My Production Diary
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Week 1
27.09.21
On my first week of university, I was given the brief that I needed to produce two songs using Logic with recordings made in the studio/ editing rooms and employ audio recording, editing and processing, mixing techniques as module guide appropriate to your project. This coursework sounded exciting to me I was looking forward to creating my own material although I was not as strong with the production side of things I was happy that I would be able to sing and write music I would be proud to showcase and submit. This week we learnt about the swing feature on the drumbeat tracks and how different effects can make our drums sound more humanized or computerised. We also talked about the different sounds you hear in music like stereo effect and how to make the sounds go from your left to right ear (panning) whist listening with headphones or through speakers. A great tip I also picked up was how to get rid of the master volume in our settings to optimize the sound quality that we can hear on our tracks. I found this technique useful when it came to producing my own and group tracks.
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Week 2
04.10.21
I was asked to collaborate with the production team and other members of our class to produce an EPK and to summarise key theories and concepts of the 20th and 21st Centuries, relevant to our creative collaborative practice. Our class and the production class merged together and we networked together and got into teams. We created a large team of seven members Kieran Smith-Helder, Jade Shambrook, Emma Heath, from the production class and Sylvana Ahmed, Aghigh Alsadat Mousavinezhad and Rhyanne Renee Gasper from the performance class. After our group was formed we wrote our names down on a paper and quickly brainstormed a few ideas, we thought about producing a song that we were all familiar with like a pop / rock track and vaguely spoke about each other’s skills noting that Jade was a producer, Kieran played guitar, Emma’s strength was keys, Aghigh played Ukulele and liked to write lyrics, Sylvana was a singer songwriter and Rhyanne was a singer songwriter / producer and of course I was a singer songwriter. We bared these skills in mind and said we would come back to it at a later date and went our separate ways without exchanging contact details. Honestly I wasn’t really thinking about the communicate part where I knew we all had a class together on Fridays and the fact that I was already familiar with Jade Aghigh, Sylvana and Rhyanne and has there contact details.
During class that week I learnt how important it was as a singer to hear the baseline of a song to reference the melody and structure. I was baring this in mind for when I started working future songs. This week we looked at ultra-beats and how to use a ready formed drummer. We also looked at how to make our own drum beats by using the midi keyboard and sound inputs on logic. I found this really interesting because as a singer drum beats really help me to sing on time. Having the knowledge of how to produce different kinds of drums proved to be helpful in the making of my tracks. With it being my second week of University and realising how much I need to learn and know about Logic, I did some homework and research of my own, by playing around with Logic and familiarising myself with the software. I also asked a friend of mine who was a producer to help me by giving me some tips and guidance on how to use some of the features.
Week 3
11.10.21
This week I started working on my first track. I was playing around with sounds in Logic and tried to make my own drumbeat and add strings, keys and an electric baseline but it sounded really raw and amateur, where I am rusty and technically at this stage more or less starting from scratch as a beginner producer. I ended up scraping the whole thing and decided to use the help of the looperman site and searched for an R&b loop to help give me a nice melody as a guide to structure my song. Once I added the loop to my track I changed the tempo and the key and dragged the loop in the correct place quantized it with every new change added, turned the metronome on to keep in beat and looped the first 16 bars where I was working out other sounds to add. After listening to the track a few times I wanted to add a rain / record pick playing or static vinyl sound effects (fx) to my track so I wrote these sounds in the looperman site and found the perfect record player sound and I added it to the first 4 bars of my track. The genre of my track is a slow R&b soul track later on I will build the sounds on the track to really be able to implement the R&b musicality into my track.
Week 4
18.10.21
The beginning of the week was going well. I was happy learning more about using different pages on logic to help with our production and programming number settings to jump from different features like the mixer, piano role, midi keyboard and track list. However, towards the end of this week, I started to feel overwhelmed with the work load and tried my best to organise myself but fell short and needed time out to process a few things in my personal life. I decided to take a back seat in terms of getting anymore work done and slowed down physically and mentally, to accommodate my mental well-being.
Week 5
27.10.21
Reading week- On this week I felt really rundown and unfortunately caught a virus / flu. I spent the whole week bedridden, resting and recovering. As I wasn’t physically attending university, I found it easier to stay home and put work on hold to concentrate on getting better.
Week 6
01.11.21
Continuing to feel mentally drained but now physically feeling better, I spent the majority of the week online. I wasn’t really doing much work for our project. But never the less I made the effort to come into class Tuesday and I was happy, I did because we were learning about recording audio on to tracks which proved to be really helpful when it came down to recording for my other project and eventually for my own two tracks and our EPK.
Week 7
08.11.21
This week we meet up with our EPK team and came up with a concept and a list of duties divided amongst us.
We decided on a theme and genre for our song, sexy super villain vibe EDM (electric dance music). We wanted our chorus to have big harmonies and loads of texture. We then delegated tasks to each other to ensure our collaboration runs smoothly and that every member of our team had a valuable role to play. The production team: Jade will be producing and mastering our final product, Kieran- will be incorporating live electric guitar in to our song, Emma- will be re-working or playing live piano, on the track. Performance team: Sylvana /Aghigh / Rhyanne and Sasha – Will be singing the vocals on the track working on the lyrics, melody structure, backing vocals, ad-libs and harmonies. (Jade low harmony) After this meeting we got more serious and excited about our project and created a team WhatsApp group to stay in Contact with each other. I felt good about this meeting with my team communication until before this point we was not really sure of what we were doing and we hardly connected with each other, other than to say Morning or discus other topics. Honestly none of us was sure of our plans and what to do collectively, so this constructive meet up really eased all of our minds and gave our project the green light, as long as we all worked hard and produced what we said we were going to.
Week 8
15.11.21
Did a lot of work in the studio learning about recording. This week Jade sent us all the backing track for our EPK so we were able to write the lyrics. She produced it really well I feel she really brought our ideas to life and executed it well. I’m not too sure if Emma and Kieran had added their parts or contributed to it at this stage but once we all schedule another group meeting, we will all know where everyone stands contribution wise. I come up with some lyrics for our group EPK song and shared it to the other members of our group via our WhatsApp group. Jade also had written some lyrics to contribute along with Sylvana and Aghigh. The performance team needed to schedule another meet up to merge all our sounds and lyrics together and see what we could come up with collectively. Where we had so much work to do individually, we all decided we would focus on our own work this week and schedule a writing and recording session the following week when we all got a chance. This week we really explored different types of sounds and noises concentrating on the treble and base sounds within sounds waves. He played different sounds distortions frequency’s like the lowest sounds and the highest sounds which were presented as buzzing ringing sounds. We learnt that when you are born you have 4 octaves of sounds that become less prominent as you get older. If you set it to a certain sound frequency you can silence out sound interference in your music production and how you can filtered and adjust the sound to cancel out nasal sounds and popping noises. My hearing has adjusted and changed so much since starting this cause.
Week 9
22.11.21
This week I developed my track a lot more by adding some sounds to my track and structured my song more by adding choruses, verses and a breakdown bridge. My track was set in the ABAC format. I also doubled the octave when the song came to an end and to show its finishing added Chroma Verb on piano and loop / sample and Harp.
I also begain working on my second track with is a trap / drill track with heavy drumbeats and strings. To create this track, I used samples from looperman. A rain sound noise fx, a rap/ trap loop, a gun shoot sound to uplift the chorus and a white noise sound to build up the sound. Once I downloaded the sounds I opened a new project and started to arrange the sounds. Once the sounds where on my track I used a DDOTM drum kit for my trap beat sound and trap clap audio files and begain placing the notes on the piano roll to make the sounds I wanted on the keyboard sound card. When I was uploading a beat, I pressed the flex tool hour glass symbol and then pressed the T tool for the tool bar press options and pressed control hold on the middle. Lastly, I added a reverb bus sound effect to make the sound, sound bigger like we were in a concert hall. Although I produced the tracks myself and all the ideas were my own I was assisted by a friend of mine who was a piano player, I would tell her how I wanted my song to sound and she would help me create the sound and tell me the technical terms for the things I was asking her to do.
Week 10
29.11.21
This week Rhyanne rearranged all our lyrics for our EPK project and structured them all together we just have to wait for our group meeting next week to come together and create melodies and record them on our track.
Week 11
06.12.21
This week I was working on my songs a bit more, starting to write lyrics and structure melodies for them both and adding to the quality and putting more instruments on my tracks. We had a brief discussion with a few members of our EPK group and exchanged a progress update and arranged for a deadline for the recorded vocals to be finished in time for Jade to mix and master the final song ready for our submission date.
Week 12
13.12.21
This week I was finalising my tracks and recoding vocals on them ready for my submission deadlines. We also placed and recorded the vocals on our EPK track, I meet up with the performance team and we got to work. Recording and arranging our vocals together. Unfortunately, due to the new covid rules our performance has been cancelled so we will not get a chance to preform our EPK or our other songs that we made. So we wasn’t able to rehearse or prepare for our group performance. Hopefully we will get a chance next year. Working on the EPK has been challenging at times, where we had such a large group and in the beginning we were all confused as to what we were supposed to be doing where two classes were collaborating and we would only really see the other group members in our joint lecture (Tim’s class) on Fridays. In the end we all come up with a good plan and I feel we all excused it well but in the future I feel we should be more productive and organise ourselves and times a little better so where not rushing and doing things last minute.