Overall, I really enjoyed this project as it has been a major learning curve for me. I have learnt a lot about lyric writing and how artists can write their lyrics, how people write catchy songs that use the elements of music. I was the producer in my group and during the songwriting process, I think my group worked really well together; we communicated well through both Microsoft Teams and our own Instagram group chat. Sending files was fairly easy and I learnt how to convert files to WAV as this is the file type I was working with. We all had our set roles, but we also helped each other with other roles; I helped Tia come up with the song ideas, and Tia helped Lucy write lyrics and make melodies for them.
As the producer in my group, much of my time was spent using software like Reaper to put the song together and make it sound high quality. I think I mostly fulfilled this role as the song has a full structure with layered instruments and polyrhythms, and the quality of it was good. I achieved this quality by adding effects to the tracks like reverb, delay and chorus to the parts that needed it. As not all of us had professional recording equipment, I had to EQ out some of the unwanted background noises from the recordings but I feel that this could have been done better as you can still hear some background ambience. I also started using Ableton Live 10 nearer the end of the project as I had just got a new midi keyboard. I used these new resources to create a drum track for the song which worked really well with the ending product. I think that considering this is the first time I have used these resources (even Reaper) to make a professional sounding and finished song, I think I did a fairly good job!
As well as song and lyric writing, I also found the written parts very interesting. For example; learning what PRS does for musicians, musically analysing songs and learning about home studios and how they work. All of these things are hugely important if you want to become a songwriter as PRS helps with copyright and royalties when people use your song and learning about some studios informs you of how to make your own studio if you ever needed one for songwriting. Analysing songs is also very important as it can give you a good insight into how professionals write songs and lyrics, and you can gather ideas of their writing and production styles.
In this project, we looked at lyric writing. This is something I have always struggled with, even in the workshops we had. This is strange as I feel confident as a creative writer but as soon as it comes to turning the writing into lyrics, I just can’t figure out what to say. I would say that I am a fairly private person and wouldn’t like to write lyrics about certain things if I knew many people were going to read it Perhaps this is something I should peruse further to increase my confidence and abilities in this area, so when I get to projects where I am working solo on songs, I can make my own lyrics up without asking for other people to write for me. I could work on this by writing lyrics in my spare time and trying to put them to a tune so the lyrics don’t seem poem-like and uninteresting when reading them back.
This might be nitpicking, but I feel the song’s production wasn’t done to the best of my abilities. I could have added different tracks like a bassline which would have driven the song much more and made vocal harmonies to emphasise certain lyrics. The song as a whole could also be better in time to the metronome in parts. I additionally must learn how to use compression as I know what it does but have no idea where to start when adding it as an effect. I feel like compression would have helped the song as its peaks were sometimes going slightly over the 0dB mark and were clipping a little.
I think that songwriting would be something I would like to look into further, but not entirely by itself. I would be interested in combining music production and songwriting into one (a bit like project two) to create more music in the future. This songwriting might include recording live instruments like guitar, piano vocals like this project, but also using production resources to work with electronic instruments like synthesizers, computerised drums and midi keyboards. I think that pursuing this further would help me in both the songwriting and production industries as I still have a lot to learn in these fields and am intrigued by them!