What’s been happening (Part 1)

We’re currently on our second round of projects for Studio 2 and, to be honest, for me everything has been all over the place. In my recap blog in the beginning of the trimester I wrote about how I wanted to do a metalcore or pop rock type recording similar to something like Bring Me The Horizon or Linkin Park. For my second project I decided I wanted to chase that down and make the concept become a reality. I tried to do this, but unfortunately, a lot of things changed between now and then which made it incredibly difficult to complete successfully with the time we had remaining in the trimester.

What started as wanting to do a metal project ended up with me leaning more towards wanting to do a pop / rock band, but still have a focus on recording clean, clear drums and analog studio practice. I was listening to bands like Two Door Cinema Club and The Wombats and thinking of recording a band in that style, that still had some electronic elements (such as synth pads etc) for me to work and get creative with, but also allowed me to get experience in some of the areas that I find to be more difficult. I’ve found that I’m at a comfortable level with post production and EMP style ‘in the box’ production, but not so comfortable with actual recording in the studio, so I decided to chase this down as a learning goal for the trimester. I started searching for bands to record by looking through Triple J Unearthed, a music sharing platform for Australian Musicians. Unearthed has a feature on the artists page that allows for artists to reference other artists as to what they believe they sound like. I figured out a technique where I can utilise that section to find suitable artists for my project; for example I was after a two door cinema club sounding band so I would type something like “Sounds Like Two Door Cinema Club Brisbane Unearthed” into google and it would come up with relevant artists located in the Brisbane area. I found a couple of really good bands by using this technique, however after going through the process of emailing a couple of them, I was left with no reply from many. I was lenient with time at this point so I gave it a couple of days in case they needed the time to think about whether my offer was suitable, or if they just don’t check their emails / social media that regularly.

At this time my laptop decided to completely crash leaving everything such as my collection of plugins and Ableton sessions on it, severely halting my project process as I wouldn’t know what I would have access to and what I wouldn’t. Don’t get me wrong there are some great facilities to use at the university, but for pretty much all of my projects I use third party plugins and sample packs to achieve the sound I’m looking for - and the things that we do have at uni don’t exactly do what I need. For instance, I have been thinking about also producing and recording a trap / hip hop track as a side project (to keep practicing in the electronic music field while I work on something a little different) but at the time I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to get a professional sound from using just the stock samples on the DAW’s at uni or through free ones I find online, so I had to think about whether or not I could realistically follow my reference tracks.

I had a big focus on trying to get my laptop back which meant I had to find a way to budget to buy a new one as repairing was no longer an option. During this time I still kept looking for bands, sending out emails and began to look into what I’d do for a side project as well.

I did get a response from one band but they stopped responding after a couple of emails and I never heard from them again and assumed they were no longer interested. Before I knew it, with all that was going on, week 9 came out of nowhere and I still didn’t have a band to record. Upon meeting with my lecturer about the issue we came to a conclusion that I would start to look for other ways to source a band by posting on various Brisbane music pages. I did this straight away and began to get some responses from bands looking to record but most of them were nowhere near the sound I was after. I decided I still wanted to do the recording regardless so I picked the band with a sound that I think I’d be able to work with best, which was a more emo / punk sounding band. After we started working out dates to record, they had found out that they had to practice for a big upcoming gig and wouldn’t be able to get into the studio until another month, so that was a no go for recording either. Just as I was about to give up my search I received a last minute message for a band, decided I would be able to record this band and still apply some of the processes that i had intended. Planning with this band went really well, we had phone calls and had set a time and day to get the drum tracking done.

Then, after locking in the studio, a day before we were supposed to meet, I received a text saying that the drummer had hurt his arm badly and wouldn’t be able to play for a while so they had to cancel. My projects had to get a move on, and at this point I have had 3 bands cancel on me so I had to make the call for the sake of getting my learning objectives done to come up with an alternative plan. I thought about it and decided that the basis of this project was for me to record acoustic instruments, not necessarily a band. If I had one solo artist that could play drums, bass and guitar instead, I’d still be happy with that as a project because I’m really just trying to get better practice at recording for the time being. That being said, I decided to compose my own track and fill it in with acoustic elements, skipping over having a third party artist (or band), as I could spend another couple of days sorting out availability, then if they can’t make it I’ve lost more time that I could have spent trying to achieve my goal in another way.

It still would have been good to record a band and get some practice on organising a full session, but I think now I at least have learnt why my time management went wrong and just how important it all is when a band comes into place. Luckily this trimester we’ve also just completed a classroom recording, which (as well as by observing my classmates project planning submissions) has allowed me to take notes on, and think about “what is going to be important for me recording a band and what is the best way for me to do this?”

This blog is getting pretty lengthy, so I’ll be making another separate blog to focus more on what my current upcoming project will be and all of those details, which you can read about next!

Thanks for reading,