Senior Project Work Example

For my senior project at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, I created a complete software instrument for a marching percussion ensemble (Snare, Tenor, and Bass Drums). I recorded over 600 total individual samples across all three instruments of various playing techniques for each drum, with various dynamic levels for each technique.

I then took those samples, and programmed them into a KONTAKT patch, so they could be controlled through a MIDI keyboard, or any program that uses Native Instrument’s Kontakt as a virtual instrument plug-in. For this project I used Make Music’s Finale. I followed similar workflow to that used with Virtual Drumline from Tapspace. I then changed the sounds in Finale to use the sounds and patches I created to use as an audio recording for a drumline piece I had already written.

Finally, I made a multi-track recording of the drumline that I was teaching at the time. I used mics for one snare, each bass drum, a sub-kick, and two room mics. The five bass mics were mixed down to two from a mixer to my audio interface, and the other mics had their individual tracks, which I recorded through an 8 channel interface from M-Audio, using Logic Pro X, then later mixed and mastered in Pro Tools.

Audio engineering techniques in this project included, various types of mic placements for instruments, recording instruments, trimming and editing files, organizing files by name and type through folders and file names, mixing and mastering, live ensemble recording, on-site recording, MIDI, and virtual instrument editing.

Here is a video demonstration I made of the software instrument playing a piece of written music in Finale,

And here is a mastered audio file of the multi-track recording,

Thanks for reading and listening!! Questions email, JimJaySound@gmail.com

-Jim