Music Studio Introduction & Rules

In this academic year we'll be creating a game trailer, game trailers wouldn't work all that well with just the content being shown on screen. Music adds the depth to a silence image and more often than not can define that content forever.

With the game trailer we'll create we will have to create an accompanying music track or theme to give the trailer another dimension. This task could be quite interesting if done with care and quality.

Before we was given the full introduction we was given ground rules on what shouldn't happen or what we shouldn't do in the music studio.


1st. No food or drink is aloud in the music studio.


2nd. Don't abuse your ears, use then with care. Don't listen to something too aloud.


3rd. Use correct carrying techniques when carrying heavy equipment like large speaker.

4th. Use the correct cabling technique when using wires, tape wires to the floor to stop people tripping over and use the "pull and twist" motion to cable up wires properly.

After the rules were given to us we was shown some of the equipment we'll be using in the next 8 months. It wasn't a big tour of the studio but rather a small tour to get us to know the basics. The first task was to learn the "pull and twist" to understand that using the correct cabling technique will make the equipment last longer and less prone to failure.


The next piece of equipment we was shown was the microphones, two models were shown but they were very similar, one used for instruments and the other for vocalists. The vocalist mic had a metal sphere on it whereas the instrumental mic didn't. You can pop off the metal sphere on the vocal mic and it's pretty Identical to the instrumental mic.


The tutor then shown us the mixing desk, with this piece of equipment you can do a load of different things to modify the sound coming out of the speaker. He stated that channel 1 on the mixing desk was no different to the other channels and had nothing special over the other channels. He then told us what each dial did on the mixing desk, I will list the functionally of the dials below;


Gain - The gain dial is simply a volume controller, it controls the volume coming out of the speaker.


Equalizer - This section has 3 dials that can modify high, medium and low sound pitches, you can play with these settings and cancel out specific pitches you may not want when recording something.


Digital Effects - This dial will modify the sound in different and strange ways. It's also links to other dials on the top right of the device that can add additional effects to the sounds coming out.


Pan - This simply gives the user the ability of panning the audio from side to side or keeping it level for balanced sound. For example, one can use the dial to pan completely right and only the right speaker will put out audio or visa versa.


Then we was given the opportunity play with the microphones, group by group we walked forward to connect the mics to the mixing desk. We was allowed to play with the dials and to understand how they worked with the mics. Most if not all tested the functions and spoke to here the sounds change with the modifiers.

This pretty much concluded the first tour of the music studio, we looked at smaller mixing devices that were connected to the computers in the room and a larger desk connected to the recording room. We all did the "pull and twist" to cable up the wires and finished the tour at that point.