At the start of this project I was very enthusiastic and eager to get going. I have learned a lot through this project and developed as a musician. Before this project started I was a talented drummer but struggled to play in a band with purpose. I could never quite find my own style behind the drums. It was only after playing in the obscurities for a while and practicing regularly that I began to feel more comfortable behind the drums in a band and find my own style. I developed a lot during this project through practicing both on my own and in the band. All this work was in preparation for the actual performance, it allowed me to become a better drummer, a more creative drummer, and have our band much tighter and technically proficient. Although these were successful and effective developments, One thing that we didn’t do as well as a band was stick to a schedule. We had a week by week schedule mapped out but had difficulty sticking to it. A reason for this was that we overworked ourselves. We were very ambitious with the amount of work we set four ourselves. Because of this, we had great difficulty with time management, especially towards the end of the project. If i were to do this project again, I would allow more time for the recording process and have it earlier on in the schedule, to give ourselves more breathing room.
My collaborations were successful on the whole. The musicians that I collaborated with (cain, sonny, and sam) were professional for the most part. However, there were some issues with these collaborations. For example, Sonny is not the most reliable person to count on, there were multiple times throughout this project where he didn’t turn up to college when we said we were going to, which left me and Cain on our own, often in the practice room, wasting time when we should’ve been practicing as a whole band. If we were in a professional work setting, this kind of unreliability wouldn’t be tolerated and we would’ve had to find a replacement. We are more forgiving and knew we needed him to complete this project. Also, Sam wasn’t as well rehearsed on his guitar parts during the recording progress as the rest of us were. This lead to a lot of frustration and time wasted. Again, in a professional setting, this would not be tolerated. Other that that, the collaborations with the musicians was successful as we managed to get a decent sounding EP out of this project.
The collaboration with the graphic design student, Baldev Raaj, was very successful as well. He managed to produce artwork for us that was exactly how we wanted it and in a short period of time, he was also very professional during our exchanges. However, the one thing that I would change with collaborations like this in the future is to give the artist more time to allow them to digitise the artwork instead of having it hand drawn for the cover which gives it a rougher look.
The collaborations with the tutors, Ben and Lewis, were very successful as well. Lewis did a great job recording us with the facilities at college and the time schedule that we were on. If I was to redo this collaboration, I would have allotted more time to be in the studio to prevent stress and us rushing the work. Apart from that, I am happy with this collaboration.
Ben Wilson mixed our songs for us in a very short period of time, the day before the EP launch. He did a great job with such little time and managed to mix the tracks to get them sounding very good. However, one thing that I would change about this collaboration would be to sit down and discuss the feedback on the mixes face to face with him to avoid any confusion or miscommunication.
I would very highly rate my own performance as I put a lot of work into it. I was practicing a lot to make sure I 100% knew all of my parts and that I was playing them perfectly. I was also constantly evaluating my own performance to make myself a better musician. Because of all this work, it meant that at the final performance, I could enjoy the music and performance without having to worry about what I was playing. It also gave me an opportunity to improvise certain sections and develop upon ideas that I had already put in the songs. If I were to do this project again, some things that I would change would be to focus more on the performance side instead of the recording side, to get a better technically sounding EP with more interesting parts. I would also have a more prominent part in the promotion side, as our promotion hasn’t worked as well as we’d have hoped. We have listeners on all of the platforms that we uploaded the music to, but it is mostly friends and family as we haven’t gathered much of a following.
Overall, I would say this was a successful project and is definitely something that I would like to pursue in my future as a career.