Mentor Visit 2 (WR 17)

On Monday January 19th, I went on my second mentor visit. I met up with Jonathan at his studio in Dallas. When I arrived, Jonathan told me that today we would be working on a project for one of his clients. It was a latin/pop song and our task for the day was to record acoustic guitar. We started by setting up the mics and line checking the patches. Jonathan showed me so much that I did not know before like how to position the mics, what mics to use, how to get good levels, etc. He then grabbed his guitar and went to the live room and I got to run the studio. I was in charge of recording him play. One really valuable thing I learned was how to operate ‘punch-in recording’. Punch-in recording is basically starting recording the channel after the session is playing. I did not know how to do this prior, but I now do and will be using it a lot because of how handy it is.

While we were working, Jonathan mentioned that he would be out of town for the next two weeks because he is going to NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants). This is really cool to me because I've always wanted to go to NAMM and now I personally know someone that has gone, Jonathan even played at NAMM last year.

Research Survey (WR 16)

For part of my original work, I decided to do some research on what peoples music preferences are. I set up an online survey of 12 questions. The goal of the survey is to find out exactly how people listen to music, and why they listen to music. I asked questions such as, "What platform do you most frequently listen to music on?" or "What device do you most frequently listen to music on?" to find out specifically how most people listen to music. I also asked questions as to why people listen to music. An example would be "In a song, what is the most important to you?". I also asked some questions about how/why people follow bands/artists on social media.

Now all this information is great, but how does it help me? This information is going to help me gather real life information, and apply the results to my planned album release at the end of the year. For example, I am planning on making a music video for one of the songs on the album. I had no idea what kind of video to make, so I asked "In a music video, what is the most important to you?" and most people have been saying that they would rather see a storyline related to the song. This is just one example of how I am going to use the data and there will surly be many more uses for it.

Mentor (WR 15)

Over the break a lot of exciting things happened to me in regards to ISM. The biggest being that Jonathen Camacho from C-Factory Productions said yes to being my mentor! Jonathen is one of the best music producers in Dallas and I am very excited to get to work with him all year. He produces all kinds of music ranging from latin, pop, rock, and so much more. You can read more about Jonathen and C-Factory here (http://christianchavarria.wix.com/c-factoryproductions).

Another exciting thing that happened was that on this past Saturday, I got to visit my mentor for the first time. The first thing I experienced was Jonathen working with a client. They were in pre-production and had just created a scratch track. Once his client left, Jonathen then took the time to help me with some of my songs. We worked on mixing them and basically rebuilt them from the ground up. He showed me all the things I was doing great, and all the things I need to fix and improve on. All in all, this has been a great break and I got a lot of productive stuff done.