Music Tech Forum : Personal Portfolio

Track listing:
1. Sample Track
2. Bad Bodine - Elvis
3. Stella Octangula - My Sky Is Green
4. Scott Philp - May
5. Scott Philp - LTO (London Trade Organisation)
6. Scott Philp - MTO (Melbourne Trade Organisation)
7. Joi - What You Are (Remix)

CV PDF: http://www.box.net/shared/recsa7yir0
Mini CV PDF: http://www.box.net/shared/x2q2vemqsx

MINI CV:
Scott Philp
33 Diosma Drive
Corromandel Valley
Adelaide, SA 5051
T 08 81781017
M 0401747593
scottbphilp@gmail.com

PROFILE
I am a young enthusiastic individual seeking employment in the music industry. My background
includes live performance, composition, sound production and recording in both live and studio
settings, and production/band management roles. I have just completed a Diploma of Sound
Engineering at Adelaide University and used that opportunity to work with many different bands and individuals on a professional level. I have both technical and theoretical musical knowledge completing solo performance on bass guitar in year 12 gaining high marks and also completing Musicianship to a high standard and further improving my theoretical knowledge in Concepts of Music as part of the Diploma of Sound Engineering. I am competent on many instruments including bass and electric guitar, basic keyboard skills. I am also currently receiving vocal training. I am a dedicated and hard worker with music as a passion and I feel I would be a great addition to any team.

EXPERIENCE
Producer/Engineer, Stella Octangula Demo Session — 2007
Engineer, Bad Bodine Demo Session— 2007
Various Personal Projects — 2007
Producer/Engineer, Shadows of a Golden Age Demo Session — 2005

WORK EXPERIENCE
Salesperson, Dick Smith Electronics — 2006 - Current
Front of House, Oporto — 2006

EDUCATION
University of Adelaide — Diploma of Sound Engineering, 2007
Blackwood High School — South Australian Certificate of Education, 2005

SKILLS
I am a competent user of Pro Tools LE/HD 7.3/4 Systems and have experience using a Control 24 desk to recorded, mix and master bands. I can use Logic Pro 7/8 to produce, compose, mix, and edit audio or MIDI based pieces. I have many years of live performance experience playing mostly bass guitar. I can also play electric/acoustic guitar, have basic keyboard and vocal skills. I can compose short pieces and am currently working on my song writing. I have excellent skills in dealing with people and from my time in the retail industry have an excellent customer service manner.

MIDI Studies B : Major Project

MTO (Melbourne Trade Organization)

Scott Philp

2 22

Mp3 :

http://www.box.net/shared/662mllczyi

This piece while not too interesting musically was created to show off certain skills using logic. The main part is split across three brass instruments with a guitar reinforcing the chords in the piece. The brass was split up in three playable parts so I could use the expression controller more realistically. The part with more movement in it has emphases on the end of the lines while the second part is similar but rises in expression more sharply. Also the second on third parts actually peak in expression at different points in some parts of the phrase to emphasize the harmony at those points. The drum part is split across three tracks to allow for better control over the sound of each part. I have found over the year that is a very important part of getting a realistic drum sound in logic. The hats have their own EQ to bring it closer to an appropriate sound for this track. The snare has pitch bend data to add some realism to the hits. Running low in the mix is an electric piano sound that adds a little bass to the track. The strings are used subtly for colour but come out with the other synth sounds at the end. As the track is really just one repeated phrase the moving synth sounds add colour as the track moves to its conclusion. The strings have a small amount of pitch band data to add realism, it is very slight but I feel it helps add some realism to the patch. I created a few different glass sounding patched in sculpture for this track and used various delays on them. The delay sounds are automated out for the concluding section. The guitar track has had the note values changed slightly for realism. Also the Guitar Amp Pro plugin is automated to push more gain through the track after the intro section. Overall while short I think the track at least remains interesting and I worked hard to make sure the synth sounds didn’t take over too much until they were supposed to. The parts chosen were influenced by what we learned this semester about various instruments in MIDI and I had to do some volume automation to make the track make sense. To master the track I just used a multiband compressor and the Spread plugin to achieve a wider stereo spread.

Audio Studies B : Major Assignment

The Monkey and the Walrus (2567)

Scott Philp

3 ‘ 25

Mp3 :

http://www.box.net/shared/nsjfimj8hv

This song is made up of only a few takes of real audio. The Piano was recorded with a stereo mic and two U87s sitting behind a baffle on either side of the Piano. This created a darker muted sound which suited the song. Also after recording the Piano I grabbed a snare drum and walked around the room playing it. This created a nice natural panning effect although the gain wasn’t really set for it so it peaked. However because I used it reversed under a lot of things it really didn’t seem to matter. The chorus and coda vocals were recorded with the mic on figure 8 and Jake and Brendan provided ‘backup’ however looking back I probably should’ve done the backup in another take so I could raise it up a bit. I used a single instance of Sample Tank 2 SE and routed two MIDI tracks into separate channels for the Brass lead and the strings sample. I then automated their volume levels and in the case of the brass lead the panning on the Aux track. To get the shaker I put reason on an Instrument track and then set the output to bus 1-2, then I set the input of an audio track to bus 1-2 and recorded it in real time. The Instrument track for reason was retained but made inactive, as it was easier to deal with the audio track. I used beat detective on one of the piano tracks to get an idea of where to put the reversed drum sounds before the coda and it actually worked reasonably well. It didn’t get the exact beats and bars right but in the end it was close enough that I could use grid mode to match up the reversed sample to something I had played straight to the audio. This is one of the only things I’ve mixed in Pro Tools LE for a while and it really showed up the difference in the quality of the plugins as opposed to the suite in Studio 1 and 2. The Piano was recorded with a dark sound in mind so I was pretty happy with it anyway so instead of using lots of plugins on the track I’ve mostly used volume and panning automation to create colour in the sounds. The reverb for the vocals however helped create a more spacious sound. The track wasn’t mastered separate I used a light compressor on the master track and then dithered it down to 16bit. The track is not exactly what was proposed as due to time constrains the original track I was going to do was used for the studio project. However the use of Pro Tools, Sample Tank and Reason remain at the same levels I had planned for the original song so I feel that I’ve still displayed the same amount of technical ability as proposed.

Studio Project - May

May
Mp3: http://www.box.net/shared/ftbxto8fky

Recording Log:
I found recording the instruments for this song very different from that of recoding My Sky Is Green. Although the song starts off with just a lone voice and Piano getting a drum kit sound that would fit well with it was quite difficult. The whole process also had a number of setbacks the largest being the completion of Piano and drums takes on the first night that were lost due to my failure to back them up. The Piano had two U87’s placed in figure 8 around the strings that were being played as the song didn’t use a very large range on the piano. The drums in the end used the NT5 stereo mic as and over head and also two U87’s one on each side of a baffle in a binaural technique. The kick and snare were closed mics but also added into the mix was the mic being used by Jake as a talkback mic. It had swung around and face the window behind him and this provided some nice room sound to the cymbals which worked quite well in the mix. The guitar ended up being recorded through a DI into an MBOX in the audio lab as there was no studio time left in which Ben could play on it. The sound worked alright after some tweaking but the sound of Amplitube is still there so that was a little disappointing. Vocals were recorded in the dead room into studio 2. Many takes were needed to get something passable... eventually switching between the doubled take lower in the mix and the original seemed to work alright. Overall the recording process didn’t really go well between losing original takes and being unable to record live guitar I feel the recording did suffer. However in the end I think the performers made the most of what we had and came out with a fairly reasonable result.

Production Log:
Mixing May was an interesting thing, getting most of the sounds that I wanted was easy but some things caused me some trouble. The vocal take for exapmle was not really the kind of quailty it needed to be so making it fit in the mix and actually sound reasonable was prety hard. I used a doubling take to make is sound thicker and auto tune to try and fix up the pitch. Mixing the drums was quite easy and I reversed the phase of the Binarual mics as I could hear something funny going on with the ride. In the mastering setup I used a small amount of EQ but as there weren’t really any noise issuses in any of the tracks so I worked mostly on making it sound louder without ruining the mix. I added in a spot effect to the guitar coming into the second chorus using one of the waves delay units. It worked out quite well but maybe could’ve been made a little more sublty. Overall I added differnet reverbs to the different groups of tracks and a long delay to the guitar to add some space to the mix. In the master track I used the S1 Imager to widen the stero image as with only one guitar track it was pretty much only the drums provding anything hard left and right.

Studio Project - My Sky In Green

My Sky Is Green
MP3: http://www.box.net/shared/1tncu9vt3u

Recording log:
The recoding process was interesting for me because the band was comprised mostly of instruments I hadn't worked with in a recording format before. Also because it was comprised mostly of acoustic instruments it meant to achieve separation in the tracks most things had to be recorded separately. The first take was the Piano and Bass Guitar because the bass was just using his pre amp and a DI so there was no microphone involved. I placed two mics on the Piano close to the strings for a brighter sound. This later proved to be an issue as the sound of the dampener on the piano came through very loud after even light compression. There was another U87 set up about 3 meters from the Piano to capture the rooms sounds. The Vocals were recorded through a U87 and I did both the lead and the harmony vocal in separate takes. To achieve the sound I wanted for the acoustic guitar I put one SM57 close to the sound hole and a U87 further back at a point where there was a fair amount of reinforcement. The guitar had a very clear and sweet tone and I wanted to capture that the best I could. The drum was recorded with a C414 after trying a out a few mics that didn’t seem to capture the ‘poppy’ nature of the drum. The C414 captured this while also sounding warm as well. The Viola was recorded with a U87 placed about 30cm on average from the sound hole when the instrument was being played. Overall I think the recording process went well and I get the sounds I wanted from each instrument. The only issue that popped up was the piano mics being too close and picking up the dampener being used.

Production:
As with recording the track I enjoyed mixing this track because it contained many instruments I hadn’t mixed before and required me to think differently about the mix. The first mix I did was just a preliminary mix so the band had something to listen back to. I fixed the levels at a basic level and started the volume automation on the harmony track. After taking the track up to studio 1 to mix I started trying to bring the main level of everything up with some subtle compression. This worked quite well for most things keeping the ratio low and the threshold quite high. This however also brought to light my first issue with the recording with that any amount of compression brought up the dampener sound in the piano from having the mics placed too close to the beaters in the piano. In the end it seemed if I wanted to keep the piano level consistent with the guitar and drums I would have to live with it being there. I tried to mix the track so that the vocals were the most obvious part and added separate reverbs to the different sets of instrument to stop the mix getting too washy. At the beginning and end of the track I automated the Piano mics so the track started with the room mic and slid into the wider fuller sound of the two close mics. I found this acted like a fade in intro to the song without actually having to start from a zero level. In the mastering step I found controlling the background sounds even more difficult and ended up having two L3’s with relatively low thresholds on them worked better than a single one trying to do all the work.