Overall, I have loved working on this project. Performing comes naturally to me as I have been doing it for many years now, so being able to play alongside my college friends and perform to a crowd of over 100 people was amazing. As well as this, I have enjoyed learning about new areas of the music industry, such as recording, mixing, live sound, promotion and event management. I feel like I have put a lot of effort into the project as a whole and I was determined to get a perfect final performance through rehearsing and promoting the event the best I could. Having a live audience felt amazing especially compared to last year, where our performances were all live-streamed due to the COVID_19 pandemic. I achieved something I am very proud of generally, but things could have been done better to make the project even more successful than what it was.
Performance is something I really enjoy doing, hence why I am in a band that performs regularly outside of college. I would love to do another performance project this year, and there has been talk about putting on a Christmas concert in a few months as a side unit during project two. Performing would be something I would like to carry on doing when I leave college, whether that be doing a popular/performance course at university or a conservatoire or carrying on playing with my bands.
Strengths
The biggest strength for me in this project was the performance aspect as I am already a confident drummer and live performer. This unit was very suited to me and I enjoyed rehearsing with my band and performing. I mentioned a few times last year that I would love to work with more people more as I tend to enjoy working alone and on solo projects, so doing this, where I was always working with my band or at least another person, was great for me. This performance has helped me personally improve many aspects of playing live, such as playing a drum solo, interacting with the crowd from the kit (including clicking my sticks in the air to indicate clapping along, or simply looking and smiling at other band members), and learning more about live sound and how to set up a stage and PA system successfully.
Looking away from performing, I also think my work on event management was very enjoyable and I completed my role successfully. Overall, we sold 163 tickets and about 120/130 people came, which is a great turnout considering the tickets were free. We also raised around £200 for Sue Ryder Manorlands Hospice and are planning to raise even more for our Christmas event. I promoted the event very well, coming up with colour schemes, poster/flyer designs and even the name ‘Live Wire’ myself. Tom and I made social media sites for the event, which gained a lot of traction in the four weeks we had to promote it, and I did the UAL Instagram takeover which was really fun for me and they got back to us saying our content was great! As well as this, we did more physical promoting like organising some acoustic sessions in the college cafe at lunchtime which were well received by both other students and tutors.
This project had a lot of units, making the workload a lot in some places. During this project, we also learnt a lot bout recording in the live room and mixing these recordings after. Even though I wish we would have had this as a separate project to learn more about this side of music, I still really enjoyed it and think my end product was high-grade given the time we had to finish it. I learnt a lot about the differences between a live performance and recording in a studio, how to set up these spaces and record professionally into a DAW, and how to edit these after so they sound refined and professional enough for a release.
One thing I made sure to work on a lot for this project was documenting my band’s progress over the five weeks. I did this by evaluating our work every week, giving myself an overall on how the week went, two group strengths and one individual strength, and the same for improvements. I also set myself three targets to try and hit for the week after, like I always do in my evaluations. I did this to ensure I was always making my work stronger and the band would have a good piece of practical work by the end of the project. As well as reflecting on the performance aspect, I also evaluated the weekly recording and mixing lessons we had, giving myself an improvement that I could make at the end of each week. I also included event management logs, which showed what progress we had made in that week such as how many tickets we have sold, what we are planning on to promote the event further, and what we are posting on social media.
Another thing I made sure was the best it could be was the presentation of my work on DigitalSpace. I feel like this has been improved hugely compared to last year and I have focussed on this a lot knowing that this will be a grading point for my work from now on. I have made more use of Word Press’ block options, using actions like buttons to send readers to different parts of my website or different web pages altogether, instead of using a URL in or at the end of a paragraph. This makes the website look more clean and professional. I have also started using more sophisticated headers for different points and paragraphs in my work and using separators to keep my work flowing well and to split different points up. I also made use of different forms of media and formated these in different ways, using galleries to insert multiple photos, tables, and audio/videos to further show the practical parts of my work.
Improvements
To improve my understanding of different units within this project, I could have done more context and research work. This would make my work more relevant and would have helped me understand different aspects of live performance, live sound, recording, mixing and event management. For example, I didn’t do any context or research work on mixing and had I have done this, I would have improved my final mix and my general workflow on this as I would have had a much better understanding of the point of mixing and how to mix before actually going into this. I could have also researched different ways to successfully promote a live event. If I had more time, I definitely would have looked at this, but given the short project and larger than usual workload, I think I might have struggled to fit this in, especially given that a lot of my context and research work was purely independent and I looked at these topics from home.
I feel like although the performance itself was well promoted and received, I could have promoted us as students and the course a little bit more. I found that I fell out of posting every day and struggled to keep up this timetable as posting on every social media we had once a day was very demanding and we had to make sure we had enough content for this too. We didn’t make much use of the TikTok and YouTube sites, even though I knew these would have helped us gain traction as these two sites have very specific algorithms and you can get viral very easily through these. however, getting good quality videos that people would enjoy watching on these sites was quite difficult. My phone doesn’t have the best quality microphone so sometimes audio would clip and sound distorted if it got too noisy or loud.
Admittedly, in This project, I feel like I fell behind on some work because of everything I was doing for promotion and the band. I lost motivation for written work during this project and wanted to focus solely on the practical parts and promoting for a lot of it, which as a consequence made me drop back a little in my writing part. To help counter this, I could have made a timetable of things I wanted to get finished throughout the project, as I feel like this would have made me more determined to do my written work if I told myself it had to be done for a certain day. I have always struggled with time-keeping and overworking myself, which I feel is also a factor in why I tend to lose motivation for written work, too.
Targets For The Future
-Try to keep up with my workload as much as possible, especially with writing.
-Learn even more about recording in studios, this could possibly be something I could explore in my final project.
-Be involved in performances including playing different instruments, such as guitar.