This year, for the final project, i went for a different approach and instead of writing my own music, i wanted to set up my own event. I won’t lie but i thought it was going as easy as riding a bike, but i ended up running into way too many issues and soon realised that it wasn’t anything like that. I started off by making a plan, it was going to be an outdoor event where a few bands and also a few acoustic acts showcase the music they are into. I was trying to make it a mini festival type thing, at a pub called, The Lord Clyde. The pub has a nice outdoor area in the back where I wanted to hold the event. I messaged them a few times, all their different emails, phone numbers and even in person. They weren’t getting back to me, and I was running out of time, so I messaged Night-train to see if I could move my event there.
This would be a pretty big change to my plan because I planned an outdoor event but I was now planning an indoor event. This didn’t change my thoughts on the event because I still wanted it to be a festival styled event with all sorts of different acts performing. Although i wasn’t hosting the event i wanted, I was still hopeful for a good turnout. With all this hoping, came some bad news, I had 3 weeks left and I was missing one thing, a reply from night-train. So I had to reach out to other venues, but I got lucky with, probably the best venue in Bradford, The underground.
I ended up hosting my event at the underground, and it went really good.
I didn’t end up selling out the venue as I hoped because i hadn’t had much time to promote, but we had an alright turnout. There was two acoustic acts, Brodie and Lacey with Isobel, they played brilliantly with a wide variety of songs. There were also two bands, a band from level 6 of the HE music course and My band (Ultraviolence), which played better than expected. The level 6 band wasn’t something that I personally wanted at my event but the bands that I had booked for this event had to pull out because of personal feuds between members, but I needed at least one more band to play along side my band and Pav asked me if they could play for their project so this seemed like a way to solve two problems so I agreed. Not to toot my own horn or anything but my band played three different gigs within about three weeks and this is where we sounded the best together, i don’t know exactly why but we were more comfortable together than before.
Overall, this project had its ups and downs but in the end i completed it to a satisfactory standard, it could have gone better but unfortunately I could not achieve that this time. What i could improve on for my next event is getting the venue on board with a rough plan before making a final plan for the event. My time management skills were really put to the test in this project because I had a set plan for when I was going to do everything, but when the venues weren’t responding, my time was expiring bit by bit, and eventually, I began to rush everything. I was never into live music events before I stayed at college but they grew on me and I started to like playing live and I really enjoy doing that, but during this project I got to learn more about the background layers that go into performing live at venues and I really enjoyed doing it. I am definitely going to be making some of my own events in the near future, but this time I won’t have a deadline with college so I will be going to be able to consider more factors, but also won’t have access college’s equipment if the venue doesn’t have in house equipment. By the end of this project I have realised that I do not only have a passion for music, but I also want to explore the many other aspects of music in some way, because there’s new things to learn every single new day.