Section 1: Rationale
When I started this course,my knowledge was compromised of some self-taught music theory. This includes 2-3 years of experience of DJ-ing and some minor experience playing the keys and using Logic and Cubase. Throughout the year, my understanding of the music industry has flourished vastly. I am now much more aware of roles available in the music industry including live sound engineering, label management, PR, and many more. In regards to these roles, I was taught methods to rig a sound system and carried out the practice, I was guided on the individual goals that a record label would have concerning selling music as a product and interacting with potential customers. My production skills have dramatically improved throughout the year as I have a broader understanding of the complexity behind the works of professional-level music producers and the tools that they used to create a certain sound. Due to my quickly-growing understanding of music production, I decided to produce an EP.
Section 2: Project Concept
For my project, I will be creating an EP. This EP will consist of tracks that are in the 160-170bpm range. These tracks will be heavily influenced by genres including D&B, Footwork and Jungle. I decided to name my EP ‘London Chicago Connection’ as those two cities have a musical culture that heavily influenced these genres that I am basing my tracks around, and I wanted to reinterpret elements of both cultures into my own work, whilst also having the natural influences of my own generic influences to give the work my own style. I aim to produce at least two tracks as I spent the first 3 weeks trying to complete a different project which wasn’t working out, however, if I can, I will include a third track, though this is unlikely due to time constraints.
Section 3: Evaluation
I will reflect on my work by assessing my progress week-by-week. I will do this by keeping track of my planned timetable for my work to be completed. My main focus will be on weekly targets, displayed on my 6 week planner sheet. This includes my plan and actual progress for each week. At the end of the project, I will consider everything I have done and write a final evaluation to reflect on what worked, what did not, and what I have learnt from the experience.
Research
The key tasks that I needed to figure out was the process in which tracks go through prior to the point they are released. The process for releasing music has changed a lot over the past 20 years or so according to this article written by well-established D&B producer, dBridge.
According to dBridge, the process in which tracks are released are quite different. In the past, when you’d finish producing your tracks, you would get it pressed onto a dub plate send it to the most well-known DJ you could possibly find that would take them. This DJ would be the only DJ you would give it to. This was because it would make this particular DJ’s selection unique. These unique selections would be a vital selling point for the DJ, leaving the crowd wondering what the tracks played were. To maintain people’s curiosity, this DJ would be the only person with these tracks for a few months until they were well-played. These tracks would then be commercially released after these few months onto vinyl records, which would be the point where the DJ has gained revenue from having these exclusive tracks, and the producer will now make money from selling their tracks that the DJ played that made people wonder what they were.
However, times have changed. It used to be relatively easy to be a producer and attain enough money to make a living and vice versa for DJ’s. When the ‘MP3 era’ arrived at around the early 2000s, it became easy for the public to pirate music off the internet. This meant it was no longer viable for producers to strictly produce for a living; they had to DJ as well. This meant that artists would be keeping their tracks strictly to themselves to play out. This also meant that DJ’s would have to become producers as well in order to keep a unique selling point.
Personally, I am not yet a club-DJ with regular bookings, so keeping my tracks exclusively to myself does nothing for promotion, and at the moment, I’m not too concerned about making money. This led me to the decision that I should send my tracks to record labels who may be interested in playing and releasing my music, as they already have an audience larger than mine, so if they were to play or release my music, some of their audience would become my audience, at which point I could seriously take the economic aspect into account.
Nowadays, it is common to come across producers who share sneak previews of tracks they are planning on rele
My strongest influences for this EP are DJ Rashad, Machinedrum, Om Unit and Abdulla Rashim. Other notable influences include Code 071, Ray Keith, Alix Perez, Voices From The Lake and Acronym.
The samples I used included vocal samples from two tracks which had a strong influence in early ‘rave’ music. I chose these samples because other than liking the way that they sound, I wanted to represent the history behind the music that I grew up around, whilst trying modern production techniques and fusing them with modern styles of music that have been recently influencing me such as Footwork and Minimal Techno.
One vocal sample was from ‘Renegade (Ray Keith) – Terrorist’ at 4m,38s
The other vocal sample was from ‘Code 071 – A London Sumtin’ at 2m,39s
The Renegade sample was featured in both tracks (in the Footwork track, it was used extremely subtly), whereas the Code 071 sample was only featured in the D&B track.
The D&B track I made was strongly influenced by Minimal Techno in the way that it has long, quiet, moody sounding synths, and minimal sections that have a focus on atmospherics. Particular artists that influenced me with this style include Abdulla Rashim, Voices From The Lake and Acronym.
My D&B track also took some influence from Footwork artists such as DJ Rashad and Machinedrum in the way that I used a hi-hat-rolling technique which they often use. This technique is also common in Trap music. I used this technique in sections where it was half-time. Switching from half-time to normal-time is common in Footwork, and can be heard on both of the tracks I produced. This makes my D&B track very structurally similar to the music that Om Unit produces, as his style is usually a crossover in between Footwork and Jungle.
The Footwork track I made has very little influence from genres outside of Footwork itself. It does however contain influences from Soul from the type of bell-based synth chords and electric pianos, though this influence is part of the roots and origin of Footwork anyway, so it is not anything new or experimental in terms of Footwork as a genre, but it was a new experience for myself as I have almost never produced Footwork before. As stated before, I used the ‘Renegade – Terrorist’ sample in this track as well to connect my musical upbringing with modern styles and production of music, though it was in a much more subtle, short-chop style similar to what UK Garage artists used to do.
My marketing strategy would be to search for record labels who release music that has a similar style to the music I had made, and contact them via email linking them my full finished tracks, asking for feedback at the very least. Nowadays, it is common for underground record labels to host podcasts demonstrating new music so that they hold relevance among their followers to show that they are still going and they are aware of new music and artists around. Due to this, labels are often open to demos for this purpose. It is in essence a win/win system for both the label and the artist who created the tracks as they both promote each other and both support each other in the process, in the case that the label likes the artist’s music.
Bibliography
dBridge Article: http://exitrecords.tumblr.com/post/141368031816/track-lists
Promotion Guide: http://www.musicindustryhowto.com/86-music-promotion-tips-that-all-musicians-should-know/
Promotion Guide: https://www.budivoogt.com/unconventional-guide-getting-signed-record-label/
Week 1
Planning & Research
The first week of the 6 week project was dedicated to accumulating ideas and plans for the project overall. My initial idea for my project was to engineer the sound for the show where everyone would demonstrate their work at the end of the 6 week project, however, engineering a show uses little creativity, and the project was meant to be based around creativity. This almost immediately ruled out the plan to engineer a show by the first day.
On the second day, I decided that I wanted to try to do a live performance. The idea for this was to use Ableton Live as my software to perform, as Ableton is a tool primarily designed around performing live when coupled with hardware such as the Ableton Push pad and the Akai APC40 mixer. My plan was to first source tracks for sampling, record the tracks, cut sections that are usable as samples, transfer these samples to Ableton, assign these samples to their individual pads on Ableton Push or Akai APC40, then create stems to group patterns/compositions of instruments (i.e creating my own drum loops, melodies, etc). These stems would then replace the individual hits already assigned to the Ableton pads when completed.
To include collaboration in my project, I was going to source a pianist to create some melodies for me to sample into Ableton as a stem. The pianist would play on a MIDI keyboard that is synced with Logic Pro X. I would record them playing into Logic Pro X. So that the melody they create is in sync with the whole audio project, I would ensure that the pianist would have the click counter enabled so that they are aware of the tempo of the project they are playing to. They can have the project tempo set at any that they feel comfortable playing to, as I can just change the project tempo to match the chosen tempo for my project afterwards. To give this melody my own personal touch, I would change the channel settings of the recording to a software instrument that I like, and then adjust the sound of the software instrument by opening the synth it was designed on on the channel strip, allowing me to adjust parameters such as attack, decay, sustain, release, drive, resonance and many more.
Week 2
Sampling & Recording
Week 2 was the week that I began to take action with my project after spending the first week speculating what I was going to do. On the weekend before week 2 began, I went crate digging for samples at record shops. I decided I wanted to find vinyl records to sample over downloading tracks off of the internet because it means I can have high quality audio, and because it’s physical, I don’t already have to be already aware of the music on it to find it. In other words, I wanted to sample music I did not know to make my project more interesting, and to force me to adapt around whatever music I take.
The records that I brought included ‘Sambas De Enredo: Das Escolas De Samba Do Grupo 1’ (a 1970s Latin carnival music compilation), ‘Movin On: An Essential Collection From The UK Soul Movement’, ‘New Jazz Spectrum Volume 2’, ‘Jimmy Young: Times Are Tight’, ‘Kathy: Too Many Walls’ and ‘Ripple: Funky Song’ as well as 2 unnamed white label records (One of these white label records turned out to be a track I recognized called ‘Jamie XX – All Under One Roof Raving’).
I spent the whole of week 2 converting these records into wav file formats. To convert vinyl recordings to wav formats, I used a turntable (Technics 1210), turntable needles, mixer (Vestax 2 channel mixer), sound card, and an Apple Mac with Logic Pro X installed. The audio information from the record is sent through the needle of the turntable to the mixer (where gain adjustments can be made if needed), to the soundcard (to convert the analog signal into a digital signal that the Mac can process. This signal is then recorded within Logic Pro X where you can then save it as an audio file. The reason that it took me a whole week to record was because I had not heard the music on the records before, so I had no idea where good sections of music to sample were. Also, I wasn’t always monitoring the records being recorded because it would just be me doing nothing for hours except changing the record every once in a while, which is a waste of time. While the record was recording, I was working on my other coursework, and collaborating with other students on their final project ( I was helping some with mixing down their tracks, using compression on their projects to separate kicks from bass, and a little bit of composition). This meant that a side of a record could have been finished up to an hour before I arrived to switch sides or change the record, hence why it took me an academic week to record all the records.
On the weekend of week 2, I listened back to the audio files, however, there was significant distortion in the recordings of the records, so much so that they couldn’t be edited through EQ to clear the recordings enough, so unfortunately, I had to rerecord the vinyl records in week . Also, the pianist I was hoping to collaborate with did not show up in week 2.
Week 3
Sampling and Recording
My initial plan for week 3 was to cut the samples that I wanted to use, use flex time to adjust all samples to the same tempo, tweak the actual sound of the sample using EQ and plugins (i.e reverb), create drum patterns and melodies with these sounds using Logic Pro X’s EXS24 Sampler, and then export each arrangement as audio files and import them into Ableton Live 9 where I would assign these arrangements to pads on the Akai APC40 so that I could begin practicing playing live, however, due to the problems that had occured on week 2, I had to record my records on to Logic Pro X all over again.
To ensure that I did not come across the same problems as I did in the previous week, I set the gain level on the mixer to an extremely low level just to allow plenty of headroom to avoid distortion. I also switched on the speakers of the computer so that I could hear whether or not the recordings were distorted.
Thankfully, this time round, the recordings were nowhere near as distorted as before, though the distortion that was present seemed to be a result of the ageing of the vinyl records.
On the wednesday of week 3, I encountered another problem. The problem was that the files of the recordings were corrupted, along with many other files on my USB. This was a major problem as it now meant that nearly 2 weeks of my 6 week project counted for nothing. This lead me to re-evaluate what I was doing for my final project, as I had used 50% of the time available for this project with nothing to show for it.I took into account that I had little experience with Ableton Live 9, and with the experience of it that I had from using Ableton Live 9, I did not understand how to use it very well. If I were to continue my current project, it would require me to spend week 4 sampling, leaving me with week 5 and 6 to edit samples, create my own drum patterns and melodies, import them into Ableton Live 9, assign each section to a pad on the APC40, and then ultimately practice for my performance. This would prove my plan of doing a live performance on Ableton Live 9 successfully extremely ambitious given that I only had 2 weeks left, and that is just assuming everything moves swiftly with no issues whatsoever. This would mean that if there were any more obstacles to come (which are practically inevitable), I would not be able to complete my project on time
At this point, I decided that I would change my project. My new project would be to create an EP. I decided to do an EP because I was already familiar with how to use Logic Pro X and use it’s features, I had Logic Pro X at home meaning more time can be spent on on my project, I already personally had a plan to create an EP since the end of week 2, and I had many unfinished tracks on my Logic Pro X at home (around 10 of which had been started since the project began).
The plan for my EP was to aim to create 3 tracks (my minimum target for myself was 2), create some artwork, have the tracks mastered and send the finished tracks to record labels for a response and hopefully, have an opportunity to release these tracks on their label. I would post my tracks to my soundcloud page as previews (meaning small snippets of the tracks themselves, but enough to give the listener the context of the track) once completed.
Week 4
Production & Artwork
Week four was a week almost entirely consisting of production. Of the 10 or so tracks that I had started, I focused exclusively on two of them. One track was a Drum & Bass track, which was heavily influenced by Dub and Minimal Techno. The ways in which it was inspired by Dub was through the strong reverb and echo’s of the vocals, organ and other synthesized sound effects. When combining reverb with echo, you have to be careful with the settings you have on each effect, otherwise they can fall out of time with the track, become an overly loud ‘mess’ of noise at the peak strength of the echo. This track was also influenced by Dub in the sense that it had a prominent bassline. This was simply done by making the channel for the bass one of the loudest when mixing down. Another way in which the track is dub influenced is that it has a vocal sample by someone with an accent of Caribbean origin.
This track was also influenced by Minimal Techno as it is not a particularly melodic track, and is neither very ‘loud’ (By loud, I mean that it doesn’t come across as ‘in your face’, but rather subtle). Minimal Techno also has subtle details in it’s atmosphere, similar to dub. In my track, I used a long stretching smooth sounding synth, with chords and patterns which make it sound moody which is a common trait among Minimal Techno tracks. I also included ‘melody-less’ sections to give the track a grittier and colder feel to it.
My other track was a Juke/Footwork track, which had more of a soulful theme to it. This was done by using a soft bell-like synth and creating an uplifting melody. When recording the melody, I purposely delayed some of the key hits while playing to give it a hypnotic chime feel to it. The drums used are 808’s; the virtually standard drum samples used in Footwork/Juke music.
I also began working on my artwork during the 4th week. My idea for the artwork was to take photo’s of local streets late at night/early in the morning while they are relatively empty. I wanted to take photo’s at night because the setting is moody and visibility is low, which matches the theme of my first track since it is dark, moody, and in some parts, LoFi. Dark, moody and LoFi themes seem to be a recurring theme among all of my works in general. I wanted to photograph local streets because I wanted to give some kind of context of where the music is from, as I feel that the location artists are from have culture that influences the music.
Week 5
Mastering & Production
By the time I had reached the beginning of week 5, I had virtually completed two tracks entirely, so I was reaching my self-imposed targets which I found surprising because I do not usually produce this quickly. I started week 5 by tweaking the mix down on the D&B track I was making. I had a problem where the bass line was clashing with the kick drum so that they were ‘blocking’ each other. To solve this issue, I had to use the compression tool.
First, I clicked on the kick drum channel that I had problems with and opened the compressor plugin. The problem was was that the kick drum was barely audible in parts where the bass is played at the same time, however I could not increase the gain on the kick drum channel because it would be louder than 0 db and risk being distorted, and if I reduced the gain on the bass’ channel, it would be almost inaudible as it would be ‘blocked’ by the sounds in the other channels. My solution was to set the attack speed on the kick drum to a slower setting to make it punchier, whilst also giving it a moderate release time so that it’s not so quick that it’s ‘clicky’ sounding, but not so slow that it doesn’t have much presence in the mix. I also increased the hardness of the knee to make the kick drum sharper. After these compression changes, the kick was much more noticeable in the mix despite the bass. To help give both kick and bass a little more differentiation, I went into the EQ of both instruments and gave them peaks in two separate places in their respected channels, as well as a dip in the opposing channel’s peak the the two sounds ‘duck’ out of each other’s way. Because I wanted my base to rumble, I made the peak on the bass’ EQ at around 20-30Hz, and the kick’s peak was at a higher frequency of around 50Hz. I found these techniques to be successful in resolving the issue I had.
Thankfully, the mix down on my Footwork track was un-problematic and a rather fast process. This allowed me to invest time into creating a 3rd track for my EP. This 3rd track was another D&B track, however I see it as the ‘musical midpoint’ between the Footwork and the D&B track I already made, as it had a D&B beat and structure, but it had a similar ‘dreamy’ mood that the Footwork track had by using synth chords as the leading melody. I also used Latin style percussion which was something that hasn’t been done (or at least not done very often) before. To give this track my own sound, I tried to create my own synth preset (or at least modify an existing preset to my own preference). The result ended up with a synth that sounded reminiscent of mid-90s Deep House (one of my favourite genres and periods for it as well) and Jazz fusion. I managed to create a bar which contains all the sounds I needed across the whole track. I then got the two completed tracks mastered by using tools such as Izotope to help ‘clear up’ and optimise the different frequency ranges in the track.
Unfortunately I ran into problems with my third track. The problem was that the Mac in the college that I used when I started working on the track (It’s worth mentioning that I spent at least 3 hours working on this track at the start) had certain software instruments installed of which I used that weren’t avaliable on any other availible Mac in the Music department as far as I was aware. These sounds were also not avaliable on my Mac at home. This limited the amount of time I could spend working on my third track as I could only work on it at college, and even then, this depended on whether the Mac with these software instruments on was occupied or not. Unfortunetely, this circumstance meant that it was unlikely that I would be able to complete the third track within the six week timeframe, which was unfortunate as I was working surprisingly quickly and stood a chance of having an EP as good as my classmates who had the whole 6 weeks to work on their EP.
Week 6
Production, Presentation and Promotion
Week six pretty much consisted of no new creative work for my project. In this final week, I was more focused on presenting my project to a crowd, and breaking down the concept and the creative work behind the project. I did get about two short, one hour stints on the computer that had the software instruments on that I needed for my third track, however that was not enough to complete my track, and every other time I checked to see if the computer I needed was a availible, it was not avaliable.
On the other hand, I did work on promoting my tracks. I created a short 90-120 seconds snippet of both tracks and posted them on my Soundcloud page. I then shared this post on my other social media pages for music including Facebook and Twitter. To find the target audience, shared my post to several Facebook groups dedicated to the genre of music that my tracks where of. This enabled me to accumulate approximately 200 post views in total, which considering I had not been very active on social media in regards to my music prior to the project, was actually a decent view count.
In hopes of getting my tracks released, I emailed a number of record labels with my full tracks to see if they would be interested in releasing them. These labels include Foundation X, Reportoire Sound, Good Street Records, Ground Mass, Modern Ruin Records, Lossless Music and Ingredients Recordings. All these labels are relatively small labels, even by underground music standards which is why I chose to send my tracks to them, as I expected large labels to ignore my emails because I am not an established artist. Of the responses I got, the feedback was relatively positive, however I was told that the mix down on one of my tracks needed attention as the bass was way too loud. I have had no direct interest from labels in releasing my tracks as of yet, but they assured me that my material was good and that they strongly recommend me sending them more tracks in the future. I probably got this response because I have not spoken to these record labels before so it would be a risk to release music from an unknown artist with no archive of releases to prove my skill.
Final Evaluation
During the project, I found myself coming across several realisations regarding things that could be improved as well as lessons from the project. One of the things I realised was that I did not have much of a solid plan for my EP. I was more just creating tracks and grouping them together rather than having a concept of what the EP would actually be. It should be kept in mind that I had a previous project in the first 3 weeks that did not go to plan, which made me reconsider and create an EP, which I only had 3 weeks to do. Nevertheless, in the future, I will know that I should have a concept behind the music on an EP, and that they should have a theme that links them together. The two tracks on my EP are very different from each other, and the only similarities in them are that they use a similar bassline style. With that said, I think that I could have made tracks that share elements of both tracks and put them on the EP if I had more time, strengthening the concept behind the EP title ‘London To Chicago Connection’.
Despite having some photographs for artwork, I didn’t manage to add important information such as the artist name and track titles in time as I couldn’t get hold of a computer with Photoshop in time.
I also believe that it may have been better to have informed the record labels I was interested in sending my music to that I was making an EP and the concept behind it before creating it so that they have some idea of what I am trying to do and see that I am serious about creating and releasing music, as opposed to what may appear as me just sending them tracks out of nowhere and expecting them to release it.
My tracks also need to be remastered as I realised after mastering them that the bass was way to loud when testing them on my Hi Fi at home. I would need to do the mix down again.
Due to these realisations, I’m holding back from releasing the EP for now. Over the next few months however, I am going to dedicate a lot more time to producing as I now have a good understanding of producing after the first year of this course, and have learnt some crucial lessons from this project especially. My future plan is to create a ‘bank’ of tracks on my harddrive, then cherry pick the ones that would make sense with a release together as an EP, and inform record labels before hand about my ideas behind the music, and also asking for their thoughts on my concept to gain an understanding of whether the ideas I had pitched made sense and whether it fits into the label’s musical context.
Links To Music
https://soundcloud.com/crystal-pressure/londondubpreviewforthcoming
https://soundcloud.com/crystal-pressure/summertonespreviewforthcoming
https://soundcloud.com/crystal-pressure/what-was-made-for-track-3/s-zRtlt
Veill Presents: Music Production & Performance Level 3 Coursework 