Kanye West  grabbed seven Grammy nominations this year, winning three of them before the telecast even aired (Best Rap/Sung Collaboration and Best Rap Song for “All Of The Lights” and Best Rap Album for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy). Jay-Z and Kanye West also took Grammy statues for their ‘Watch the Throne’ hit ‘Otis. CRAS grad Christian Mochizuki worked with Kanye on his Grammy nominated album and has also assisted and engineered for Kid Cudi, Kanye West, Justin Bieber and Jay-Z. Congrats Kanye and Christian!

Mix Magazine recently produced a free webcast featuring CRAS director of education Kevin Becka and Avid’s pro audio marketing manager Tony Cariddi. Over 3,000 people watched live as the presenters answered questions about Pro Tools 10, HDX cards and the new AAX plug-in format. READ MORE

CRAS grad Andrew Pearson and songwriter Anne Preven of Pulse Recording were caught on the red carpet as they attended the 2012 Grammys.

Taylor Swift took home two statues for Country Solo Performance for “Mean” and the second for Country Song, also for “Mean.” Grammy winning engineer and CRAS grad Chad Carlson worked on Taylor Swift’s nominated CD Speak Now. Congrats Taylor and Chad!

Celemony, the company who makes the Melodyne pitch processing products has been honored with this year’s Special Merit Technical Grammy Award. CRAS offers students certifications on Celemony’s Melodyne plus many other audio products including Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Auto-Tune, Smaart, Reason, Waves, L-Acoustics Kudo and more.

Adele swept the Grammys this year winning for song, record and album of the year and CRAS grad AJ Clark was on the team. Congratulations Adele and AJ!

Depth within any mix and listening situation is paramount to proper sonic understanding. Much like we see in 3D, we hear in 3D and taking out any one of these dimensions only serves to create a flat and unnatural sound. READ MORE

As of February 13, 2012, Pro Tools 10 has been integrated into the curriculum and student laptops at the Conservatory. The new software brings a long list of new features including:

• Clip Gain:  easily adjust and match gain levels, pre-mixer.
• Easy integration of multiple audio formats in a session—including interleave—without file duplication
• Recording and mastering at higher resolution  with more headroom in 32-bit floating-point format
• Better responsiveness on slower hard drives with the enhanced disk handler
• Recording in low-latency mode, with direct monitoring when using third-party audio interfaces
• System 5 console EQ and dynamics with the Avid Channel Strip plug-in
• More voices (for HD Native and HDX)
• Support for 32-bit floating point files and mixed bit depths within sessions
• The ability to play sessions from network drives and RAM (HD only)
• Direct bouncing of mixes  to SoundCloud or iTunes

CRAS students may qualify for our multi-tiered Pro Tools 10 certification which better prepares them for real-world workflows and applications.

The Band Perry is up for a Grammy for Best New Artist. CRAS grad Rory Rositas worked on the CD as well as records for Randy Houser, Sherrié Austin, Newfound Road and Carrie Hassler

The first thing we are going to do is set up the routing of our most important elements (kick, bass, snare, hi-hat & vocal). I usually like to set up the kick, snare and sometimes the bass in much the same way so as to ‘de-correlate’ the sounds. De-correlation is basically the splitting up of a sound into different frequency ranges (low/high) or into it’s constituent parts (bass fundamental/twang; basically low/high again), applying different processing or plugins and then recombining them to form a new and cohesive sound. READ MORE