Point Blank Music School: Week 5 + Masterclass 4+5

Week 5: Arrangement and Vocal

• Recording Arrangements
• Automation: editing, recording/overdubbing
• Arrange view essentials, fixed grid
• Editing audio, consolidation, Red drums, fades
• Editing midi
• Free 3rd party plug ins: T.A.L/NI Kore Player
• Vocal samples and recording vocals

Week 5 is coming to an end, but this has got to be the most important week so far and the culmination of the last four weeks curriculum. Moving from Ableton's session view to arrangement view marks an important step towards the a finished track. It's where the skeleton of the track in progress is constructed and the track starts to come together. 

Apart from the addition of editing vocal, there has not been so much new knowledge and technical challenges to deal with this week, but instead it was about applying the skills learned and record the clips into an actual composition. I really enjoyed this process and still learned nifty tricks along the way to smoothen the transition. 

For this week there's another home assignment, where I had to create 5 tracks (one 32 bar, the rest just 16 bars) using vocals in different ways to demonstrate having understood the concepts of e.g. beat to midi, vocal to midi and time stretching. This was actually a lot of fun, forcing me to think creatively and work in a different way than I was used to before. You can listen to all my five tracks below:

Masterclass 4+5

As you might remember, last week the instructor had a poor internet connection, so this week there was a double masterclass for 2 hours. While that sounds like a long period of time, I can't recall a lecture/masterclass pass so fast as this one did. Freddy Cuin again spent a good amount of time answering the questions from the participants and showed us cool tricks that were not discussed in the self-study part of the course. Particularly features like "delete time" or "add silence" that I didn't know about before, are going to completely change the way I work in Ableton. 

More info on the course I am taking: CLICK HERE (via Point Blank).
Also visit Point Blank to see all their programs and offerings: www.pointblanklondon.com