The Plan

A lot of progress has been made this week in AUD210.

In the first session the class presented their project pitches. To summarise, we decided on our group name which ended up being RCB Productions, and began to construct our project pitch. In order to complete our project successfully by the deadline, we first had to construct a project plan, which essentially listed the details of what we were going to do, as well as potential risks. We have also implemented other methods to keep track of our progress, such as a shared Google Calendar and Trello forums. After completing our project plan, we could then base our project pitch off of it, allowing us to share the more specific details of our project with the rest of the class.

After our project pitch we received feedback and questions from the class, to be honest the sudden rise of questions after our presentation and comments freaked us out a little bit, and made us questions whether we had bitten off more than we could chew. To counteract this, we brainstormed some ideas that we could use as backups in case our initial plan was too complicated to pull off in the limited time frame we had. As we only had a week prior to decide on a project to pitch, I felt that there may be some things that we hadn’t thought through properly yet, however after proposing a number of options that we could take, we collectively discussed the positives and negatives of each to find a plan that was realistically attainable in the time frame but also flexible and easy to adapt in case of sudden changes close to the due date.

I am happy to say we are now comfortable with the plan we have chosen, and am glad we took the time to lay out each plan in writing to decide on one instead of making the mistake of not thinking through our options properly.

We decided to set a date for our recording in week 4 to give us not only enough time to mix it but a small amount time to do any last minute redo’s of recordings. I generally have a workflow where I get all of my creative concepts out for the scratch track rather than worry about the mix, so having extra time to mix the track I think will be very useful. Another reason for this is that we also expect that a lot of processing will be needed on the vocals to give it the clarity that pop music and our references track have.

I have continued to communicate back and forwards with our Artist that we are recording, and we decided to set a recording date (11th October) and also have a session before this where we workshop the demo he sent us so that it fits the demo we’ve created before we start recording. Our artist has been very easy to work with, and is agreeable for us to experiment with the demo as much as we’d like.

We’ve started writing a new chord progression to work with the repeating demo in order to make it sound more pop. We changed the key of the original song being C# minor to the relative major which was E major, in order to change the vibe to the sound we were looking for (Circle of fifths showing major and minor keys, n.d.) . The actual demo itself is much sadder than we wanted it to be, but I noticed after listening to the vocals alone that it was just the chord progression that made it sound this way, and that the vocals themselves would be fine with some minor tweaks. I then sent our artist the demo of the new chords and structure, and he was agreeable to the changes. Ben, Carissa and myself then spent a couple of hours at SAE creating the concept of the scratch track, and started to figure out the drum pattern, what samples would be used, and how the song would sound.

We hired out the Ableton Push from the tech department, a MIDI controller that I am very familiar with and use to create all of my work. What I really like about the Ableton push is a feature where you can select any scale (C major, C minor etc) and then each of the touchpads are immediately set to the selected scale so that you can’t play any notes out of key. By using this, we could set the key to E major and then any of us could come up with melodies or new parts to add to the song, despite our previous musical knowledge.

Next week we should be finished the scratch track, and then we can move onto the recording stages!

Circle of fifths showing major and minor keys. [Image]. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_key#/media/File:Circle_of_fifths_deluxe_4.svg