#14

Wadha Al Nabti
Music Production 9
22nd February 2014

Process Journal #14

My aim for this week is to listen carefully to all Mr. Ball has to say and to understand later on in my own time because I feel like he forgets to miss out on parts, but nonetheless he is the greatest arts teacher I've ever had. My aim for next week is to have no suicidal thoughts as Mr. Ball takes class time to explain knowledge and information because I'd rather learn it by reading it or doing it myself rather than have someone explain any information to me. This week firstly we were taught about Max Martin who is a behind the scenes type of guy that is in the music world who wrote 16 #1 top hits in the billboard which is apparently more than Micheal Jackson and barely anyone knows who he is. Max Martin rarely goes on any tv shows for interviews or anything making him really hard to get to and very hard to know anything about him. Next Mr. Ball showed us a mode, which is like a scale but you can start from any other key in the scale. Then he showed us the Top Gun Anthem (the movie with the young/handsome Tom Cruise) which has to do with modes, albeit lead us to Mr. Ball showing us another video of a solo guitarist who was declared an expert at the guitar playing some modes, his name is Joe Satriani. Before that he showed us a showdown between the karate kid playing the guitar against this satanic guitarist apparently. The next lesson we first listened to Love Lockdown - Kanye West, that resulted in the whole class going mental since this song is the best. Mr. Ball told us the song was an inspiration to introduce us to flexi-pitch (aka autotune) and we spent the rest of the class learning about microphones. Including dynamic microphones, which are used for people who speak in front of an audience and another microphone that looked like a rod used in TV's. We learnt that some microphones need phantom power to pick up sounds and that some microphones are ideal to pick up 360 degrees of noise while others aren't. Furthermore near the end of the lesson Mr. Ball taught us what exactly to do to each different microphone on the mixing board including the phantom power button. What didn't work in this lesson was the video of the Australian guy explaining how different microphones work, which was made by the company Shure (it makes microphones). These kind of videos kill me because they are so long. There is no feedback as we had nothing to show for ourselves as all we did was listen to Mr. Ball, albeit isn't that bad.  

Kanye's Love Lockdown: 

Joe Satriani playing normally: 

#13

Wadha Al Nabti

Music Production 9 

16th February 2014

Process Journal #13

This week we were asked to listen carefully to the teacher as the teacher introduced new chord progressions and the 1-8 chords. He told us to take it slow because we really needed to know the 1-8 chords by next year. My aim for this week is to understand the 1-8 chords system. Also my aim for the week is to know what the chord sequence is in a chorus of a song and calling them out by the 1-8 chord system. I honestly do not understand the 1-8 chord system and why the 1 from the 1-8 system can start from C, or D, or G, basically any key. Thank god I'm supposed to know this by next year. Furthermore we listened to The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and One Direction singing the same Beatle's song. The whole aim of listening to these songs were to find the chords and its progression in the chorus of these song. With the exception of the One Direction cover of The Beatles song "All You Need Is Love" in which we compared One Direction's cover with The Beatles'. We concluded that The Beatles' version mainly focused on the instruments while One Directions version mainly focused on the singers voice rather than the instruments. The next lesson we listened to different genre's of music featuring the singers Nas, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, The Beatles, etc. For next lesson I hope to be able to understand the 1-8 chord system and I am happy to inform that I have learnt all the keys on the piano, which was an aim I set for myself about 4 lessons ago. This lesson I didn't receive advice/feedback on any of my work since the whole week the only thing we did was listen to the teacher. Actually I did receive one piece of feedback, which was to stop being Mr. Ball's second banana, I was quite ashamed that he wasn't honoured that I was his second banana. This was mostly brought up because I was telling him why we didn't have a mixed genre of music to display in the first class, this resulted in me giving in a suggestion of a song for the second class, which is "Teenage Love Affair" by Alicia Keys.

Second banana definition: The most (or second most) important person in an organization

For example: (Luigi is the second banana, whilst Mario is the top banana)

Teenage Love Affair: