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The meeting began like most others, officeholders and attendees introduced themselves by name and cycle. The icebreaking question of the day was "If there was any movie you could work on the sound for, which one(s) would it be, and why?" The answers ranged from Rio, the Spider-Verse films, Transformers, to John Wick. For various reasons, be it Sound Design work, Foley or even ADR.
Following that, we played a new game called "Ears Up." Ears up is a sort of "guess that ___" game. We took a short audio track, and heavily processed it. It helped sharpen our critical listening skills. Although it was almost immediately guessed, it still proved good to start thinking about processing, and how plugins can affect a sound in different ways.
*Up next was the "Future events" segment. On August 30th there will be a RedNet Advanced certification Zoom meeting held. This is a follow up to the RedNetCore certification, that was also held on zoom. The next day, there will be a Professionalism Clinic held by our very own Robert Brock. He'll be talking about Social Media presence, Risk vs Reward, Email Etiquette, and more. There is also the possibility of a Mic Build event being held on November 18th. They are looking at going forward with the event dependent on how many interested persons there are. There is a ribbon mic being built and a Guitar Pedal Kit. They cost $349 and $129 respectively.*
Moving forward, we spoke about networking. Similar to other websites like Fiverr and other such work-for-hire sites, we introduced the audience to Upwork. Upwork is a website that allows you to seek clients and view work. Experience is experience, and any of it is valuable, especially for newer engineers or those who just want to brush up on certain skills. The experience of working with a client is a very important thing to get into knowing the ins and outs of, even if the pay is $20 or $20,000.
Following that, attention was brought to Klang, and their immersive in-ear mixing. There was a video interview with Ed Sheeran's Live Engineer taking about their experiences with the products before, and after as well as why they preferred using them.
The Free Plugin of the Week was the ChowDSP Chow Tape Model; a free analog tape emulator. It was mainly designed "to emulate the Sony TC-260." Chow's mission statement is "to create useful tools for musicians and audio engineers; tools that sound great, are easy to use, and provide musical inspiration."*
**The meeting closed with a note by Megan, a current officeholder at the CRAS Chapter. She had mentioned that mental health is important to take care of and easy to ignore. She mentioned this because CRAS is an intense program and a lot is expected of the students by the instructors and faculty, and even by the students themselves. Talking to friends, and family, is something she stressed the importance of. Taking a break to just breathe, write, draw was something she recommended as its easy to overwork oneself, and hard to give oneself a moment of brevity. On top of feeling better and refreshed, the lack of stress will show through in your work and in your demeanor to your peers and colleagues. **
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