White noise

The first part of the course I'm doing has finished and the next part doesn't start until next week, which is also when we need to hand in our assignments. Mine's pretty much done but, in the absence of a lesson today, I went into the studio this afternoon to do a bit more work on it.

I'd made a loose arrangement to meet the tutor, Yoss, for a beer once I was done in the studio but some heavy rain and then hail(!) in the afternoon resulted in us agreeing a rain check. But then the sun came out and at four-thirty Yoss sent me a message asking if I was still around.

I replied that I was and that I was still working on my mix. He said to bring it down and we could have a listen together (mine is one of the only ones we haven't done a session on in class so I was quite happy to accept the asistance).

We played it through end to end and Yoss gave me a bit of advice - beef up the bass drum, put a low pass filter on the hihats - and also showed me how to apply an effect to only part of a synthesiser's range by splitting the keyboard, which was really useful.

We played it through one last time and, towards the very end, I think Yoss inadvertently stopped the track. However, a bit of drum signal got through into the delay effects, which started to feedback on themselves.

Over the next couple of minutes, this slowly built up into a wall of noise. It wasn't quite 'white noise' as some of the frequencies were shifting back and forth and then overall sound was rising and falling in intensity. I have to say I was rather enjoying the moment, listening to this huge noise across the studio monitors and then Yoss said "Oh, has it finished?" He thought it was part of my track! (I'm tempted to add it now.)

After that we went down to sit outside the New Oxford for a couple of beers. I invited the Minx to join us but she was taking the miniMinx out for their first drive together (the miniMinx having completed a couple of lessons).

As is sometimes the way with these things, the couple of beers extended out into several, and I took this photo on my way back up the Crescent, slightly later than intended!

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Reading: 'Touching The Void' by Joe Simpson