Check out this sound replacement project that i worked on this previous semester. Im really happy with how it came out. Full credits below!

THE INCREDIBLES (City Omnidroid Cutscene)
MP421 Sound Replacement Project

Michael Moss - Bob
Leanne Ungar - Helen
Jannae Garcia - Violet
Justice Mitchell - Dash
Archie Brewton - Frozone

Tangelene Bolton: Score
Ryan Masecar: Additional Editing and Mixing
Me: Sound Design, Editing, Engineer, Mixer and Producer

Special thanks to Alfonse Enriquez, Gary Lazzara, Jonas Margraf and Inspector Pizza for helping me book extra studio time in the EPD studios to do the recordings. I do not think i would have been able to really plow through it if you guys didn’t lend a hand

This project was really special to me because i got to work with so much people. From those who did my ADR, to my friends who helped me book studio time. A big part of what i liked about school this semester was that the environment got more and more collaborative. It feels good to be involved with people who are like minded and who are willing to put in the time and patience to work with you and help your vision manifest itself into a tangible form such as this.

My personal favorite aspect of this clip is the ADR. everyone did such a great job playing their parts and were so enthusiastic to do so.

anyway. i hope you enjoy it as much as i did! This was truly a labor of love on my end.

31 December 2 Permalink

Did a mashup for my DSP class a couple of months ago. Decided to revisit it and do some editing and tweaking.

SONGS:
STEP BY STEP - NKOTB
LOVE YOU DOWN - INOJ
PRAY - MC HAMMER
THA CROSSROADS - BONE THUGZ N HARMONY
GONNA MAKE YOU SWEAT - C+C MUSIC FACTORY.

Sequenced and Mixed in Ableton Live
Sound Design and Editing in Peak Pro and Soundhack.
Additional Mixing and Editing with Pro Tools
Caveman Mastering with Pro Tools

This goes out to all you people who grew up in the 90s!

21 February 2 Permalink

My one and only gig in Berklee and probably the most complicated set up that i have done in my whole life!

This was my DSP final project live at the Berklee Performance Center for Singers Night. 15 Nov 2011.

Andreas Russo - Electronics, Vocal Manipulation (Csound/MaxMSP)
Ernie McMillan - Drums
Camilla Charlesworth - Bass
AA Enriquez - Electronics, Samples (Live)
Me - Vocals, Guitar

LIVE PERFORMANCE NOTES:

Before anything, the voice that you hear is my raw voice convolved with a reversed guitar instrument that i made a couple of semesters back using Kontakt.

Implementation of the gig was sort of complicated from the Electronics standpoint. I did not want to stand there with a laptop and just launch samples. So i had to find a way to have everything “Live” so that its really flexible since i had a drummer and a bassist. My rock roots always make me want to have that “live magic”

With the help of Andreas, we were able to figure out that the Csound opcode i used for the original piece (PVSCROSS) was able to take live input. So we would just have him take 2 inputs and convolve it in a Csound patch that he wrote.

He then wrote a Max/MSP patch that utilizes the waveform~ and buffer~ which basically records an audio track and then enables you to manipulate them if you want to stutter, freeze and do phase vocoding. He also embedded Csound within that patch using the Csound~ so that everything is clean and utilized well.

We had 2 Laptops, one running Csound/Max and one running Live. We agreed to have a stereo out of BOTH instead of having individual outputs so there was an awful lot of internal routing involved with the process.

We had the Microphone (SM57) come in to Laptop 2 which is Andreas’ machine running Max and Csound and AA’s reverse guitar samples (played lthrough Live’s Sampler) in Laptop 1 that then made the convolved voice, WHICH THEN went back to AA’s laptop running in a different channel.

A Seperate channel for the reverse guitar patch was then enabled in the 2nd half of the song when the band comes in. we chose to do this over a pre fader send because it enabled more flexibility in terms of the control surface that we used live.

Everything came back in an Ableton Live set in AA’s computer where we were doing balances and had sends set up for on the fly ambience. Andreas’ electronics were coming back on a separate channel so we can balance the convolved voice with the rest of the electronics well.

Andreas was using a WiiMote and an iPad running TouchOSC to control parameters of his Csound patch and the custom Max/MSP performance patch that he wrote.

Took us a while to figure out the routing. We were debating on using 2 computers or just one. We did not want to exhaust the processing of the machines since convolution at very low buffer sizes might tend to crash programs so we did not want to risk it. Andreas was using his Mbox3Pro and AA was using a MOTU 828MkII.

I decided to add guitar just for different timbres of harmonic content.

Choosing Camilla for bass and Ernie for drums was really a great move. the vibe and playing was everything that i expected when i had a vision of how this performance was going to go down.

AA stepped up a lot. He really listened and tried to make sense of the internal routing and micro management of the parts balance wise (and did automation to the sends while we were performing. and all of it while playing the part of that reverse guitar instrument. I thought that was quite a task.

BACKGROUND:

For my DSP class in Berklee. I had to make 3 movements in the style of Paul Lansky’s “FANTASIES” where in we would present a poem’s different faces and meanings through Digital Signal Processing methods. This was my 3rd movement!

The poem that i got for this project was a passage from Songs of Solomon in “The Message” version of the Bible. Its a version i thoroughly enjoy reading because its in a “normal” language where the words are not highfaluting and big. It was translated from the greek and hebrew text but made accessible for normal people like me who doesn’t like big words when reading.

The exact passage is.

Songs of Solomon 2: 10-14 (MSG)

Get up, my dear friend,
fair and beautiful lover—come to me!
Look around you: Winter is over;
the winter rains are over, gone!
Spring flowers are in blossom all over.
The whole world’s a choir—and singing!
Spring warblers are filling the forest
with sweet arpeggios.
Lilacs are exuberantly purple and perfumed,
and cherry trees fragrant with blossoms.
Oh, get up, dear friend,
my fair and beautiful lover—come to me!
Come, my shy and modest dove—
leave your seclusion, come out in the open.
Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice.
For your voice is soothing
and your face is ravishing.

MEANING:

when i was studying this book. It is pretty obvious that it deals with romance, sex and love. It is often translated to how Christ loves his church as a bride or the passion that a man should love his wife inside their marriage. Either way, its very passionate, and explicit sexually. The book means to bridge the gap between conjugal love and sex. according to this book. It is a convincing witness that men and women were created physically, emotionally and spiritually to live in love.

Christians read this book on many levels. In the intimacy of marital love between married man and woman, God’s deep love for his people or like i said a while ago. Christs love for his church like a bride Its a prism in which the love of God gathers and breaks out into several colors

having said that. I had the idea of interpreting this passage in 3 ways. things i have experienced personally and seen in my life.

3RD MOVEMENT: would be how people see it as a very romantic thing. How things are intimate and how things are shared between 2 lovers.

DSP METHOD: Convolution.

Feb 20 2012: reworked the master track and did some De-essing, EQ and Compression.

19 February Permalink

Buchla x Pandeiro x Funk
my EP381 Project 4

Pandeiro by Joao Martins
Assistant Engineering by Andreas Russo
Guitar, Buchla, Programming, Mixing, Editing and Engineering by MEEEEE

20 December 12 Permalink