The production of this EP has been a challenging but fun experience. Setting my own learning outcomes was difficult simply because I didn’t know what I wanted to learn. However, looking back at my level 2 production work, I knew that there were many ways in which I could improve my production techniques. And so, I thought of the areas which could do with improving and set myself some learning outcomes to improve on them.
LO1: “Develop my understanding of making my mixes ‘fuller’ using stereo field and dimension”.
I’ve certainly learned a lot about creating sonic spaces within a mix through width, height and depth. Although I was already familiar with creating depth through reverb, through further research, I found out how to use it more effectively. Some of my vocals, for example, blended with the reverb which, although the reverb added depth to my mixes, would make the vocal parts sound more distant as well. To separate the parts, you can turn down the higher frequencies on the reverb and/or add some pre-delay. I never understood how pre-delay could be used effectively until now.
I also found the reasoning as to how we perceive width in sounds quite interesting. Before now, I used to pan string instruments and pad synths both left and right to make mixes sound ‘fuller’ but I never understood why it never worked. Now I’ve learned that identical sounds coming from both speakers will only result in a phantom mono effect.
With the research I’ve done, the work I’ve created this year makes a lot more use out of stereo field and dimension. As well as making some sounds seem ‘wide’ by having them contrast in different speakers, I’ve also applied width within a few musical parts by having them move across the stereo field. Chords and melodies can be heard moving left and right in ‘Overload’ for example.
LO2: “Establish ways in which to develop project management skills and apply these skills to the production process of my EP”.
My project management was quite poor during the production of my level 2 production work. This resulted with stress and a variety of technical problems. This year, I booked a number of studio sessions for recording and mixing across the weeks and planned on how I wanted to use each session before using them. This helped me prepare my work and gather necessary equipment. I even learned how to better organise my work within my chosen DAW; Reaper. Colour-coding, arranging, grouping and labelling tracks really helped make the sessions easy to navigate. This was important since most sessions had over 40 tracks, some with layers of automation beneath them. However, I also learned how to organise my work for more technical reasons as well. I learned that an overabundance of plugins can take up a lot of your computers processor and slow down its overall performance. This became noticeable to me as some projects began lagging during playback. And so, rather than having many plugins on each and every track, I learned to route multiple tracks into induvial plugins.
LO3: “Develop methods of writing music in terms of idea generation with a focus on melody using references from other artists and industry professionals”.
Geoff Petty’s ICEDIP/creativity process was helpful. However, I didn’t follow it very strictly. I didn’t create as many ideas as his process would suggest. I simply created four demos and became adamant on developing them rather than creating multiple demos and choosing some to proceed with and others to put aside. However, there was one stage from his process that I did find realy useful and that was the incubation stage. This is when you choose to leave your work alone rather than force yourself to develop ideas under pressure. Whenever I felt overly stressed about one of my tracks, I would separate myself from it and work on another track instead. I kept doing this, cycling through each track one at a time, and it really helped me develop my work and come up with music ideas while making use of as much time as possible.
The priority of my research for idea generation though came from analysing songs by other artists. The guitar solo in ‘Crash’ had many takes recorded before it, each taking influence from various guitarists. Some used wah-wah effects like those used in Stevie Ray Vaughan’s ‘Telephone Song’ and others used some more rockabilly-like playing techniques. In the end, we decided to use techniques heard in Van Halen and Fleetwood Mac songs. My research became troublesome when I wrote ‘Overloaded’. I was mainly influenced by the Stranger Things soundtrack while I was writing it. As a result, adding lyrics to it proved difficult as the Stranger Things soundtrack was mostly, if not all, instrumental. I was originally going to create a poem to be talked over the music during the verses, but this idea bored me as the narrative had no musical structure. Due to time constraints, I ended up adapting my poem into melodies through improvisation. I should have planned some better reference material that contained vocal parts since I wanted to write a song with vocal parts.
LO4: “Learn ways of gaining a successful vocal recording in preparation and recording”.
I’m not a singer and this became clear in my last EP. But with better preparation, I believed I could produce some vocals worth mixing. And so, I researched a variety of ways to prepare people for singing sessions. As well as utilising them myself, I also made sure that my guest vocalist, James Jolly, prepared himself as I wanted the best performance possible out of him.
James’s vocals were much easier to mix than mine since he gave a better performance. Realising how easy it was to implement James Jolly’s singing into my songs made me think I should have collaborated with more singers. Even with various vocal preparation techniques, my singing isn’t the best which, as a result, makes the mixing of vocals very tedious.
LO5: “Establish and implement current industry-standard methods of music promotion”.
The music industry is a network that connects people from many areas. The most effective way to promote yourself is to make some of those connections. And so I plan on sending my music to a variety of music-reviewing blogs. Although my objective is to “implement” methods of music promotion, I haven’t yet sent my work to any blogs as I wanted to allocate as much time as possible to finishing my mixes – I didn’t want to rush the production so that I may send the music to the blogs before the deadline. However, I will email them within the next week and hopefully have some reviews, or at least some responses from blogs who plan to review my music, to discuss during the Viva-Voce.
I was hoping the Ashfield council would be interested in helping promote my work when I contacted them regarding album cover imagery. However, the fact that they never responded to me meant I had to forget about that idea completely. Perhaps I should have emailed them earlier? I imagine they must be busy towards Christmas.
The collaborations I made with James Jolly and Joe Dickinson will provide me with some extra promotion. They could benefit from the promotion of my work as it expands their repertoires, showing people that they are open to collaborations and even experimenting in the electronic music genre. And so, they agreed to help promote my work through some of their own commercial social media pages. In other words, they’ll be sharing their own audiences with me.
Conclusion
I’m very happy with what I’ve produced. I’ve collaborated with two people, recorded guitar parts for two of my songs, produced 3 minutes more music than my last EP (not including any introduction track) and, overall, have enjoyed the process due to better planning and research. The production of this EP has given me the confidence to research further into music production and create more work in the future. However, the creative and technical choices I make could be heavily influenced by some feedback, of which I am really hoping to get from some music blogs. Overall, I think this EP has been a big improvement on my last EP.
