As I've blogged about twice before, I was working on a fun edit of a music video by a big music artist named Tyler the Creator. I really liked his music for his song "See You Again" with Kali Uchis, and to get a bit back into sound design I wanted to recreate it without the song and with my own sound effects synced up with whatever was happening on screen to make it seem as if you were watching a real recording with all the regular sounds in it like footsteps and car sounds and dishes being moved. 

I spent about 3 hours to do roughly the first 90 seconds of the music video. I got burnt out pretty quick and didn't have time to finish it all, but I still wanted to upload it to Youtube. When I tried re-uploading the video to Youtube, Youtube told me there was a copyright claim on the content in the video. I thought copyright claims were only for audio, and I obviously didn't keep the song in the music video. Apparently it was the video content, and instead of a usual copyright claim where I can't monetize the video (AKA put ads on the video to make money), which wasn't my plan in the first place, it wouldn't even let me upload the video to the public. This is a very frustrating and terrible rule, as the only reason it exists is to prevent me from stealing the video art and making money off of it, which they can already do by just demonetizing it. Obviously I can't put ads on the video, which wasn't my intent in the first place, I just wanted to show off my creation. 

One of my clients emailed me about an edited episode not being sound leveled enough to his liking, so he asked if I could fix it to make it more level. Usually I level the audio with the Dynamics processing, but I wanted to learn if there was a way to do specifically audio leveling instead of the whole dynamics process.

I simply searched "how to level audio Audition" on Youtube, and quickly found a tutorial video for the speech volume leveler tool in Adobe Audition. The video was just a few minutes long and I followed along with the tutor easily, and quickly learned how to use the tool. Once I customized it to how I wanted, I saved it as a preset to use for the future. It did the job perfectly for my client, and now I can use it every time for all the future episodes I edit for him.

If you already have your first episode recorded and are ready to publish it to the world, follow this video using BuzzSprout to get started:

My brother Gideon recommended me "Buzzsprout", which is a podcast hosting service where you distribute and publish podcasts to listening platforms like Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, etc.

I created a Buzzsprout account to try to upload my own podcast, as the next step I want to take in my business is to offer podcast publishing as a service, this way I'm closer to taking care of everything for a podcaster.

I learned how to use Buzzsprout pretty easily, and learned about RSS feeds, which is a link that has your podcast info encoded, and what you give to listening platforms such as Spotify. I created a test podcast for a client and listed it on Spotify and Stitcher, but I had to wait a bit for both platforms to approve the podcast. Spotify accepted it pretty fast, but I'm still waiting on Stitcher to approve.

I was able to upload an mp3 file really fast, as well as artwork for the episode and artwork for the whole podcast (like a logo), and a description. Sometimes podcasts will have a whole blog post, show notes, description of a guest, or links to sources they mention during the interview for their listener.

Another great feature with Buzzsprout is that I can have multiple podcasts under 1 account, and save all the presets and artwork for the episodes. In the future I'd like to be publishing for tons of podcasts, so Buzzsprout can help me manage so many.

I've gotten a lot into hip hop music, and I noticed some of my favorite artists will get pieces of songs to put in their own songs, and mix it into their "beat". Usually it's a small clip of an already made song, just a few seconds, and then they loop it and add their own instruments with it to make it sound more hip hop.

Here's an example where Tyler the Creator, a famous hip hop artist, uses a sample from an old song from 1971 in "Get Down" by Monterey.

Here's the original sampled song, "Get Down" by Monterey: 

Here's Tyler the Creator's song "Boredom" where he uses the drums in "Get Down" at 1:11:

Some people see this as stealing music, but all art is inspired by art before it. Technically everything in any music has been "stolen" since people use pieces of music to structure their own, whether it be through lyrics or beats or chords. 
Tyler the Creator and Kanye West are my favorite artists to use samples in their music. 

Kanye West samples "My Song" by Labi Siffre in Kanye's song "I Wonder":

"My Song": 

"I Wonder": 


I love how Kanye and Tyler use samples to really give their songs life, especially with old vintage songs as they tend to do. It also really helps to build their own style and aesthetic but made modern.