The concept for this project was inspired by my everyday commute from Stamford,CT to New York City. The 1 hour train ride magnified the differences between living in a quiet suburb and studying in the concrete jungle. By cooperating with my classmate Gabe, who is also a Producer, we were able to fully transfer my own experience into a story, a sound vacation. The story tells how a person, who is so stressed with the crowded and non-stop city life, takes a train ride to escape to nature, and cured by the steeping foot on the leaves, running river and singing birds, etc, and returned back to everyday life with energy and a good mood.
To start with, I recorded the train ride sound, my stepping foot on the autumn leaves, and the running waterfall near my place through Zoom Recorder. The process was also a treatment for myself, to extract myself away from stress. And then I put all the recorded sound into Adobe Audition, with some sound tracks I found on freesound.com, which became the initial version of our sound story. I got to practice how multiple tracks work in Audition, and how fade in and fade out makes a huge difference to a story.
Then the first issue I met is when I tried share this Audition file with Gabe, I didn't export with Tracks checked as per below image, so all the links are not included in the file he received.
Although this is an easy fix that we soon figured out.
Then the exciting part comes to collaborate with a professional Producer (Gabe), who taught me how layering up the same track multiple times change the whole effects of a sound track. I was also introduced to Ableton ––– a great tool for composing, recording, arranging, mixing, and mastering for live performances. So all the music in our project are played by Gabe in his studio. I was also introduced to 2 plug ins that I could use for editing the sound, first one is the Decapitator by Soundtoys.com, which can also be used in Audition, it's an emulation of pushing hardware into saturation.
The final project was definitely 10 levels up after Gabe's professional editing. And I definitely have gained a lot professional knowledges on sound editing skills.
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