Final Product Evaluation (Practical)
As a whole, I really enjoyed making the two singles over the space of these nine weeks. They have come such a long way from when they were just initial ideas and simple loops on Ableton. They have both gained structure, new instruments, more elements and effects I never thought I’d use. I have impressed myself during this practical side of the project because before this, I had absolutely no idea how to use Ableton or how to mix tracks, and I had a little experience in producing from project two and three, but not enough to call myself a producer. As well as this, I have used hardware that I never thought I’d get the chance to use such as Ableton Push’s and even be able to work in the control room with the mixing desk and high-end monitor speakers.
There are many things I could have done to make these singles better, but given the time frame I think I have done a really good job both as a producer and mixer, and the final product is professional and high-quality! The collaborations I had during the project were great and I could have asked for better parts and musicians. As well as actually making the songs, I managed to tackle promoting myself and my music, and creating artwork to go with my music. Here are the two songs in full. They have been mixed and mastered and are available on all streaming platforms. I have also included an overall evaluation of both the tracks, explaining the behind the scenes of the production, recording and mixing of them both on Ableton.
General Points For Strengths
-One of the most important targets for this project was to produce a high quality and professional end product. I mentioned this as a target in my introduction and presentation, as it is vital to have this if I am wanting to release the song professionally. I think I achieved this target as the song is of excellent quality because of the hardware, software and my own musical knowledge that I used to my advantage.
-As well as the two singles being high quality, I also think the collaboration side of the project worked extremely well. The main part of this project was to have at least one collaboration, so the fact that I have many, like David, Lucy, Meg and Lex really shows that I was dedicated to getting two great-sounding singles that worked well with the theme of the project. Because of this, I now have more contacts; these contacts bring me into the music industry more as I am working with professionals such as David. I made sure I communicated well with all of these as often as possible so we can work together to create some great ideas.
-The musical elements that I have used have improved my knowledge of producing and mixing and also to make the song better generally. For example, I used my knowledge of dynamics to learn about automation and how to change the volume of channels during the song, which helped to dip certain musical ideas in and out. Also, I used instrumentation as a way to experiment with different and quite unconventional sounds and pairs of instruments that aren’t usually seen together like a flute and sub-bass.
-This might not seem like a part of my practical work, but it has actually played a huge role in my project; artwork and promotion. Promoting my music was something that I wanted to get into at the very start of the project, and it has gone very well. You can see through my promotion logs that I have gained a following for my music and the artwork I have produced with Paul, such as the animation and single covers, are excellent and very skillful. Having this practical skill is important in music if you want to get your name out there and gain contacts in the music industry.
General Points For Development
-I could have had more of a role during the mastering stage, however, I didn’t know much about this job and therefore could have done more research into this before it got to the mastering stage. Knowing more about mastering is something I would love to learn about during my second year if I decide to produce more as I feel it is a vital skill to have as a producer and musician, even if you just need a little understanding of how this process works.
-I could have thought of many ways the songs could be structured as they both have the same form. Even though one of them is an instrumental, it still has the same structure as the one with lyrics and I could have changed this to make the songs differ more. For example, I could have put the two solo’s at different places in their songs, and worked on things like pre-choruses. I will definitely do research on creative and uncommon song structures if I go into production again.
-Instead of using drum samples, I could have taken time out to record the drums professionally instead. Even though using samples is accurate to the genre and stylistic context, recording them live would have shown my skills as a drummer and would allow me to be more creative with the sound of the drums (I could add different effects to each drum, for example).
Project Five Evaluation
Overall, I had a great time during this final project! I have absolutely enjoyed going into new areas of the music industry and learning about and within these roles such as production, mixing, distributing and promotion. I feel like I have put a lot of effort and determination into this project to make the final products and even my digital space work the best it could possibly be given the time frame. I think one thing that spurred me on to get my work perfected is the fact that I was releasing the singles, so I knew they had to be perfect before the deadline. Therefore, I think this project as a whole was a huge success; I achieved exactly what I wanted to do! There were points in the project, however, where I felt my work wasn’t quite on par, and this made me lost some motivation. I think a part of this was the fact that I may have overworked myself a little too much! However, I did get back on track quickly and I am really proud of my final products and the other work I have done throughout.
Producing is definitely something I am going to explore more over the holidays and during my next year in college as it is something I have enjoyed learning about and I would love to gain more knowledge in this role as I still have a lot to learn! Even after college, I would certainly consider producing as something I could venture into as well as being a multi-instrumentalist. I understand that in the music industry, a lot of the things I had done for me such as the mastering, collaborations, filming and animating for the showcase, and even creating the artwork would have all cost a fair bit of money, so I am grateful to have got this for free. As well as this, I would have needed to rent out a studio and possibly equipment to be able to get the full potential out of this project if I wasn’t in college. Having a basic master might cost around £35 per hour, the filming and animating about £40 per hour, and around £27 an hour for a freelance graphic designer. Renting out a local studio would have set me back around £15 an hour with equipment such as a mixing desk, instruments, monitor speakers, microphones and stands included. (All of these rates have come from Google and may not be realistic).
A producer is someone who works in the music industry. They create the song usually using a DAW, and think of creative ideas to add to it, like the instruments and structure. Producers have to be lenient to ideas, creative and be able to take responsibility and criticism. A mixing engineer would then take the producers work and make it into a much more high-quality song, using creative and correctional decisions to transform its sound. They would experiment with different effects, parameters and automation to see what suits certain sounds. Mixing engineers have to be very open-minded, have a good ear, and be very motivated to finish the mix as it can take a while! However, a producer would most likely be present for the mixing stage as well, recommending any ideas they have to the mixing engineer. I think I took on both of these roles in a professional manner by using my knowledge of producing and mixing and applying it to my songs and also being very open to different ideas and critiques about my song.
Strengths
I would say this project has been a huge success overall, and I have shown many strengths throughout it. Comparing my end product and portfolio to my proposal at the start of the project, I have changed hardly anything! I have gained many skills from my context and research work, such as being able to analyse songs efficiently and in more detail, and understanding the relevance of my written work to my project; I gained a lot of knowledge from these and I plan to use what I have learnt in future projects. The practical work is to a great standard and I am extremely proud of the outcome. Adding to this, my evaluations represented what I have achieved for my practical work. Overall, I stayed true to the targets I was making in my evaluations and the weekly target sheet, and I completed most of the work that I mentioned I wanted to complete during my project proposal. As well as this, I made sure to correctly reference all of the pieces I used for information and quotes.
A huge strength for me during this project was being able to release the songs onto streaming platforms. Putting the songs out onto streaming platforms was something I have wanted to do since the start of this project and even before; I thought the idea of having music out into the world so anyone can listen to it would be amazing, and I was right. I did a lot of research into which distributor I wanted to use, considering things like how much music I plan to release in a year, what genres I will be focussing on, and how I want to grow my fanbase by turning one time listeners into dedicated followers. The actual distribution process was really interesting and I learnt about a lot of legalities when putting official music out there. Using Distrokid also gives me the opportunity to become a Twitch Affiliate; I want to take this opportunity up during the holidays as I think this will help to grow my fanbase by streaming music production to new people. Distributing music again net year is something I want to do again after gaining more of a following.
Another asset for this project was learning Ableton. This includes the basics and the more intermediate features that helped me progress my music independently. As well as learning Ableton, I also started working with 3rd party plugins and how to navigate around new pieces of software. Out of all the DAW’s I have used this year, Ableton is certainly my favourite. It feels slick and easy to use and I think I have picked up the software extremely quickly given that I only started using it just under four months ago. Because of this, I plan to use Ableton for any other production and mixing work i want to make as I am comfortable with it. However, learning how to use even more DAW’s would be useful as knowing how to navigate them all would help in a professional music industry situation where you might be in a studio and the only DAW available is Pro Tools, for example.
Furthermore, I took advantage of collaborations and working with people inside and outside of college. A great example of this would be working with Lex from the University course. He played the flute for my track ‘Going Down’ and also recorded a sub-bass synthesiser for me. his work was amazing and I am extremely happy with the outcome. He told me how he recorded his part from home with different types of hardware, and also gave me some recommendations to listen to that are similar to the music I was working on. Also, David Hogan, the brass player on my song, was a collaboration I did outside of college. I am very grateful that he recorded his parts on my song for free and I couldn’t be happier with the outcome. I think getting used to collaborating is important as this is a very common factor in the music industry and for me as a producer and songwriter. I would love to work with more people in projects for the future and I am getting more used to working in groups and with people I don’t really know.
I think my evaluations this project have been the best out of all the evaluations I have done this year. Considering I was doing two evaluations a week at most times, I still managed to keep this work up to date and write everything I needed to. I also made drafts of my song every time I made changes to it and uploaded them to Soundcloud to show my progress in a different, more engaging light. As well as this, I tried my best to include three strengths and improvements in these write-ups, but sometimes I didn’t need three as a lot of the work was already finished. As well as strengths and weaknesses, I made myself up to three targets every week on each single, and had a go at completing these during the next week. This ensured that my songs were always improving and would be ready in time for the deadline. In my second year, I plan to keep this amount of workflow up, making sure I am using different forms of media to show my progress. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses in the music industry is extremely important if you want to challenge yourself with new targets and learn from your mistakes.
Improvements
Overall, there are a lot of things I could have improved with this project, some of them minor, and some of them more important, and these could have made a huge difference to my final products and portfolio. I plan change this and work on these improvements during my second year at college to make sure I get more out of projects, so they are a lot more successful and that I am happier with the outcome. Realising improvements and mistakes throughout the project is important to develop as a student and musician as there are always things to make better and constructively criticise, and acting upon these improvements would make me a lot more professional.
I think, as a whole, I could have done more research on things that would be relevant to my work. For example, I could have researched efficient ways to promote yourself as a musician and how to make connections with other people in the industry early on in the project. If I did this, I feel like I would have had a much better chance at finding a rapper that would be willing to work on Going Down, and this would have improved the song hugely. I could have also done a little more specific research on mastering, as for the final masters, I didn’t have much of a say on them and I wasn’t quite sure how it all worked. I could have tested free mastering plugins like Ozone Elements, and learnt how to use this myself before it got to the mastering stage. I plan to learn more about mastering over the holidays and during my second year so I can develop as a producer and mixer as well, and my musical projects in and out of college will be more independent and successful.
Something that I could have done better this project was stick to a timetable, specifically the one I made at the start of the project. This timetable went through every week, and I made notes of what I wanted to achieve and the plans I had. I did follow this for the first few weeks, for example completing all of my context work and starting with promoting and making social media accounts. However, after a couple weeks in, I fell out of this routine and simply started doing things on the project as I needed them. This caused a problem during the project as I found that I lost motivation for my work as I let things pile up and didn’t use the timetable to get back on track. However, I did make notes in my diary about what I had to complete and then crossed it out once it was finished, but I think going by an actual timetable would have been a lot better and would have made me less stressed! In the future, I will undoubtedly use a timetable for other projects as I have realised what changes it would make to my work and motivation. I think working with a timetable would make me more professional as a musician and producer as a lot of roles in the music industry, such as producing, are very methodical and things have to be finished for a certain time.
I think that promoting was a field that I definitely could have done more work in. For example, I could have done more physical promotions like handing out flyers and putting up posters around my local area, promoting my debut singles. Also, now that I think about it, I could have posted more on Facebook as this would have been reaching out to a much different, older-on-average audience that I didn’t get to reach through TikTok and Instagram. Although the release went very well, if I wanted to get more streams on these songs, I could have done more of an event to announce the release of my music. An example would be Twenty One Pilots. They are very interactive and engaging with their fans as they put on events like streaming parties, live streams, Q and A’s, and are also very cryptic about their music and the release of it. For example, for their latest album, they created a story behind it and made cryptic messages that their fans were eager to decipher. So, to gain traction and hype, I could have done something similar, like creating an enigma that people have to solve to figure out the song name, release date etc.
Targets for the future
One of the major things I missed out on this year, especially for this final evaluation, was using a reflective model. This would have helped me a huge amount to reflect on my work on this project and to see how I can improve on these, but unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to implement it into my work. However, I certainly plan to use it next year.
I have been in the control room for a lot of this project when I was working on practical work, however, when I was recording things such as vocals, I usually got a tutor to set up the recording session for me as I wasn’t sure how to do it. Next year, I want to fully learn how to set up and utilise the control and live rooms so I can record things independently.
I came into this project knowing absolutely nothing about Ableton, as, before this, I did project three on Reaper and project two on Logic. I know a lot more about this DAW now, but there’s still a lot I can learn on there, especially with producing and mixing, even mastering. So, I want to get faster generally on Ableton and learn about different features on there.
For future projects, as I mentioned above, I should perhaps do more extensive and specific research work to make sure I know everything I need to know before I start with my practical work. This will make sure I can stay motivated with the practical side and I don’t need to break off my workflow to research and learn how to do certain things.
After this project, I have become a lot more interested in producing and mixing. So, I plan to pursue this further by taking time out to learn more about these fields. If I can, I would love to get more experience in this by applying to local music studios to volunteer there and learn from professionals in the industry.
If I am wanting to get into a conservatoire after college to pursue music even further, I need to have at least a grade five in music theory. This is something I need to start working towards over the summer and during my second year in college so I can get this out of the way as soon as possible, and it gives me more of a chance to go to a conservatoire.
One thing that I’ve always wanted to do was to work with more analogue equipment. This might consist of synthesisers, drum machines, effect units, patch bays and more. If I can, I would love to upgrade my hardware and make my musical arsenal at home even bigger so I can make more impressive music out of college.