Yesterday I went to a church to meetup with the ensemble to record them. I brought a laptop, cords, 2 microphones (Rode NT1-A and an Audio-Technica AT-2020), and my audio interface, Behringer UM2. 

I started by creating a multitrack, then turning on recording for the first track. I can enable recording on all of the tracks if I want, which means when I press record it'll record onto all of them. For now I only want it on 1 track. The lead singer, a bass, started first. I plugged the headphones into the interface so he could hear himself back, as well as the instrumental music while he was singing. After he finished singing, it already had him recorded in sync with the music. Then after that we recorded each other singer, then lined them all up.

I sent the files to the lead singer, and he's gonna edit them since some parts the singers were a bit off beat. Once he's finished he'll send them back to me and I'll edit them with de-essers, compression, leveling, etc.

Tomorrow I'm going to a church to record a small ensemble of singers. Some of them are in the same choir I'm in, so I've been friends with 2 of the leaders for a while. They know I have recording equipment and software, and for a while they've wanted to record themselves to post it to Youtube. They invited me to where they meet up to practice to record them. I'll be there for around 2-3 hours, and we've decided to record either each singer separately, then combine/mix them. I did a tiny bit of research about producing vocals, and it's a lot harder than I expected. Once I get the recordings, I'm gonna be in for a lot of learning how to edit with leveling, compression, de-essers, and so many other effects for voices. Editing vocal music is very different than the other type of editing I do. 

Many streamers and youtubers create discord servers for their fans. With discord servers, you can create as many channels as you'd like for different things. One could be just for chatting, another one for chat debates, or another for video games. You can control who can speak in which channel, so sometimes for a channel that might be for announcements, you'd only want the owner or admins to talk there. You can also add voice channels where people can use their microphones to talk with their voices. You can join with your voice at any time, whether there's only 2 other people there or 20 other people in it.

I created my own server for my viewers that can join from my stream by using a command in my chat. The command gives a link to the server, which sends an invite to join the server to their discord account. Anyone can join, unless they're banned by me or an admin or moderator. I have about 7 roles, and the main ones are the "mod" role, "VIP" role, and "subscriber" role. I have a channel for chatting, a voice chat for talking, another voice chat for minecraft chat, a rules channel where no one can talk in, but I have a lists of rules for the server in, and even a channel for alerting the members when I live stream.

In my previous blog post, I talked about buying new monitor stands. Yesterday, I finally finished building it! It didn't take long, but at one point I temp lost some of the pieces/screws, so that slowed me down. All of the pieces felt really nice and heavy duty, especially the main pole which is metal and heavy because of that. The stand clips onto my desk, and the stand is just 1 thick pole that has 2 arms attached, and each arm holds 1 monitor. The arms are strong enough to hold the monitors, which is surprising since my monitors are pretty large.

The arms can move back, forth, sideways, in, out, and pretty much every other direction. The part where the monitors attach can turn the monitors diagonally if I want them to. My dad sometimes uses my computer for his calls, but he always likes the monitor to be really close to his face so he can see the people on his call better, but I like it further back when gaming, editing, or just doing my school work. With the stands, I can now easily move the monitors back and forth.

I'm really impressed with this stand, and it only cost $40. I'd definitely recommend these!

When I got my new desk I had to change my whole computer setup. The desk came with a shelf to attach, and I put one of my 2 monitors on it. I like to have my monitors raised high at eye level, so I'm not slouching to look at them. Unfortunately the shelf has enough space for just 1 monitor, which I keep as my secondary monitor. I use both a lot when editing, so I find myself craning my neck up and down when I look back and forth between the 2 monitors. I decided it was time to get a clamp on desk monitor stand, and I found a nice heavy duty one on Amazon that can hold 2 monitors at once!

The box came in 2 days ago, but I haven't gotten around to finish building it yet. The stand was only $40, but the box was pretty heavy, and almost all of the parts were heavy duty metal. I've got good hopes for it!