Project 1 Reflection 1 - Drums

It's been a long journey since the start of the project at week 1, many things have gone wrong throughout the process however everything has come together in the end. Issues with planning and team management have pushed the production of the project to the back burner for project 2. Managing the project has been a test of my skills, though it was easy to purvey my ideas to the group it was hard to get them to do the work without being there to guide them. We followed the original plan relatively well. Over the 7 weeks for project 1 we had 4 sessions in the studio and in the end had another 2 sessions during the time I was working on project 2. In reflection I feel that more time should have been taken into consideration for the vocals. Thankfully we had risk management in place to mitigate the trouble with the artist on the first recording session. Though this relied on Jordan to create a song out of nowhere, and it took a bit longer than we had planned and had to change the plan in accordance it was better than nothing at all. As testament to the ability of our team we soldiered on and created something that worked. This project has been a learning curve in a lot of ways, research in to rap and hip hop songs has helped me gain insight with a lot of things and especially into how to record good vocals. After recording the drum samples in the studio, I mixed them in with a Logic drum sample library to get a unique sound. After layering the sounds the samples were placed into Logic's Ultrabeat and mapped out to play the drum pattern. Ultrabeat is great because it allows you to easily automate velocity on midi tracks using the velocity/gates section. Image below is hi-hat velocity markers.

After some initial trouble with getting the drum samples off Morgan, I decided to do it myself and layered the studio tight kit samples in logic with the drum samples we recorded in the studio. Morgan eventually gave me the drum kit samples but I thought that the samples in logic were far superior in most ways except for the brightness of the snare and hi hats. So after bussing the drums into stereo I added the snare and hi hats from Morgans kit on another track And panned the snare 40 left and the hi hats 15 right to give a little bit extra width in the drums.

It was a huge relief to get the drums finished, as it was needed in order to move forward with the project.