Final Evaluation
Over the past months, I, alongside a band of my friends have been working on our final project. As we stated in the beginning, our end goal was to create, record and mix a four song EP together as well as create a physical copy of it on a CD as an extra challenge. Now that it's come down to the final day, I'm happy to say we've managed to achieve this! With the time given, I focused my time in college onto the practical side of the project, spending most of my time writing lyrics, rehearsing or mixing the tracks. Whilst outside of college, I frequently communicated with my bandmates on creative decisions and spent my time doing some personal research also.
So what aspects went well? Well to begin with the obvious, we got the full EP finished! I believe something that I improved on throughout this whole project was my teamwork skills. Being in a band and relying on eachother can be stressful, but this experience has shown me that it can be helpful to work alongside others and get to communicate your ideas. I'm grateful for the recording side of things as I enjoyed being an 'engineer' and setting the microphones and wires up in different ways that I hadn't tried before, especially on the drum kit. Likewise, I've learnt much more about mixing recently by researching and then putting my newfound knowledge into practice. Compared to my understanding at the beginning of march, I understand much more and enjoy using different Logic features such as bussing and compressors.
On the other hand, it wasn't always easy learning with this project. There were a couple times I struggled with staying on track with my project timetable and had to adjust which therefore threw me off-course. Despite my previous praise of the collaboration, there were times where it caused stress. We would occasionally disagree creatively or a member of the band wouldn't show up to booked studio time which was not only inconvenient for us, but wasteful as other students could be making use of that time for their projects. I found myself struggling with lyrics for our newest song also, which then stressed me out as I didn't want to let my bandmates down. After awhile, I decided to watch videos on lyric writing and practice until something worthwhile was written. I also listened to similar artists and wrote songs in the style of their content to get some inspiration after seeing someone else do the same online and I found this to really clear the 'writer's block'.
If I could revisit this unit and edit my work knowing what I do now, I would try to start mixing earlier, as this week has been a bit of race to feel secure. Additionally, I would like to try adding more vocal parts and harmonies in the future as I only managed to complete them for some of the tracks. But overall I did enjoy this unit and the experiences it brought as well as getting to work and learn alongside my friends and bandmates and getting to release our very own work together.
Full Finished EP
One Day:
Drowning in Flames:
Paper Notes:
I Get It:
Finished CD
Below I'm going to list some images of the finished CD. It's got our whole EP burned onto it with the final mixes that we're going to make public. It includes the compact disc itself, a jewel case, a lyric booklet and some images of the band as well as our album cover. I'm super happy with how this turned out and thankful to Amber especially for putting in the work when it came to printing everything out, most of credit definitely goes to her for all the effort she put in. I'm also very happy to see that she took my idea on board of the broken glass design which she's incorporated to sit behind all the lyrics. Overall, I'm very pleased with how this turned out and it sounds very cool when played due to the recognisable 'CD quality'.
T-Shirt Design
I'd also like to add in, as some extra physical content that I've created, my band t-shirt. I was completely new to bleaching and designing clothes when I created it but it's a cool prototype of what merchandise we could potentially make. I hand drew the design in chalk and then went over it using a paintbrush and bleach. Despite not being perfect I think shirts like these could make fun unique tshirt's to sell at our gig's as each one is slightly different.
