Technical Research Study #1 with Reflection

As I would like to make an original music bed for my opening titles, I decided to explore a software program I haven't used before: Sony Acid Pro. Another Instructor teaches this software and I often have students who ask if they can use it to create original music for their projects (which the answer is "yes," of course!). The students often show me what they are working on and how they did it using the program, so I've seen it many times before, but have never used it myself as it is only available on my work PC. I knew what I wanted the program to do, but it took me awhile to explore the interface and find everything I was looking for!

Here's what I created (video shows a screenshot of what I had going on in the program, audio is the completed experiment with using loops, etc, to create a music bed):

Here is a better screenshot of the program:

Reflection: Using this software for the first time, I felt exactly like the quote from the start of Chapter 5 by Beth Balliro, "You start and you don't know how to do anything. You make a huge mess. You're out of control. You have no technique.... And then like any craft, you have to build and build and practice and practice" (p. 33). I started and restarted and restarted this project again and again before getting to the point that I felt like I had something to work with. And it still needs more work and polish! But at least I can continue to develop craft from this point forward. I think I understand how some of my students must feel when they are not new to the idea of using a video editor, but are opening Premiere for the first time. It becomes a challenge of knowing what you want and finding a way to do it in the program! Good resources to search for specific answers to advanced problems are necessary. Going to have to keep hunting up more resources for those types of students.