Post Mortem Reflection (Project 1)

My first major project for AUD210, a ’modern pop song’ has finally come to an end as we now begin to send out the deliverables and start our next project. It’s an important process for me to reflect on the production as a whole, including what went well and what didn’t, and how I can improve on this next time.

We intended to create a modern pop song with a local artist through Ableton using original synthesis and composition, which would then be sent into pro tools for mixing.

There were a number of important things that happened in the production for myself and the 2 other group members. One thing that happened to me specifically was the failure of my laptop which is where the scratch track was being produced. Without an up to date backup of the project, which was relied upon by the rest of the group, this caused a big concern when my laptop didn’t turn on one day and I needed to get the files off of it. Keeping multiple backups of projects is something that has been a flaw of mine in the past, so it’s definitely something I need to get on top of before it’s too late and I can’t recover the files. Luckily, the laptop decided to turn back on and I ‘quickly’ collected all files while it was working. To expand on that point, the laptop was running pretty slow during the whole timespan of the production, this stalled up a lot of time when I could have been productive with other things. For instance, because this is an electronic pop track there are alot of not only elements, but layers of drums and synths which in total added up to about 90 tracks to work with. Unsurprisingly, my computer couldn’t handle this which made it so that each time I tried to add a new element it would cause ableton live to crash. It also wouldn’t let me export the session into stems so I had to copy the stems, paste them into a new session and then export it from there.

Technological problems aside, a really big negative part of our project which is where it really had its flaws is the vocal aspect, which unfortunately in the scope of our project and in pop music in general is a very important feature. It was known from the beginning of the project that time would need to be set aside to get the vocals to sound how they wanted, however, we underestimated the amount of work that needed to be done to fit the rest of the song. Our vocalist seems to sound good when performing in an acoustic setting, with an acoustic guitar, however in the setting of a pop track the results were out of time, off key and flat sounding. We could have potentially fixed some of these problems but my skills in melodyne aren’t that great at the moment and with the deadline nearby I had very little time to fix these problems. It seemed to be that even with all of the tuning and processing I could do with the plugins that are available to me, the overall performance of the song just wasn’t there.

What’s really a let down overall is that the recording itself in terms of microphone set up was executed exactly how we wanted it, however the performance itself is what made the project flaw, as we didn’t have enough time to fix the issues before the deadline.

The artist changed the recording dates around a couple of times, and that on top of planning our recording date a little too close to the deadline created some conflict when recording. There were also technical difficulties in both studio sessions: the first being in the Audient 8024, where by the time we actually had our first recordings we only had about an hour left, and the second being in the NEVE, which went surprisingly well however we could use some more practice in it.

There was also quite a bit of issues with illness in the group as each of us came down with a cold at least once during the production, which slowed down the process.

Whilst these are mostly negative aspects of the production, there were also many things that went positively. Something that I believe we did really well was our communication and time management skills. I think we were very aware of the little amount of time we had and did very well considering it was our first time working on a production together. In our previous projects we each had roles that were relatively minor or were supporting roles, for instance, this is my first time being a producer on a project, so I think i have executed this well for a first try, as i can learn from this and expand on it. I think that we also communicated very well with the artist, by keeping him updated on any changes. I think that overall the project did what it intended to do so in that way it was a success.The issue seems to not lie in the production or mixing but rather the song and performance itself, as this was created for the soul purpose of an assignment, the song has come off as not how I’d liked it to sound, I’ve thought during this process how a reworked version of the song with a new backing track could potentially sound better.

I used a variety of creative processes in this project including writing chord progressions and melodies to ‘remix’ the original demo that was sent to us by the artist. By doing this, I had to analyse the key the song was written in and convert this to the harmonic major equivalent to create the pop sound I was trying to achieve (C# minor to E major). As the scratch track was still being constructed, I wanted to keep the artist on the same page so I created an acoustic version of the scratch track, which was essentially piano and the demo vocals in order for the artist to get an understanding of the song structure as many parts had been rearranged from the demo. I tend to write my music in a very specific way due to being taught on the Ableton Push, a piece of hardware which works with Ableton. As I have learnt digitally, there has been no reason for me to need to know what the name of the chords I am playing are, however, our artist writes his music on guitar, where it's essential to know the name of the chords so that he can play them. I did some research by using a website where I can search the names of the notes i’m playing, which then corresponds to a

Though synths were made for the track in some sections, a large majority were presets from third party preset packs. I think that if there were somewhere to improve on, perhaps I could incorporate more of my experimental sound by creating more synths from scratch rather than relying on presets. This could give the track a much more unique sound, which helps it stand out more, especially in the pop music industry.

A Learning outcome that we decided to get ticked off was the Interdisciplinary practice which we did through collaborating with a graphic design student, Jess. She was invited into our group chat early on in the production so that she was fully aware of what was happening with the project. We shared the scratch track with Jess when it was completed so that she could get an idea of what vibe the song is, so that her design can match aesthetically. Jess is very easy to work with and had the design ready for us very shortly after sending the scratch track, she would also tune her design based on our suggestions.

Overall, the project ended up turning out not as great as I had anticipated, however that’s not to say I didn’t learn a tonne of things. I’d like to keep practicing projects similar to this with different procedures, as I continue to grow as a producer.