Evaluation Of Final Performance

On the 7th of February, our groups finally got to perform the song we have been rehearsing since September. Every song that we performed (Heaven In Las Vegas, Don't Let Me Go, Papa Was A Rollin tone and Air Signs) In terms of performance, we had a lot of success as we had a lot of preparation as we rehearsed each song constantly so we were confident in preparation and equally confident in performance. However, one thing in my opinion that could've been done better was that their could've been a lot more uplifting body language from the band as a whole to make the crowd feel more welcome and positive. By this I mean that the band as a whole were in a way holding themselves back from interacting with the audience.

I have to say that we were all very happy with the performance as we didn't make much mistakes, their was a time where lyrics had been forgotten and improvisation had to be used to make the song flow, but in my opinion thats how true professionals go through their songs. When they make a mistake only they know that it was a mistake as they use their experience and talent to go through the songs.

Band Workshop Shoegaze

In one of our band workshops, we had also worked on a song called "Don't Let Me Go" which was meant to be our original song for the Shoegaze genre. This was during a session where their was only three people so we just came up with this idea during that session. Only a piano was used for this track as I was the only instrumentalist in the session so we had to come up with the song using just the piano and I used the sustain pedal to make the chords last longer and so it also links to the genre of Shoegaze which is musical loudness and dynamics happening simultaneously using the effect of reverb. We didn't necessarily struggle with the composition of the song but since the objective of the task was to have a full song complete with a mixture of different instruments, we couldn't do this as the whole band wasn't in and we decided to just use this recording as the main idea and any development could be added in future rehearsals.

grant song

When it came to doing this track, we had also done another song but since our classmate wasn’t in, it was difficult to get the song done especially since it wasn’t recorded properly in terms of timing. Therefore, what we did is record a song that we already knew and that we wouldn’t have any pressure on making. We recorded the Guitar and the Vocals all in one raw take. 

The aim of the track was to make it more of an acoustic feel, rather than a fully edited song with loads of instruments. In my mix,  I used the space designer reverb and lowered the wetness down from the default setting. Also, when it came to recording the guitar we used an amplifier with a reverb setting already on the amplifier, however I decided to add a silver verb on top of the reverb to make it more of a spacious sound to make it sound more of a soulful-R&B song. When using the equaliser, I made sure I took out all the tiny areas where there was a slight weird sound of high-frequency noises in the recordings. This includes finding an area within the EQ where there is an unusual high pitch sound within the recording.

 During the one take, we also recorded a improvisation on the guitar which is used on the second verse and chorus and I slightly panned it to the right as I wanted it to been more of an added feature rather than the focus of the song and to create a bit of dynamics in the track so the song wouldn’t sound tedious as the listener would listen through the whole song. One thing that was important when editing the song was adding compression to the vocals as the raw recording you could hear all the plosives and mouth noises in the phrases which sounds unprofessional, not just because I think it does not sound good because their are songs which have this feature but I since the song is an acoustic and intimate song I wanted to make the song as clean as possible. Therefore, what I done is I lowered the ratio and made sure their was a balance between the threshold so the vocals wouldn’t be too loud and the mouth noises weren’t too noticeable. It’s 

Prog rock

 During the process of creating our own progressive Rock song, we pretty much made this song by improvising on spot with everyone playing their own instrument and vocalist live on stage.  It was a fairly easy way of making this song complete and come out in a natural way,  however what makes this a very risky way to make songs is that it can very easily be forgotten how to play what was created in the first place. Which is what happened in our group and we had to figure out different ways to make this song sound as similar as possible to the original recording because the original recording was brilliant and we loved the way we used every single instrument stand out.  We use three different sections which is what we tried to do as the Prog Rock genre has this element of differentiation throughout the structure of the songs. We also changed the tempo and the time signature of this song, but still using the same key .  As much as it was easy to create a song, we found it difficult to finalise the performance of the song as we wanted it to become better and better and we never reached a point which we were completely happy with how the song was finished.

Blues

For our blues song we done everything is gonna be alright by mamma Thornton, we faced quite a lot of difficulties in the beginning of the process of this song. Since this song is so dynamic in its own way in terms of instrumentation and vocal presenve, It was hard for us to recreate same thing. Therefore, the way we manage to get through this song was to do the same exact instrumentation but use our own timing in terms of where the instruments lay within this song and whether vocals come within each bar. The vocals are pretty much improvised since blues was a genre that was mainly created by improvising and artists would use their own emotion in that moment when it came to recording  to create this song in a much natural way rather than having a complete figure out structure which  I think personally would make a song much more limited and  restricted in terms of letting the emotion come out more naturally.