Music production and DJing J-term

 Today after a small break we worked on our final projects, we also made a nice little song where we made a song where most people in the class helped. Today i worked on this beat that i ultimately ended up deleting because its just did not go. But it’s all about trial and error. I had already made two beats i really liked so this was mostly just to get creative and fun. Making a beat usually takes me a little while so it’s really fun to just be focused for like the whole day and just chill. 

On this day we were unable to attend school due to the frigid conditions in the Houston area. This was a minor setback that we experienced but it was ok in the end because we rescheduled all the activities we had to later days.

 Day 3     For our third day we started it by walking to Black Hole and picking something up to eat/drink. Then we strolled around the near by neighborhoods, giving our minds a rest hoping it will spark up some creativity. Afterwards we headed back to school to focus on our project.  Once the clock hit 11:30 we decided to go out to Cava to eat some lunch. Then we went to Vinal Edge Records, in which we browsed some records. Once we had bought anything that caught our eye we left but before we went we met up with Dj Sun who has won Houston Dj of the year seven times.  He had said the last time he checked how many record he made was fifteen years ago and at the time he had made twenty thousand. After speaking with him we headed back to school and worked on our projects some more. 

Day 2      For our second day we watched two documentaries in the morning and in the afternoon we went on an outing. To start off our morning we took some time to start brainstorming for our projects that we will be working on over the course of this term. Afterwards, we watched a couple documentaries and had a small discussion about what we took away from each one. The first documentary was about the music production process. The documentary showed clips of several producers and what their job was like in the studio and working with several artists. The second documentary we watched was a bit longer and it went into detail about sampling. Sampling means to take a piece of an already produced audio and rework it to fit in with a new audio. This documentary talked about several cases where a piece of audio had been sampled without any credit or money given to the original creator. In each case the sampled piece would eventually be taken down for copyright reasons. After this documentary

 Today in the first class of music production and DJing, we started the J-term with some questions about our experience with music, such as if we played instruments, and if so which ones, when we fell in love with music, our earliest musical memory, etc... After a bit of open discussion, we took a small break. Afterward, we watched videos on the history of music, human's instruments through different eras, the invention of sheet music, and its origins in the church. We then had another discussion on sheet music and whether or not it is limiting to musicians, as well as cultural shifts in what is and isn't considered high culture. By the time it was finished, it was time for lunch. Once lunch was over, we watched more videos, these ones being on the music industry and record companies. We talked about whether or not the oversaturation of music was a good thing, about the financial struggles of a music artist with record labels, and the complications of trying to break into an in