Communication In Industry

Instagram
Personally, I think that Instagram is a very affective way to promote an artist because it is the most popular social media in terms of the most impactful audience which would be young people. Also, due to my experience of promotion my videos on Instagram, I think that you get a lot more out of promoting my projects on Instagram as it usually using the videos as adverts and a lot of people tend to pay attention to these things.


Facebook
Facebook is also a very good social media platform to promote an artist as for things such as live performances as you can write a post and write the: time, place and date of your performances and then promote that specific post to get people to come to your gigs. Even though Facebook is a very good social media platform, in the recent years the younger generation has started using more Instagram and twitter which is why I think Instagram is probably the most influential in terms of promoting your self as a musician.

Touring

Touring is a very useful and effective way of promoting musicians as it allows fans from around the world to come and see a show of you and if possible to even meet you. Also, it is a way to also promote your music as fans can also bring parents and friends who might not necessarily listen to the musician but by the end of the gig they might gain fans from going on tour. Going on tour evidently helps with making money and having more money will help with: travelling, making music and promoting music online which has a big impact on the artists career.



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Proposal

Intro

The aim for my EXP is to create an EP with four songs that demonstrate the kind of music I love making and that show my style in this current point in my career. During the last year I have been able to discover my style as well as develop my sound as a whole in terms of what I enjoy making and writing. What I make now I would consider as my strength mainly because it is a style which I have been able to develop since these last few years. In this EP, there will be a clear demonstration of the progression and maturity in my overall sound as a musician which developed from my FMP in my first year of Level 3 Music. One thing I will also do is interviewing different musical artists that I have worked with and that have experience in the music industry. Also, since I will be interviewing people with a lot of experience, it will also help me with my career as I will be able to gain knowledge from the way these people make decisions in their own careers and I will be able to apply this when it comes to my opportunities in the future. I tend to evolve my song writing skills throughout the course of this project and listen to various genres of music to develop this.

Context
The EP will be based on the music I enjoy making and what represents me as a musician, the interviews link to my EP because these artists I will be interviewing have a similar style of music to me which will influence my EP massively when it comes to asking questions about how they make their music and techniques they use for their songs. Also, this is a chance for me to hear their experience and take inspiration from these artists and learn from their own experience and try to picture myself in their situation and what I would do in a certain position. I have chosen to focus on all of these three areas because its something that really interests me and that will keep me motivated to get better and get a successful end product, particularly the interviewing part of the project as gaining experience in this area will give me more opportunities in my career and it will also give me a new road to focus on to get new opportunities. The music for my EP will be to show the process of making each song and to show how I've progressed since last year and to show what I have learnt in terms of ways to make my songs stand out.

Areas Of Research
The area of research that I will look deep into will be within the interviews, I will ask certain questions that will be based on how these artists have used their experience to make the right decisions and to apply this to my own career. I will also look at different interviewers and I will look at the different questions they ask and see what type of questions they ask and apply this to my own interviews. My interviews link to my own work because I will hear about other artists' experience and what techniques they've used to get through their careers and how I can apply that to my own work. Also, I am also planning to ask questions in regards to the interviewee in relation to how they make their music and techniques they use in their own music and if I see that it can benefit me in my own practice then I can evidently apply this to my own practice.

Methodology 
I will research different online sources and use that information to develop the specific part of my project. I will also look at videos from YouTube that focus on mixing and I will have to look at different types of videos to see which techniques will help me and which ones work best for the music I want to make. In my interviews I will write down specific questions I will ask the people I am interviewing but the way I want the videos to be portrayed as is more of a natural transition through the videos rathe than stopping and looking at my questions and ask the artists what I have planned to ask. I will have questions which I will write down to ask but according to how the person responds I might develop another question on spot which will make it seem more natural and the most important thing is to be myself and make my personality stand out. In terms of the documentary, I will use my phone to record the process of each track and I will also use screenshots to show the transition between each song and how it develops throughout the project.

Week 1 - 11th March (Rehearse song ideas for first song)
Week 2 - 18th March (Contact different artists and talents to see if they're available for interviews and write down basic questions for each artist)
Week 3 - 25th March (Go back to first song idea, develop it and try to finish it, if possible to also record vocals y)
Week 4 - 1st April (Record Interview and take pictures of set up)
Week 5 - 8th April (Edit Interview and Start developing a second song idea)
Week 6 - 15th April (Research Interviews Online)
Week 7 - 22nd April (Record Interview and take pictures of set up)
Week 8 - 29th April (Go back to second song idea, develop it and try to finish it, if possible to also record vocals)
Week 9 - 5th May (Edit Interview and Start developing a third song idea)
Week 10 - 12th May (Record Interview and take pictures of set up)
Week 11 - 19th May (Go back to third song idea, develop it and try to finish it, if possible to also record vocals and record process for Documentary)
Week 12 - 26th May (Edit Interview and Start Fourth song idea. make sure everything is done and finish any gaps within the work)

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.