Welcome to my reflective summary page. Here is the part of the blog where I will draw on my individual learning from the project and the highs and lows of the whole process from pre-production to the final completed product.

My roles:

My roles for this project will involve me acting as a producer, an engineer and a marketing spokes person. I intend to successfully produce this EP along with my colleague and after we have mixed and mastered the material, plan how the product will be distributed to the consumers and the format it will be released on.

Reflection on the Project

Week 1

After sourcing the client it was time to arrange a meeting and go through the track ideas for the EP as well as ideas on how it would be marketed. I felt good about this project already after our first meeting as I felt that the tracks had enough potential for people to want to listen to it. As the deadline is December for this project, I learned that it was a good idea to meet up this early on and record a rough idea of what was going on as it enabled the project to move forward so we could start to get to work on laying the tracks down with other musicians. I was however a bit worried on how we were going to source the other musicians, but its OK to be worried at this stage, isn’t it?

Week 2

On reflection after this weeks session I am feeling a lot more confident about how the project is going to go further. This weeks involvement with Chris Gill coming down to go through the songs structure with O’Brien has given me hope that in week 3 we will successfully lay down some drum tracks for the EP. This week I learned that it is very important for the drummer to go through the songs with the songwriter before actually recording the parts so both can agree on ideas. It was also good to learn how a typical ska beat is done with both the kick drum and snare hit at the same time, something I didn’t know before this week!

Week 3

Recording drums isn’t always as straight-forward as it sometimes should be. This week proved that with a few problems we had when miking up the kick drum and we weren’t getting the response or sound we wanted from it. Eventually after a bit of trial and error I placed a pillow between the microphone and the skin and we came away with a half-decent sound, on reflection this highlighted how in some situations like this it is possible to try anything. When recording there are no rules and it is good to try things you wouldn’t normally think of and this week I did just that and we came away with three drum tracks for the songs. My role this week was very much the engineer with setting up microphones and it is a role I feel comfortable in when I am in the studio.

Weeks 4 and 5

As explained in my blog these weeks were not used for recording as originally planned due to O’Brien not being able to make the sessions due to personal reasons. Initially this was very worrying as we had a schedule and time frame planned out for recording and mixing and so we had to remain productive. I used my time during these two weeks to do a lot of listening research and also discussed the possibility of applying for an extension on the project with our project tutor. The main lesson I came away with from this delay on the project was to always have a back-up plan which I didn’t have at the time but one was made during these weeks. The ‘plan b’ was to record parts in the coming weeks on more than one day a week but only if we really needed to, hopefully we weren’t going to have to resort to this…

Week 6

Guitar tracking is my favorite part of any recording project, especially when I get to play on the recording too. That’s what week 6 involved and with O’Brien playing the main rhythm on the tracks, he asked my to play some parts for the track ‘Another Day’ which was a really good learning process for me. My individual learning during this week taught me to listen to other peoples ideas and incorporate my own style when working on instrument tracking. I also used the idea of having a room microphone as well as the close miking on the guitar amp as I feel you should always make the most when capturing sounds in case you want to experiment with them at a later stage. I also got to record a 4 bar improvised solo which will hopefully make the final cut!

Week 7

This week I learned how important it is to have the musicians you’re recording in the same room at the same time, feeding off each other and creating a real vibe. The session involved Megel and Clive coming to the studio to record keyboard and bass guitar tracks and after watching these two experienced musicians I realised how good it would have been to have had Chris Gill recording his drums along with them at the same time. As both Clive and Megel went through ideas I realised how useful their knowledge of music theory was and how my learning process was growing with every session we did for the project. The tracks came away sounding a lot bigger with a lot more texture and all that was left now was to record O’Brien’s vocals.

Week 8

Every so often something changes and you have to adapt and find new ways around and this week I did just that after the multitrack studio was fully booked and we needed to record vocals. The solution came after I remembered that the sound theatre at the university has a brilliant isolated room used for automated dialogue replacement (ADR). This is where we would record O’Brien’s vocals and after booking out the room we captured some amazing vocal takes for the tracks and came away with the tracks finished and ready for mixing. The most important thing I took away from this week was learning that you sometimes have to think outside the box and other possible ways of doing something.

Week 9

Mixing is not one of my strongest areas and this week Phil and I were due to begin mixing the three tracks for the EP. After conducting research into reggae and ska mixing techniques I felt a bit more confident in what I wanted to achieve at the mixing stage with the songs, although I still wasn’t entirely confident about how well our overall result would sound like. After spending a good full week mixing, we would bounce down a track and then listen to it on several different devices to check for any issues. We did this to ensure that the the levels and frequency responses sounded good on any devices, whether the listener was listening on small ipod headphones or expensive high-quality monitors. The main key point I learned from my listening research was how in reggae music, the vocals are quite high in the mix and that everything has its own space. Therefore I made sure that the vocals on the tracks in the EP are quite high in the mix and stand out in a clear and coherent way with a decent amount of reverb on them. This week my main learning outcome was how useful it had been to research how tracks within various genres are produced and mixed.

Week 10

The final week of the project and everything is coming together, I have had time to reflect on what I have learned after the project and the various things I would have done differently. The one thing I would have done differently was to invite Chris Gill to the session with all the musicians at the same time, the main reason behind this is because I feel he would have got a better vibe off everyone and got into the swing of the music. As an engineer and producer on this project, I feel I have become a lot more confident with working with outside clients and people I have never met before. I have learnt to share my ideas and understand where other people are coming from with parts and I feel that I have a better insight into how to work as a producer with skills I have picked up during this project. After I leave university in 2014 I aim to put these new skills into other different environments and become a more experienced producer and engineer. In conclusion, I think that the overall sound of the EP is very good and this is because of the time and effort we have continued to put into it, week in and week out.