Project updates, reflection on pitch, a new direction, working with multiple artists, the journey so

I’ve been away for awhile and now I'm back, been unwell for about 2 weeks now and it's time I caught up to where I'm at currently and where I see myself going.

Our project 2 pitch back in week 3 has taken a slight change in direction. For our pitch, Darcy, Simon and I presented that we would be creating an ep of original music, showcasing Darcy’s production as an artist and possibly myself if I can get a track done that I'm happy with and my artist is happy to write or freestyle on. In our pitch, we decided that we want to do a lo-fi, MF Doom style ep consisting of around 3 to 5 tracks. Our intentions for the project were successful in gaining interest among our class and I'm sure the lectures were happy to see us move forward in producing this product. The general feedback from the class was that the genre of lo-fi is heavily sample based and we would need to either find royalty free jazz/brass samples from Splice or record our own performance on some keys through midi or record a brass player in the studio. The main driving force of this genre and style of direction we wanted to take heavily influenced by my love for this genre and also the production aesthetic that Darcy is currently experimenting in and creating some beats that I think have lots of potential for reaching a lot of plays on SoundCloud and possibly be sold on Bandcamp or iTunes. So we were given the go ahead for this project and decided to work on it after 6 because we had a sound replacement for that AD that I’ve been talking about in my previous blogs.

Week 7 came along and I had my transferable skills meeting and discussed how I could better myself in my practices and as a person in general. I had the pleasure of discussing these things with Adrian Carroll, an audio engineer and our lecturer and also someone who I look up to in the industry and also hope to continue to be able to have these meetings with and most importantly keep in touch with into the future, along with my other great mentors. After our discussion, these were Adrian’s notes to help me improve these skills.

Notes: Vesh has identified that his reflection after sessions could be improved. The time management of the session is well under control but the reflection process will be worked on. Vesh will evidence this by doing his reflection after each session and periods of project work. Vesh will also evidence this by doing a separate blog on his self-reflection progress and techniques.

This blog will go over where I am now and what I need to do to improve. So after my meeting, I was keen to get straight into doing my blog but then I realised I had a session on Wednesday (the next day) and that I needed to discuss with my artists if they could still make it and discuss microphones and what exactly we wanted to achieve in the session. This was when one of the artists, Skamux, told me they were going overseas to America for 3 weeks, so we decided GHO$T would take over the role as the lead artist on this EP. To accommodate for the side projects, I'm currently doing with ghost and what I wanted for the EP, I decide we would go from lo-fi to more of a trappy hip-hop style somewhere along the lines of the track in my case study I discussed and also with some of the original styles we discussed in the pitch. During that session, Skamux decided to make one last beat before he had to prepare to leave for America. We didn’t get time to record vocals but that beat will continue to develop to be on either this EP or use next tri. Before I went to the session I was struggling, I was getting sick and a had a fever but I thought this was the only booking available the whole week and when everyone could make it before Jordan left for America and then after the session I got sick for 2 weeks. I planned for week 7 to be my catch up week but I lost all that time trying to survive. After a course of some antibiotics and getting sick of being sick, I struggled my way to class on Thursday and Friday of Week 8. Now it’s week 9 and I'm about 80% of the way to recovery so I have to get back into the swing of things and get the next studio session happening seeing as I'm the liaison with the artist. This week I plan to get a studio session happening with Darcy and Kudzai to see if Kudzai is keen to rap on what he can resonate with from Darcy’s library of loops and beats. I during my sickness managed to piece together a quick loop that I made while doing my case study in Ableton. Having very minimal experience with Ableton and having Darcy as a mentor is great for developing me further in using Ableton for music production. My goal is to get a track happening, pass it onto Darcy for feedback and maybe get him to help me remix then master the track, if we get Kudzai’s vocals on it.

Currently, we have two tracks and a potential third which are my track to be on this EP. One of the challenges of this multi-genre EP will be mastering the three tracks from three different styles and levels of the producers’ background experiences, then making them sound like a cohesive EP. We will be making sure all three tracks will have similar mastering processes to help add some sonic and production consistency. We can also achieve this by getting feedback from class members through our Slack Feedback channel.

Currently, where we stand right now, as a group and as for myself, I feel trying to keep up to date with my blogs and manage my group members for studio sessions will be a bit of a challenge but we will see how it goes. I'm the type of person that loves doing the practicals, going in to class and in the studios and even just witnessing my lecturers’ workflows, seeing industry professionals doing their thing in the studio is what motivates me to go to class and be in their presence. What I don’t like doing, is writing down my reflection of things because I feel, right now where I am, as a student, audio engineer and producer, I still don’t fully understand and know exactly how to explain why I do the things I do in my studio session, as well as my mentors, can justify their actions, but I have full confidence that I'm moving in the right direction. I love doing the practical side of things and I'm not afraid to fail and make mistakes because that’s what moves you forward. I enjoy putting myself in a pressure situation, for example, we had a situation where we had to record some vocals with Guy Grey in the studio, I discussed with Guy, the signal flow of things, inputs, Pro Tools session setup and made sure we were using the right equipment with the right gear. We were recording an artist, Alex Mills (, in the Avid S6. We used a u87 and a ribbon mic, both going into the Avalon channel strip. The Avalons in the s6 is normalised so you don’t have to do any patching, however, we had to send the other two guitar mics and a DI into the SSL XLogic Alpha, where we had to patch back into Pro Tools as the SSL wasn’t normalise in the patch bay. Guy had not previously recorded in the s6 and I had some previous experience recording vocals in there from my session on Wednesday with Jordan and Kudzai. We experienced our own issues and things but that will be discussed in a later blog.

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Writing these blogs, I get really side tracked, so I'm going to try to stay consistent now, I will try, no promises.