Joe Shenton III
Below is some of my work that I completed either personally or for school as assignments that I am proud of. Everything was worked on in ProTools, my preferred DAW.
Glass
Salisbury University offers a "Special topics in music" class, and in one of the semesters, that topic was Music in Video Games. In that class, we worked on writing music and creating sound effects. This video showcases one of the projects we worked on. The game in the video is called Glass. When we started this project, we were given a couple of guidelines to follow as we create our own sound effects/audio for this game. We were also given this video, which had no audio at all, so that we can match up the audio we created to this video to see if there were any needed adjustments to our work. All the audio you hear in the video was created and edited by me.
Salisbury University requires a senior project to be completed as part of your degree. The project could be about anything, as long as it is related to your degree field. I chose to record and mix 5 songs: 3 of them would be originals, 2 of them would be covers. I started this project in the fall of 2022, and normally I would've finished the project in the fall. However I had been diagnosed with stage 3 testicular cancer, and with all the medical appointments I had to attend while doing my best to keep up with all of the other classes I was taking at the time, I couldn't finish the project until the spring of 2023. The following songs were the songs I recorded for this project.
#1 is an original, classical guitar piece. I recorded the guitar using both DI and with a mic. I added some pads to give more ambience to the song, I gave the guitar some slight EQ, as well as some reverb. This is the final result.
Coffee is an original instrumental. The guitars were recorded with an SM57 and a KSM44 set up in front of my Blackstar amp. I double tracked the rhythm guitars on each mic and panned it left and right (1 track each with the KSM44 and the SM57 on the left ear, and vice versa). I personally like to make little edits in my music to help keep it as natural as possible, so all I did for the rhythm guitar section was add some EQ, and side chained compression to the lead guitar track. The drums are all MIDI that I programmed myself. The bass was recorded with DI, and is completely raw.
Everlong was the last song I recorded for this project, a cover of the Foo Fighters song. This song I feel could use more work compared to the other songs, however I had ran out of time and had to finish up the song quickly and turn in the project. I am very proud of myself for programming the drums in this song because it is a nearly identical copy of the drums you hear in the original song. I worked really hard on those drums and knowing that if I can program drums that are that complicated in a song, it inspires me to write more complex drum parts in my original work. The acoustic guitar you hear was recorded with the DI and mic technique I had done for #1, the rhythm guitars are not double tracked, and the bass is also DI.
For Whom the Bell Tolls was the first song I recorded, and is a cover of the Metallica song. The bass was played through my PRS MT15, and recorded with an SM57 and a KSM44. I used the distortion through the amp to give it that nasty sound, and the mics really helped it sound full during the intro. The bell and wind you hear in the beginning are both MIDI presets. The ADSR for the original wind preset was changed so that it didn't overpower the recording. The bell's ADSR was not touched, however I did add a bass to the bell to give it more oomph. I side chained the bass to the bell with a compressor so that whenever the bell was struck, you could hear it much easier. All guitar tracks, minus the first solo you hear, were recorded with a KSM44 and a SM57. I did 3 vocal tracks: 1 was an octave lower than the the other 2, and the other 2 tracks were pretty much a double track. Drums were MIDI programmed just like the other songs.
We're Fed Darkness is an original song, and my personal favorite out of the bunch. This is a song I wrote during summer break, and decided to use for the senior project. I had some friends help me out and speak those news headlines you hear (Thank you Aubrie and Jordan!!). I took their voices and added the "moogerfooger ring modulator" to both of their tracks to give an evil sound to their voices. For Aubrie, I added overdrive to her voice, and for Jordan, I added fuzz to his voice with the intent of their voices being heard through 2 different TV's. The static you hear is the Heavy Rain preset from the Vacuum instrument on Protools. With some small tweaks to the ADSR, it now sounds like tv static/white noise. I used my Focusrite Scarlett mic to record the guitars, and I used my PRS MT15 and Blackstar amps for each track (same idea as the Coffee mic technique I used, just with amps this time). Bass was DI, and the drums were MIDI, just like the other songs. The screenshot at the top of my page is the edit window in Protools of this song.