With the ‘The Late Show’ EP finally having been officially launched, I can look back on the work done and things we have achieved and look at how to improve in future.
Here is a reflective model that I am going to use in structuring my thoughts on this project that I found online.
Here are the project’s key parts:
- Songwriting/Arrangements
- Recording at Loom
- Promo, Marketing and Launch
The Songwriting Process:
We wrote three songs in three sessions, which was excellent progress, meaning we would then have a fourth week to arrange and practice the pieces. This also would mean that we were working well to our planned schedule in the proposal.
I feel as though the songs were not our best work. I feel this way because not only were the songs very simple, but I don’t think they pushed us as musicians to really showcase what each of us can actually do.
Realistically, I believe the only way we could improve upon this in future is by not having such a short timescale to work to. Although we obviously had to stick to the relatively short timescale for the sake of all our modules, I still think we could’ve started a few weeks earlier as we already had this project idea well before the schedule would officially start. This would mean much more time on each individual track to really make them shine. One more thing I firmly believe we should’ve done is fit in extra rehearsals for writing. We only had one slot per week which simply wasn’t enough, and we could have done much more that this.
Ultimately, we managed to write three songs of a good standard ready in time for us to go and record at an external studio.
Recording at Loom Studio
With the songs more or less finalised, it was onto recording at Loom Studio in Birstall. We had two days booked in, and would be recording all of the raw audio to take with us and mix it ourselves.
Firstly, going out to an external studio had many positive impacts that we wouldn’t have gained using our own facilities. We would not be stuck to the regular college hours, nor would we be interrupting or being interrupted by other students that are around the department. We also wouldn’t need to worry about setting up all of the equipment. We would receive more professional sounding takes, as our room at college isn’t the best. Finally, we would be working with the industry professional Grant Henderson, who we have worked with in the past, making the experience one of the most enjoyable ones we’d had. Here’s a link to his studio’s site: http://www.loomstudio.co.uk/
The recording session went brilliantly overall, everyone had a good experience, and the change of setting I think lifted the mood. Although the sessions were long, we managed to achieve some of the best takes we could, and I think this is clear when listening to the final product.
We only had one problem with the sessions, and this was that we had a vocalist absent on the second day. This couldn’t be helped unfortunately, but it did mean that we would now have to get a vocal take recorded elsewhere at a later date. Nevertheless we finally had the tracks recorded and arranged, ready for mixing by Lex and Luke who agreed to take point on this role.
If we were to do this again, I would’ve really liked to have more days at the studio, as it would allow us to work out the finer details, and mix the tracks in this professional environment. The reason we didn’t stay longer was for not only times’ sake, but also expenses as the studio had to be paid for.
We completed our goal here of getting some good takes of all three songs.
Promotion, Marketing, and the Launch
With the songwriting and recording process complete I realised that my role was now complete. Therefore I helped out with promotional material and contacting people to take some of the weight off of other student’s shoulders.
I got in touch with the media student Abbey, who swiftly began work on some visual promo stuff and a music video for us. Along with this, the others were posting on social media to gain a following. We had finally decided on the name of the group: “The Late Show.” We also got some logos for the band, which we all liked.
This was too little too late. There was only a week until launch day, and we hadn’t even got our teaser video back yet. As a group we overlooked the promotional and branding side of this project considerably due to the short timescale for producing the physical product. This meant that not many people were aware of our EP on launch.
The biggest problem though, has been the lock-down situation in the UK. This ruined our original promo plan of hosting the all day live event, and caused us to fall back onto promoting online.
If we were to do this again, I would be promoting our EP from the get go, maintaining regular uploads to social media of our progress, and building our branding as soon as possible.
Personally, I do not feel as though we met our goal here. Not just of the live event we were forced to cancel, but we didn’t even manage to get much of a following online, meaning that nobody really knows we ever launched an EP. This is a big shame due to the effort and dedication from everybody in the group. We will not let this happen in future.
The Overall Project
On the whole, we achieved a good amount of our original goals:
- Wrote three original pieces
- Recorded all three at the studio
- Mixed/Mastered by us
- Collaboration with Industry professionals
- Launching the EP online
Overall this was a successful module looking back on what he have actually achieved. We really let the quality of the promotional aspect slip however, resulting in nobody knowing about all the hard work from the group. This has put a damper on the project as everything else went smoothly, however we will learn from this, and make sure in future that we are constantly keeping the promotion feed up to date and in as many places as possible.
References:
Bradford.ac.uk. 2020. Reflection Models And Frameworks.. [online] Available at: <https://www.bradford.ac.uk/wimba-files/skill-space/Reflective_Writing_HTML/page_04.htm> [Accessed 7 May 2020].
Henderson, G., 2020. LOOM :: Recording Studios Leeds / Bradford, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Halifax, Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, Yorkshire. [online] Loomstudio.co.uk. Available at: <http://www.loomstudio.co.uk/> [Accessed 7 May 2020].