Entry 4 (30/04/2022)
Updated: May 11, 2022
This week we have done a lot of important tasks towards our final project.
On Wednesday (27/04/2022) we started our day with a meeting with our tutor Alex where we highlighted our plan for the week, within this meeting we realised we needed to move our meeting with Dan Fox so I went to speak to dan and we agreed on 04.05.22 at 14:30.
We also wrote the 'Acceptance' song, we used the writing method "cut ups". I cut out phrases and words from poems and pieces of writing about acceptance and put them all on the floor, I then picked them up and arranged them to make sense. After that I did a little arranging to make the song flow and work better. This was a new way of song writing for me, I think it worked quite effectively. In the future I may use this method again as I feel it created lyrics perhaps I may not have thought of that I now thoroughly enjoy.
On Thursday (28/04/2022)we took the day to practice the full set list, we recorded some of these and I posted the videos on my instagram. As it turned out in the end we didn't practice nearly as much as we intended to in our initial plan as we got held up with other areas of the project. Despite this we decided we didn't need to know the songs by heart as we were just recording them, so instead of learning all the songs fluently before recording we recorded and learnt simultaneously. It would've been more ideal to have been able to practice and learn more but I think our compromise worked well.
On Friday (29/04/2022)Dan and I went to Bluebells house to start recording our songs. We started off with recording our original song for 'Denial' we started off by recording bass and guitar, we plugged them both into a Scarlett 4i4 interface and ran that into Bluebells laptop where we used Logic Pro X. Initially we were recording both bass and guitar at the same time, however after a couple takes we decided it would be best to record them separately, so we recorded guitar and then bass. After we recorded that we listened back and felt we needed to re-record the outro, so we re-recorded that however after listening back to that we discovered a audio glitch between the first take track and second. To fix this we experimented with automation and made the first take track fade out (volume wise) whilst the second one faded in. This fixed our problem and we were able to move onto recording the vocals. Recording vocals took some time and contained a lot of listening back, splitting tracks and re-recording, we recorded vocals with my SM58 microphone plugged into the Scarlett interface. After we were happy with the main vocal line we decided to add harmonies to some of the phrases, we chose an octave harmony would be best for the track. After I sang the harmonies we could move onto EQ, we first equalised the guitar and then bass but after doing vocals we realised we had to redo the guitar and bass to match the vocals because we were very happy with those. At the end of this session I thought for our first recording session went well however in the future I thought we should take breaks more often because todays session was intense and we got burnt out by the end and were all very tired.
On Saturday (30/04/22) we started recording 'Acceptance' we had the same set up as the day before and recorded in a similar way, recording both guitar and bass first this was definitely a quicker process than yesterdays recordings. We stopped for a few breaks like we decided we should do after Fridays session, which did keep up more energised and able to record for longer. However, today we recorded piano for the first time and this took a long time, there was a lot of re-recording and we ended up writing a whole new section to the song as the 'outro' to the show deciding to scrap our initial idea of having 'Always with me, always with you' by Joe Satriani as the finale song, this was a decision based mostly on the discussion about the length of the show, we decided that removing this song would shorten the show and end it more effectively. Whilst this discussion and writing was productive and good problem solving it brought up a problem, as by the time we got to recording vocals it was 5pm already. We had planned to be finished by now and Dan and I had to leave soon, this resulted in having to rush the vocal recording, personally I wasn't very happy with this as id spent all day recording the other two over and over and as we were running out of time and knew we didn't have time on our schedule to revisit the vocals I had to settle for recordings that I felt probably could've been better. In the future we should definitely manage our time better and discuss adding / removing sections & songs outside of our dedicated recording time, as then we can discuss and deliberate if we have time to add sections rather than add them then rush previously planned parts.
As a whole I think this week went very well, however I would like some parts to improve i.e timekeeping when recording and more realistically detailed initial timetabling. As I highlighted earlier timekeeping and sticking to plan when recording can help ensure that all the most necessary parts of the recording are up to standard we are all happy with before adding extra parts. I spoke to both Bluebell and Dan about how I felt we rushed the vocals for Acceptance and they both recognised this aswell, and as a group we intend to focus on ensuring we have enough time for all necessary parts before adding extras. A more detailed daily timetable would aid this process so we intend on doing that. Similarly, in future projects I will make a more realistic initial timetable to avoid having to compromise practice time to ensure we finish our project on time. Practice time is an important part of this project and although practicing of the songs was the least needed practice time it would've been useful. By creating a more realistic and detailed timetable it will make sticking to it easier avoiding problems like some weeks rolling over onto the next.
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