Month: August 2019

Next Tuesday I’ll start going to high school since last school year was my last year of elementary school. I’ve already received my courses for the first semester and have also already been inside the school, so I’ll be writing about how I feel about what school will be like.

First period is orchestral strings which I’m pretty happy with since I already have some music experience, but I want to learn how to play an actual orchestral string instrument. I think that being able to play an actual stringed instrument would help when I write for strings, and especially how I write out articulation.

My next period is geography, which is also the class that has the most people that I know from my previous school in it. In elementary school our geography teacher didn’t really do the best job of teaching us, but from what my brother’s friends tell me; what you learned in elementary school shouldn’t really matter.

Third period math is probably the one I’m the most worried about for my first semester because from what my brother’s friends say; depending on the teacher you get you might get a lot of homework. They also say that math gets a lot more difficult, and papers take up a lot of space in your bag. Additionally, I’m pretty sure that there’s nobody from my old school that’s also in my class.

Last period is Healthy Active Living Education which is pretty much gym period. I’m really glad that I have this as my last period because I know some of my friends got it as their first period. Since I have it at the end of the day, as soon as class ends I can go home and take a shower or whatever.

Generally, I’m not too worried about making new friends since almost all my friends are going to the same school, and I also am friends with most of my brother’s friends. However, in classes or clubs that I don’t know anybody in, I’ll still try to talk to some new people.

Overall, I’m not too worried about high school and the courses I have for my first semester aren’t too bad. I think the hardest part will be getting good grades and having an efficient way to do work and get around the school.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been playing Minecraft on a survival server one of my friends started. Minecraft is a game I’ve had for almost six years, but it’s still fun to play. I’ll be writing about what I’ve done on the new server and why I still think Minecraft is fun.

So the server that I’m playing on is completely survival with no plug-ins. I started on the server a bit earlier than the rest of my friends, but I wasn’t the first. For the first day, I just went mining to gather resources and set up a few chests and furnaces to put all my stuff. Once almost everyone got on the server we had around seven of us just talking and doing random things like farming and going to the Nether.

Since I was one of the first people on that actually gathered resources, most of us gathered and built around the first chests I made from the first day. The day after I decided to build a few projects, so I took some resources from the chests. I moved a little further away and built a house first so I had somewhere to safely stand AFK (Away From Keyboard) and put my items. The next thing I worked on was making a cow farm since I wanted to be able to get leather for books to enchant. It was a simple fenced-in area just so I could keep them all in the same spot. Next to it, I also made a small wheat farm so I could breed the cows.

The first big project I made was an automatic experience farm, so I could easily get levels. I didn’t want to make a mob farm, and I’d seen some videos of experience farms that used cactus and bamboo. I used EagleEye621’s farm design and it took a while for me to get it working, but it works pretty well for not having to do anything after building it. After obtaining a way to efficiently get levels I wanted to make bookshelves for my enchantment table to get better tools and armor. For me, this has always been one of the most difficult stages in Minecraft survival because you need a lot of leather to make the books for the bookshelves. In order to get level 30 enchantments, you need to have at least 15 bookshelves which are 45 books, and after that, I needed more books to actually enchant.

I divide Minecraft survival into separate sections; mining, building a base, enchanting gear, defeat the Ender Dragon, and then doing whatever you want. For some reason whenever I play on a new survival world, defeating the Ender Dragon is one of the things I want to do. You don’t have to but I prefer spending a lot of time enchanting my gear. Not only to become really strong, but also to show off to the other people on the server. Currently, I’m still enchanting most of my gear, but I also built an AFK fishing farm to see if I can catch some good enchanted books. It takes a lot of time, but each time I finally finish a piece of gear I feel accomplished.

In my opinion, Minecraft survival can be fun in many different ways. Because even though there are some things you do the same every time, you can also do things a new way. For example, playing with or without plug-ins or making different types of farms. Especially after you have all the resources and gear you want; you can just have fun building things with your friends or testing new things out. Each time you create play on a new world you make a new base, with different things in it, and with different goals in mind.

Overall, even if Minecraft is an old game if you’re feeling bored, you can always make a new world and try something new. I think that in a sandbox type game like Minecraft you can always have some sort of fun even if you’ve been playing for a long time.

The song that my music teacher and I have been working on for a while is almost completed, and last Wednesday he taught me few more features in Logic Pro X that I didn’t know about before.

One of the first things he showed me wasn’t really a Logic Pro exclusive feature, but more of song creation in general. It was the way you panned your different instruments. Panning is determining how far to the left or right you hear a certain instrument from. While you want to keep certain things like the main melody and drums in the middle, you should balance your other instruments by frequency. We panned our string quartet so that the cello and first violin are on one side and the second violin and viola are on the other.

Another technique he showed me was reversing the audio of an acoustic piano to make it sound more synthetic. We’re using it the help with the transitions of certain sections, and it sounds pretty good. Supposedly, it works in quite a few different scenarios, and it’s a good thing to know.

The last thing he showed me on Wednesday was making a processing track. By sending all of our instruments to the processing track, we can add certain effects all at once from the processing track. It also makes it a lot easier to change the volume of the song itself.

Again, I learned a few more tips and techniques to help me in music production, and next time he’s supposed to teach me about using a compressor which is pretty complicated. However, our song should still be completed fairly soon.

Over the summer I have been playing a lot of video games, and one of the games I’ve played the most is CS: GO. Lately one of my friends wanted to get more into the game, and since I’m the only person that’s half-decent at the game that he knows, he asked me to help him get better.

I’ve had the CS:GO for a little over four years now and next year in April I will be rewarded with a 5-year Veteran Coin in-game. Even with over 1,400 hours on the game, I still wouldn’t consider myself a “good player”. The average matchmaking rank for most people is Gold Nova 3 which is the 9th rank out of the 18 ranks that exist in matchmaking. I currently sit one rank above that, at Gold Nova Master which is the 10th rank; just barely above average. For reference, my friend has gone all the way up and down the Silver ranks which are the bottom six ranks.

My friend isn’t a complete beginner to the game. He’s had the game for a little bit over two years and has around 600 hours in the game. I’m quite positive that he knows the basic understandings of the game and how it works. From what he’s told me, is that in the lower ranks (Silver) the teammates you get are almost always really bad or throwing (trying to lose on purpose). I can vouch for the fact that players in the lower ranks are typically not the best since I was there too, but I never remembered so many people throwing as my friend describes. However, if this really is the case, and you’re a low ranking player trying to climb the rank ladder, I’d suggest finding someone that is also of your skill level that also wants to improve. Playing with that one, or even more, people that you can get along with will make your matchmaking experience much better since it eliminates one random factor that could make your game less enjoyable. This is what I did ever since grade 5 when I started playing with a few of my brother’s friends that also played. We all started off in Silver a few years ago, and now we’re all around the Nova skill group now. Forming good teamwork, communication, and relationships in general with longlasting teammates isn’t something that can be done with random players you find in low ranks.

Besides teammates, I think game sense (your understanding of the game and the way it works) has a big impact on the way you play. While playing more games will improve your game sense in one way or another, I think that a good way to improve your game sense is to watch other people play (preferably professional/high ranking players). Don’t just watch them, but try to understand what they’re doing and why. After that, you can go back and watch replays of your own games and try to figure out what you did wrong in certain scenarios and what you did right. When you watch, don’t worry about your aim because that’s a completely different factor than your positioning and use of utility.

The last few things I told my friend to try and do are to practice his aim and memorize the maps. At the end of the day, CS: GO is still a shooting game, so if you don’t hit your shots, you’re chances of winning drop significantly. However, if you improve your knowledge of the maps you play on, and common spots people play from; you’ll also have another step up on other players.

Overall, if you want to improve, you should practice with teammates you know, as well as your aim, utility usage, and watch other people that are better than you play. Even if you lose games or get bad teammates, as long as you see yourself as an individual player improve at what you’re doing, you should keep playing and eventually rank up.

Last week, I installed the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Logic Pro X onto my computer as an upgrade from GarageBand. My music theory teacher has always been telling me how much better Logic is compared to GarageBand and the many features that it has. On Monday, I had a chance to use it a little bit, so here’s what I’ve understood from it so far.

Logic Pro X is very similar to GarageBand, and since they’re both owned by Apple, they look and function similarly except Logic has a lot more things you can do with it. GarageBand is the free DAW from Apple, but you can purchase Logic as a better/improved version of GarageBand. Logic includes more sound samples, and I’ll explain more about the features I’ve learned about.

The first feature that my theory teacher showed me was the Command-Click Tool which is a secondary tool that you can switch between your cursor with by holding the command key. You can change the Command-Click Tool to 13 different tools, not including the pointer tool. The only one I’ve used so far is the scissors tool because it’s the most intuitive tool for me, and it’s really helpful for splitting tracks without using as much effort as you would in GarageBand.

Another thing that my teacher showed me was the difference between the way you EQ tracks in Logic and GarageBand. In GarageBand, you don’t get a lot of numbers to work with and you kind of have to move things around to get the sound you want. However, in Logic, you can see the frequencies and the volume of the different frequencies. You can even copy and paste EQ settings from track to track which is useful if you want to make sure all your tracks are EQ’d exactly the same.

The last thing I learned was using Buses for effects. My teacher showed me by only using reverb, but it should work with all kinds of effects. Buses are used to send audio to different places, so we used the bus to send our track to a reverb setting that we made. Doing this gives the reverb effect to our track without directly applying it. It also means that we can send a different track to the same bus and the exact same reverb will be applied to both the tracks. This saves you the time of giving each track its own effect settings.

Overall, Logic Pro X is pretty similar to GarageBand, but there are also a lot of new things to learn within the program. Even though I’ve only learned how to utilize a few tools it makes mixing and editing a lot easier than in GarageBand. However, I still haven’t learned everything yet, so maybe I’ll update again when I finally finish the song I’ve been working on.