Week 1:
During this week, my targets were to prepare for problems, prepare my digital space, and begin researching and planning my promotion and my EP. I also wanted to continue working on the tracks I had already made up to this point, making sure that I made them as professional and high quality as possible.
I began by brainstorming as many problems as I could think of that I might encounter during this project, I then continued to work through them to think of how I could prevent them from happening, or how I could solve / deal with them. I believe that, by problem solving, I will have made my life much easier going through this project, especially compared to last year, where I found myself running into problems constantly, slowing my progress down and reducing the quality of my final product considerably. This was because I hadn’t even thought about problem solving at all throughout the entire project.
Preparing my digital space didn’t take me long, but it’s one task out of the way that will allow me to be more efficient in my written work. I prepared each page first, naming them accordingly, and then continued to separate them into their collective tabs to make things cleaner, more organised and much easier to navigate through.
In terms of researching, I originally planned to research artist representation, copyright, promotion, and production. Instead of doing all of these, I found myself overwhelmed by this and I only managed to complete my research into artist representation and copyright, whilst making considerable progress on developing different ideas to work with for the EP. Whilst this is a setback, I did plan for this and I have given myself much less work to complete after the first two weeks as I wanted to complete my research within the first two weeks. I believe, however, that the research I have done into artist representation and copyright will definitely help me when building my appearance and persona as an artist, and planning my EP in general.
When it came to planning my EP, I already had a very strong idea of which direction I wanted to head for with the EP. I knew what genre I wanted, what mood / style I wanted, how many tracks I wanted, the only thing I have found myself stuck on still, is the name for the EP, and the names for each of the tracks. I believe that this is something that I’m going to have to work on later in the production process of the EP as I do not know exactly what direction my tracks are going to go in the future, there is still a lot of room for change.
In terms of planning the promotion, I decided to leave this until I felt I had done enough of the research I needed to begin making a trustworthy plan to follow, and I do not want to begin promoting for a while yet, so there’s still plenty of time to get this done in the future.
In terms of continuing to work on the tracks I have already produced, I began by doing some critical listening. I listened to each track so far, and I listened to each section repeatedly, whether its the build, the intro, the drop, transitions, etc. and I searched for as many problems as I could think of, and I then worked through how I might solve these problems. For example, one of the songs actually sounded slightly muddy, which was something I hadn’t noticed before, to solve this, I could just EQ the master channel and duck the gain slightly around the low frequencies where the muddy sound would come from, or I could listen to the different sounds and synths, using the spectrum analyser in Ableton to find where my bass parts might be overlapping too much, and using EQ on individual channels to try and solve the problem. Doing this process has allowed me to learn a lot more about the way I produce, and how I can improve my own tracks, and future tracks, in lots of different ways. I also now know different problems that could easily be prevented in my future work, making it easier to create and produce better quality products in the future.
The rest of my weekly reviews will be done as voice recordings.