#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: