This entire project has been a huge learning curve for me and has definitely improved the skills I already had. I have loved working on this project, from both a practical side of making the two originals, to researching and developing my knowledge of recording, marketing and more. I have put my all into this final piece of work and I know how important the final product is to my future, hopefully as a working musician. Overall, I think this project has been done successfully, with high-quality final products and a well-presented portfolio that I am extremely proud of. I managed my workload very well and made sure I was improving my work and knowledge every day. Even when I had two weeks off for the mini-project abroad I still created a great project outcome within a shorter time frame. There are some things I wished I could have done better or worked on more, however, I think that the assignment ended up being great even without these additions.
I took on many roles equally for this project, and I think most of these roles were performed successfully and with confidence. One of the main roles was being both the other half and producer/mixing engineer for yes., using Ableton to mix the songs and learning a lot more about this process along the way. Mixing engineers and producers have to be creative and have a good ear, and be open to ideas and experimental ways of working. Being in the band involved helping to write the songs too, thinking of musical elements we can add to our music such as harmonies, instrumentation, dynamics, melody, rhythm and more as early on as we could to get this section out of the way before recording. Writing songs can be very difficult, but experimenting and looking at new ways to create music, such as using unconventional chord progressions, rhythms and even rare, interesting instruments can all help create your unique sound. I took on a minor role in the recording section, helping to set up the live room for recording bass, guitar and drums, and independently setting up the control room when recording vocals. Recording engineers must know different microphones placements, what microphone is best for specific instruments, soundproofing and more to fulfil their role. After researching all of this, I acted professionally and critically when recording and helping to set up the studio, as I knew the better and more high-quality the recording is, the easier it will be to mix and master later on.
Strengths
A huge strength of this project was being able to utilise the recording studio. In my last final project, I didn’t use the live room as I created a lot of my songs using midi instruments and samples. Because I have never really set up the live room for recording before (we missed being able to do the recording project due to the COVID_19 lockdowns), I was helped by the music department technician, who showed me how to set it up so it would work efficiently and let me set things up independently. I see it similar to setting up a live performance, which helped a lot on the set-up, but instead of the audio going out through speakers, it goes into the computer in the control room. I used two SE Electronic SE4’s to record the acoustic guitar, one at the guitar hole and the other near the fretboard. For the drums, I used a spaced pair configuration for my overheads, a Shure SM57 for my snare and some clip-ons for my toms, as I knew using high-quality microphones in the recording will help hugely when it came to mixing the track. I used a DI box for the bass tracks. Being able to make decisions on what microphones and techniques I wanted to use in the recording studio gave me more freedom over my own tracks and helped make the songs unique and sounding how we wanted them to from the start. This will help in the future when recording as I will be able to set up a live room more confidently and can make my own decisions on equipment.
Another aspect that hugely helped to progress my project was all the context and research I looked at for different aspects of my final project. This included; recording and mixing techniques, history of certain music genres, inspirational music analysis’, and even looking into how to promote yourself and create a brand as a musician. All of this research helped throughout the project and it will also help in the long run; when in university and beyond. I really enjoyed analysing the two songs for my context as I love diving deeper into the musical elements and techniques used in the song that normal listeners might not pick up on. Without looking into specific parts of your project, I would have definitely struggled with certain things, especially recording and marketing techniques as I had never really looked into these fields specifically before and had only touched on them in previous projects. Even though we didn’t end up doing as much marketing and branding as I’d hoped, it was still very important to learn all of these strategies in case we did end up promoting more, and so I could apply them in things outside of this project and in the future.
Aside from the recording and production side of the project, which played a huge part in the final product, I also worked a lot on my guitar and vocal skills for the final showcase, as I knew this was equally as important and would be a great end to the year. In both some originals and covers, I used advanced fingerpicking techniques and worked with interesting chord progressions and shapes that I had never used before. This really helped me to advance my guitar skills as I began to use fingerpicking styles in my other music as I find it so interesting to play and you can create some great melodies with this. As for the vocals, this project has influenced me to carry on singing in the future and outside of education, as I have enjoyed doing this so much. I still have a lot of things to improve in my vocal area, and I really want to work on this so I can become a more confident singer, perhaps even singing solo on stage one day instead of doing backing vocals. I really never thought I would be singing and playing guitar on stage to an audience, so being able to do this
My mixing skills have definitely seen improvements during this project, and I’m really impressed with the knowledge I have gained and applied to the two songs to make them sound high-quality and professional. I learnt new things from both doing research and asking for tips and opinions from my tutors. Some examples of new things I learnt were parallel compression, EQing in more detail, saturators, vinyl distortion, auto-pans and limiters. I also learnt more about how to automate parameters of effects on certain channels more creatively and experimentally, for example, the auto-pan applied to the ambience at the start and end of ‘foilsick’, ending in a sudden drop out that I automated too. Overall, I feel like I am more confident and efficient in mixing. Compared to last year’s final project, when it took a good few weeks to mix the two songs, this year it only probably took me a few days on each track to achieve a final mix, showing I can manage mixing more and have a better understanding of the process.
Improvements
In general, I think a lot of things changed in this project, which is OK in some circumstances as you need to be flexible and open to change especially in such a creative environment. I feel like my planning of the project was thorough and detailed, however, looking back at it, perhaps a bit too ambitious. I would have liked to stuck to the timetable a little more, as I feel we drifted away from that for a number of reasons. One, I realised we were running out of time and wouldn’t be able to release our songs in time for the project’s deadline, and two, I think the recording process took longer than I would have liked. We had to spend quite a while creating new lyrics during our recording sessions when this should have been done beforehand. The plan was to record the vocals whilst I was away in Italy, however, due to the lyrics not being ready and the department being closed for some time due to COVID, we could not get this done then. This caused almost like a domino effect on the project’s progress, as things were slowed down and we had a backlog of recording sessions to get through if we wanted to get back up to speed.
One thing we definitely lacked in the final project was the promotion and marketing side. We managed to create a brand, featuring a logo, colour scheme, aesthetic and more, but never fully implemented this into a marketing scheme, even though we did post on Instagram sometimes. Similar to the paragraph above, we quickly realised we just didn’t have enough time in the project to promote both the band and two originals to their full potential, and we wanted to give ourselves more time so we can set up with a distributor and promote them in our own time without having to be rushed. It would be great to have the songs released around the time we plan to perform at Deershed, so audiences can listen to us after the event and it will create more of a buzz about us before the event. If we had more time, we could have worked a lot more on marketing, such as creating physical promotional material and content on different social media platforms to reach new audiences.
I also feel like communication became an apparent problem throughout the entire project, with different people. We had planned to include a session guitarist in our project to record the songs we had written. This was going fine until I sent them the songs over and they seemed uninterested to work with us and communication stopped. This was disappointing because it would have been great to work with another musician and would have improved the outcome of our songs, however, did not pose to be a major issue as we just used the ghost guitar tracks instead, which still sounded fine. Communication with my band member was difficult at times, and I feel like progress was slowed because of this sometimes. We communicated through Instagram but sometimes it could take a while to receive a reply, which when you are trying to work on a project together, can become an issue. For example, when I was away for the music project abroad, there was not much talk about our project, which was worrying when the plan was for her to record vocals when I was away.
Targets For The Future
The most important thing for me after college is university. I decided to go to university as I know music is what I want to do for the rest of my life. As I enjoy so many aspects of the music industry, from performing, producing, promoting and organising events, I want to go to university to broaden my skills in many fields and then home in on certain ones that I really want to focus on after university, to make sure I don’t spread myself too thinly.
A main thing I would like to achieve soon is researching mastering, and applying this to my own music. This would make me feel more confident and independent as a musician and will improve my audio ear training in general when producing and mixing too. Being able to get more experience in mastering will definitely help in the long run, especially in the modern, very independently run music scene.
Although I feel happy with the skills I have learnt on Ableton and would be able to independently use this DAW to create a song, I want to become more confident with Ableton, such as learning about different parameters within the stock effects, how to use Max For Live, and learn new features on the software such as randomisers and chance effects and different Ableton plugins. This would make me a more confident producer and songwriter, being able to use my DAW in the best ways possible.
I also want to become more confident with mixing, especially after working on this project. Mixing has been something I started to learn about a year ago, for my final project last year. Since then, I have found huge improvements in this field, however, I still needed tutor advice and help with certain parts during the mixing stage of these two songs. I want t to be able to mix fully independently, and this can only happen by researching things I don’t understand or am new to, and applying this practice to any future songs.
After doing the BCB radio interview to promote our final showcase, the producers and organisers there were really impressed with me, and even asked if I’d like to do some work with them down the line or even have my own radio show there, to which I have said yes! I am currently organising a meeting about this with someone at BCB, and hopefully, I should be working with them very soon. This will be a great experience for me; it will improve my communication skills, look great on future job applications, and give me many more contacts within the local music and arts industries.
Something I am very used to now is working in bands. This is what started my passion for music and I will always love playing live. However, not that I am going to uni, I still want my bands to carry on and be active. This could be hard to juggle but I really hope I can manage both university work and playing gigs with many different bands throughout the week and on weekends. The chances are I will probably join another band once at university for modules and live performance work, so I could be in up to 4 bands by the end of this year!
The final thing I want to really work on is improvements in my vocals. This year has really seen me come out of my shell in terms of singing, and I want this to carry on. I could get more vocals lessons for university and over the summer, and keep singing backing vocals in my bands. Being able to sing more confidently now gives me the opportunity to become a solo artist as I can also play a range of different instruments, instead of having to work with bands all the time as I have always been an instrumentalist.