{Friday Night_Finishing Up}

Your Friday Night projects are due today! I'm hoping to send these over to KQED tomorrow, so today we need to focus on pulling them together and getting them polished up. Here's a list of all the steps you need to do to complete the project:

1. Record your interview.
2. Edit the interview (get rid of extra noise, pops and clicks, etc.) Remember, this should be 2 minutes long MAX!
   
3. Put a compressor on your vocal track to smooth it out.
4. Create a beat in Reason and export it as an audio file. (click here if you don't remember how to do this.)
   
5. Import the audio file of your beat into your Pro Tools session. (click here if you don't remember how to do this.)
6. Balance the volume levels of your vocal and music tracks and add automation, fades, etc. if desired.
7. Bounce a stereo audio file of your project out of Pro Tools.
8. Import the stereo audio file to iTunes and create an MP3 version of it.
9. Turn in the MP3 file of your project along with the Pro Tools session.

Couple things you should do to make sure your project sounds as good as possible:

Create a Master Fader
A Master Fader lets you see and control the volume levels of all your tracks. This is important because sometimes your individual tracks don't look like they are clipping (hitting the red), but when they are all playing together, the overall loudness is too much for Pro Tools to handle. You NEVER want to see the red lights light up on your Master Fader track. With a Master Fader, you can see what the true volume of your project is and adjust it if necessary. It's also an easy way to create a fade outs/fade ins for your project. (see Volume Automation below)

To create a Master Fader:

1. In the Track Menu, click on New. (Track>New)
2. In the window that pops up, select Stereo Master Fader and click Create.
3. In your Edit Window, you should now see an extra track that looks like this: