wendsday

today we finished our mind maps for the different audio formats that we were assigned on Monday this is what i have
now i have to go to a student council meeting

this task promises to be more entertaining than how it started but i still prefer doing a written task but i think that is something that was programed in to me from the years that i spent in school.

monday back to lessons

to start with today we had key skills this seemed a bit un organized as the tutor for the lesson didnt know that we had already done this the week befor we left for half term.

after we had our first break we went through the assignment brief i spent a bit of time highlighting the important sections.

Thursday

Today we finished writting reviews for (1) a pice of music in the top 10 of the UK charts and (2) a game that we own or have played.

Unit 2

Audio Production

Research

Robert Pallier

For this task we have been given the job of writing a review on a song in the charts more specifically a song in the top 10. So for this I have chosen to review Journey – Don’t Stop Believin’

Journey is an American band that was formed in the early 70s in San Francisco, California.

Most of the band is made of former members of “Santana” a band that touched on a similar genre Santana is a band that was formed in 1964 with Carlos Santana as the lead guitarist and an array of other artists that changed over the years. The range of these artists has varied greatly. Just like Santana himself, the band is famous for helping to introduce Latin rock to the rest of the world. They have won a total of 8 Grammy Awards and 3 Latin Grammy Awards which were all awarded in 2000. Some of the songs performed by the band include “Santana” , ”Abraxas” , ”Caravanserai” and “Welcome”

The song “Don’t stop belivin” was first released in 1981 on the album Escape and is often considered the bands signature song and has been used in many TV shows and films including Family guy, King of the Hill, South Park, CSI, My Name is Earl and many more.

“Don’t Stop Belivin” is also believed to be one of the most popular rock tracks in Ireland.

The recent release of the Glee version of “don’t stop believin” has boosted sales of the original putting it back in the charts and boosting sales once again for the ageing band. Also X-Factor star Joe sang a cover of the song on the show that also helped to boost sales.

A main part of the song is the guitar with a memorable rift.

The lead vocals performed by Steve Perry have a very catchy part of the song “Don’t stop belivein” that isn’t sung until the last m inute of the song.

The backing vocals are performed by Ross Valory who also performed the bass guitar, Jonathan Cain who also used the piano and keyboard and Neal Schon that also performed on the lead and rhythm guitars

The other band member was Steve Smith who used the drums and percussion

The song its self is a love song from what I can tell.

My personal feelings on Journey are mixed whilst I like some of there songs like “Don’t stop believin” and “Any Way You Want It” there are others that I don’t for example “open arms” and “lovin touchin squeezin”

If I was to give the song a score out of ten then it would be only a 6 but when I take in to consideration how well the song has been used in other settings like films the score goes up to a respectable 8

For the second part of this task I am going to write a review on a game of my choice for this I have decided to review the game Fallout 3

Bethesda Softworks creators of the award winning game series “the elder scrolls” was founded in 1985. Bethesda Softworks or just Bethesda have had a long history in game development and publishing with the creation of the first physics based sports simulation in 1986 which soon led to the first NFL game. This game was published by EA (Electronic Arts). Bethesda used to write games for more than just PC’s and conceals in fact the first games were written for the Atari ST, the Amiga and the commodore 64 (the commodore 64 was the first computer that I owned)

Many of the early Terminator games (based on the hit films “The Terminator” and “Terminator 2 Judgment Day”) were written by Bethesda. Terminator Future Shock was one of the first games to use 3D graphics and allow the player to use the mouse to look around the game one could almost go as far to say that Bethesda were the grandparents of modern FPS (First Person Shooter) games.

Fallout 3 is a game based on a timeline that never happened in a post apocalyptic wasteland from a nuclear war that never took place. As the player you start in life in the game as a survivor that was raised in a vault (a huge underground fallout shelter). The player as has always been the case in the Fallout series will have to navigate the wasteland making choices to do good or bad weather to save characters or let them die. The story for Fallout 3 is based around Washington DC were the player has almost free roam to search the 13square kilometres for a way to bring back fresh water to the people of the wastes.

Fallout 3 plays as an FPS primarily with a strong RPG (Roll Play Game) element however it also boosts being a turn based real time hybrid but I found that the VATS (Vault Assisted Targeting System) the part of the game that is supposed to emulate a turn based combat system just allowed the player to kill their target with lethal accuracy.

Another big part of the game play is the ability to switch between first and third person gaming seamlessly however this seems to be something that was left over in the game engine from the Elder scrolls 4 Oblivion.

Although this is the third game in the Fallout the game play has changed dramatically and has more in common with Oblivion than Fallout 1, Fallout 2 or any of the other Fallout spinoffs that arose. This could be due to the fact that Fallout 3 is built on the same game engine as Oblivion but many of the Fallout modding community would go as far as to say that Fallout 3 is just a mod for Oblivion. Previous Fallout titles were 2D with a strict turn based combat system.

One of the biggest aspects of the game that I like is the massive open story that allows the player to shrug off the main quest and go in search of fame and wealth. The main quest can be completed in less than 3 hours but the amount of locations the player can visit and mini side quests that the player can take on will lead to over 100 hours of game play. This coupled with the stunning Graphics and engrossing sounds lead to Fallout 3 being one of my all time favourite games.

Despite all this Fallout 3 is not without its draw backs for one it is only a single player game not that this is new in a Fallout title but for modern computer games multiplayer tends to be a big part of choosing weather to purchase a title or not. Another of the Problems with Fallout 3 is the amount bugs whilst not an over abundance considering the size of the game the ones that are there can be a hindrance especially if you spent a long time getting somewhere only for a door to not work or an item that needs to be picked up going missing .

If I was to rate the game I would give it an 8 out of 10 but with the extra downloaded missions and the large amount of user made content that can be acquired I will have to give this game a massive 9.5 out of 10

Monday

Today we started with a keyskills exame for comunication (English) I think I did well but there were some questions that i strugeled with. for the rest of today we have to update our blogs and review the blogs of other members of the class. this should be fun reading how others have been doing and how well they think they have done.

later on in the day i downloaded a new template for for my blogger. this was easy i think i will change it every week.



over the weekend i finished playing Mass Effect 2. i had played mass effect some years ago and had been waiting for the second game for so long and felt that it was a fitting continuation to the first game.

Monday

after spending the morning in keyskills learning the correct use of apostrophe's we started by listening to each others recording projects. as expected mine wasn't the best but i still liked it.
by far the best was Paul's track that he made mostly from a Prodigy track.

this afternoon John (our main tutor) came round and had a small one on one with each of the class to discuss how well we had been doing on the latest assighnment he comented that i seem to be doing as well as always (dispite that i dont think i have done aswell as other units)

over the weekend i spent a lot of time making prototypes in Unity. Unity is a Game Engine made to be used by want to be game designer's like myself. to aid myself in the ceration of my game i have been building 3d models using 3dsMax.

i plan to spend my tuesday of to start implementing some of my prototypes in to a small working game.(i hope)

Thursday

Today was a rush because we didnt have the space on our harddrives to save our sound booth files. some of us got around this by using the desktop as a tempory storage space this helped but i used my laptop that helped because i now how to use my laptop and have higher admin rights on it (something that i like is to be in control of my computer)
by the afternoon i had finished the project and taken all the screenshots and done a wright up for them.
now im looking forward to the weekend as i have had a long and frustrating week.

Monday

I have been a bit bad and haven't updated my blog since December so i decided that as we have just started another unit of study i should post about what has been going on.

during the MIDI sequencing project i ran in to a few problems to start with i only have 1GB of hard drive space on my college home drive this is a real problem because when using Cubase after editing an audio track that track is saved with the edits as a .WAV this became problematic extremely quick as the project folder would grow to extremely large sizes.
another problem with using Cubase was that any MIDI drum beats that i created myself would not be converted during the mixdown proses. There was a work around for this problem but the resulting sound after this was not as good as before.

After the snow had stoped and we all got back to classes we were given a new task to remix a MIDI track of our choice. This task was meet with the same storage space problems as the last task. (i need to invest in a new USB memory stick (thanks to who ever found mine and didn't turn it in))
we also ran in to a host of new problems regarding the Cubase software the most annoying of these were that any MIDI tracks that i made would not mixdown and i ended up having to hand in my whole project folder.another problem that the class ran into was that after choosing a MIDI track and changing the instrument and then selecting a new MIDI track would reset the last track making it impossible to remix the project the way we wanted.

all in all i think that this project could have gone better despite how well it started and given the choice i would have chosen to use a different software package

this morning during Key Skills we were studying the use of capital letters in sentences this sort of thing is helpful for me because its the sort of thing that i do tend to over look when writing.

after break we had a look at adobe sound booth and how it worked it reminded me of how cool edit worked and so i felt comfortable with it straight away. i would have liked to have spent more time looking at this software and I'm hoping to be able to use it again in the future.

after lunch and for the rest of the day we started on our latest unit "Recording"
our goal is to buy a dream recording studio with an imaginary £10,000. this started with john giving us a rough guide as to the sort of items we should get for our studios including hardware and software. i spent the rest of the day looking at the difference's in microphones and amps to give myself a better understanding of where my money would be going tonight i will put together a spreed sheet to help balancing the spending that should be fun relearning excel functions (i wounder if excel still has a hidden Easter Egg.