Final Product Evaluation

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Final Showcase

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yes. Songs

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Evaluation

Overall, I think the final products of this project have been extremely successful and of high quality, both the showcase performance and the two original songs. The songs really came a long way and exceeded my expectations with the musicality and production value. I really enjoyed creating the products and have learnt a lot throughout these nine weeks, such as new production techniques, recording techniques, songwriting skills and have seen huge guitar/vocal improvements. Even though some things changed and might not have happened the way the project was initially planned, we worked with these changes, solved problems, and we both still had an excellent final product as a duo. If I had more time, I definitely could have done more, such as a third song, a release campaign and more, but I am still very proud of what I have achieved given the time frame (and the fact I spent two weeks on a separate music project in Italy).

Strengths

One of the biggest strengths of this project is that I have seen a huge improvement in my confidence in vocals after singing both for the showcase and in recording sessions. I received some vocal lessons outside of college which were funded to me by a band I am in which helped a lot and I spent time doing vocal exercises and singing a range of genres to get my voice used to singing live. I have done backing vocals before whilst drumming for another band but it was nothing of this scale and whilst having to play guitar. I am less confident in playing guitar than drums so doing this together was quite a challenge for me and I struggled for a while during rehearsals to sing our originals and play guitar at the same time.

As well as performing live, I have also worked a lot when mixing the two tracks which I have learnt a lot more in, as I only started out mixing last year for my final project. Overall, I feel like this went more fluently than last year as I already had a general idea of how to navigate Ableton and what the different effects and parameters on these do. I was able to use the control room in college for a lot of my mixing sessions which helped a lot as it gives you a realistic idea of what the song sounds like, and also helps you understand the stereo field once you have used panning and other spatial effects. Although I didn’t master the songs myself, I was present for the mastering sessions for both the songs and began to understand the process more and the difference it makes whilst watching, and next time I could look into doing this at a more independent level.

Finally, I have developed both my songwriting and lyric writing skills in this project. Last year, a lot of my songwriting was based on using midi keyboards and electronic instruments, however this year it was very acoustic based, as we started writing the songs on just guitar, working out melodies, chord patterns and structures. I only really worked with other instruments during recording. I also improved my lyric writing skills as I worked with lLicy if she ever needed any inspiration or a new lyric. For example, I helped a lot with writing the second part of the chorus of Promises, where the lyrics are turned on their side and give a slightly different meaning to the ones before, but stay very similar in terms of syllables and the melody.

Improvements

I major improvement to the project would have been having more collaborations with other musicians. We had plans to work with other people such as a session guitarist to make these sections of the songs better quality, and this would have helped to create ideas with new chords and melody lines if we wanted a guitar solo as I am not confident enough in playing guitar to do a recorded solo yet. I had communicated with the guitarist and they were willing to work with us, however after I sent the song files over to them, they didn’t reply or seem very interested in helping, so I just worked with the guitar tracks I recorded for the ghost track, which still sounded good and I was still happy with the outcome. We also had the idea to work with a marketer, however, I felt like this would have added to the already full workload, and because we ended up postponing promotion, I’m actually glad we didn’t end up collaborating with them.

A major thing I would have liked to focus on more was the promotion aspect of the project. I had high hopes for this because promotion has been very successful in past projects, but it became very apparent quite early on that we didn’t have enough time to promote enough as we were so busy with other aspects of the project, so after a hard decision we stopped posting on social media. We knew we had to focus on the more important part of the project; the showcase and finishing our original songs. We want to carry on promoting after the project has finished as we will have more time to create a full campaign, meaning our brand will do a lot better.

Another thing that would have been great to incorporate would have been releasing the tracks onto streaming platforms. This would have been a great improvement for our project and would have taught us both more about promotion, distribution and how the music industry works as an independent artist. After the showcase, we had a lot of people come up to us saying they love our originals and asking where they can listen to them, so obviously, we have people wanting to stream out music already! This is a great incentive to start distributing those two songs and more in the near future, and I think around Deershed we will definitely plan to do this.

What I Would Change Next Time

-I would spend more time on promotion so we can push out our brand and music to new audiences.

-Work with new people, or people I know would work well for specific projects, in both the musical areas, but also promotion.

-Release the songs earlier, by spending time to set up a Distrokid account and creating more of a marketing campaign for the release.

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