading this, you have not got the faintest idea of how long I’ve been itching to get plans into motion. One of the songs I want to perform live in my “Digital Performance Applications” module I’ve been wanting to do for the best part of two years. Just that I’d not encountered Ableton Live prior to looking into this module.
Live is a really powerful and in some ways a unique bit of software, by where a musician can control many different aspect of a piece of music to such a degree that he/she could compose an entirely new piece of music on the fly. Unlike trying to learn Logic last year, Live requires a completely different mindset to learn it because it’s a totally different way of controlling music. I’ve grown up with the likes of Cubase and Logic that are well respected professional DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations), and the manipulation of audio is always post-production. Though the whole concept behind Live is that all these processes to audio etc. are done... well...er, Live. So that’s what I’ve been doing all this weekend, consigning myself to my room with my head buried in a book or watching tutorials on Youtube to get a visual idea on what to do. Intensive. Oh and expensive too. I’ve sunk (quite a substantial) amount of summer earnings into buying yet more gear to control all the bits I’ve got already. Some not quite as obvious as they may seem, a dance mat being one. Don’t ask, it’ll all become apparent if I can get a couple of people to film my performance and show the people back home what I’ve been dreaming of for the last 6 months. OOooh I’m so hyped about it!!
That particular project I know is going to soak up most of my free time, however I’ve got other projects to knuckle on down with. One of which is revisiting the mind sapping mathematics behind recording music that I had to look into last year. It’s intriguing, then again so is staring at a sodding huge crack in the floor of the Tate Modern and wondering if that’s subsidence, or just another shit excuse of art. Well I do learn something from this but it seems rather overkill, even I with a computing kind of mind can’t find a real-world application for it. It almost seems like electrical physics, for the sake of electrical physics. Suppose the spin off from this particular module, drawing up plans for a DIY studio for £18k is going to be a nice little venture.
My last music based module is going to be learning to grasp the juggernaut of the DAW world, Pro Tools. If trying to learn one application wasn’t hard enough already. And from what I’ve seen and played with so far, I don’t like it. It feels clunky to work with, it seems like there are so many long-winded work arounds that other applications have one button or shortcut for. Though once again it’s good to know the ins and outs of it, as many studios have Pro Tools installations. Apart from the cumbersome way to get stuff done in the program (allied to a woeful MIDI support - so controlling my outboard synths are an almost no-go) there’s one massive reason why I object to Pro Tools. For some bastardised reason the guys at Avid behind Pro Tools this have decided that only their own manufactured soundcards and other peripherals are the only hardware that is going to work with their precious creation. WHAT THE HELL! Let me put this into context it’s like Sony turning round one day and saying “from now on, Sony Playstation 3s will only work with Sony Plasma TVs”, so basically screwing over the consumers that want that product. Come on Avid, even Apple one day woke up and saw that integration for all was the way forward.
This brings me on neatly to my last module of this semester, my one and only Film Tech module. Here I’ll be learning how to edit on Avid’s own professional, and again renowned editing software for film. I’ve yet to look at the program itself, but what irks me already over this particular assignment is what we’ve been tasked to do. The objective is to create a 30 second trailer for a film. Seems simple enough I’m sure. However the big twist is that the trailer has to be concocted from five totally separate films with the goal of trying to integrate the different clips seamlessly. OK I can cope with that. But wait there’s more! The five films are of completely different genres;
- The Harder they Come - 1972 film starring the singer Jimmy Cliff, plot focuses on racial oppression and the criminal ring associated with marijuana production
- Hot Fuzz - 2007, legendary comedy with Simon Pegg as a copper in a rural English village
- Rear Window - 1954 Hitchcock film with typical Hitchcock suspense, paranoia, murder combined with a slightly creepy leniency towards spying on neighbours in a voyeuristic fashion... OK.
- Sleuth - 1972 film with Michael Caine, couldn’t quite grasp the plot on wikipedia. There is some murder game in which some guy gets shot but doesn’t and comes back to play another murder game on the guy that supposedly shot him, but he shoots the other guy again only to find out that the murder game wasn’t a game at all... confused? So am I.
- Quills - 2000, a periodical costume film set in France post-revolution (a bad start for any film in my opinion). Something about this guy banged up in an asylum that from what I can work out writes literotica and gets it to a publisher via Kate Winslet. Kate has some sex somewhere in there, winds up dead in the washing basket where she works, only to be found by her blind mother. The porn guy gets his tongue cut out, as his health deteriorates he dreams of having sex with Kate’s corpse and resorts to using faeces as a form of ink... and I stopped reading the synopsis there.
So a very random selection of film that I’ve got to sit painfully through and whittle down to 30 secs. Many having the weirdest story-lines I have ever come across. Making even The Clockwork Orange seem like a fairly nominal plot that you’ll be forgiven for thinking was tomorrow’s Eastenders episode. WHAT SADISTIC PRICK CAME UP WITH THIS MODULE! And I’m not finished yet on my rant about film.
Coming full circle on my Avid blast earlier, I’m going to now take aim at the people in the film industry. OK in music we are a fairly laid back kind of crowd that really don’t care what tools you use so long as you use them well. Indeed most of the time not what the tools were intended for. However in the brown-nosed world of film buffs, it does matter what you use. Oh we were well informed of how people where considered inferior and a joke because they had honed their craft on Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro, as opposed the halo topped Avid program. This is just abysmal if this is how that industry works, how on earth does it intend on producing content for an ever increasing media hungry world if they shut the door on prospective employees based on what they have and haven’t worked with. In all honesty most of the skills required for editing can be universally applied to all software and OS platforms.
The more I look at film, the more I hate it. It reminds me so much of why I hated art lessons at school. It’s vague and wooly, there seems to be almost no logic applied to anything despite a vast plethora of ‘rules’ which can be freely broken. This is why musicians are so much better, we are tolerant class of artists who use anything to make our work, with a degree of science and theory behind our actions. Music isn’t subjective art, it’s a subjective science. With that I’ll now happily dive into my up and coming mathematics lectures with gusto and a smile on my face.
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