Metalcore Post Mortem Reflection

The trimester has finally come to an end, which means that I have to submit my deliverables for one of the projects that I’ve been working on, whether it’s finished or not. As I’ve mentioned quite a bit this trimester through my blogs, I have been working on recording 2 ‘Metalcore’ tracks with a local band. From the start this project was something that I predicted would be very daunting for me to complete on my own on top of the other projects, However upon checking upon the actual scope of the project with my lecturers, I decided that although it was going to be hard, even if it didn’t turn out well, I would be able to learn a lot from this project including what could be improved in my own practice. I tend to have a lot of feelings of “what if” when doing and then I tend to not really progress any further with my learning if I’m too scared to do what I would like to do. I decided that since this was one of my last trimesters at SAE and I’m still in a simulated learning environment, I would jump into the deep end and learn from experience.

How did it go?

Unfortunately, this project just didn’t end up getting finished on time and this was mostly due to time management and project management. I’d say the biggest thing that let me down on this project was time management, from both myself and the client. Time management is an issue that I deal with every trimester however this trimester I really tried my hardest to mitigate any foreseeable issues that might occur in this project and plan it as soon as I could, I began planning this project out at about week 2 in preparation to record in week 7, planning to finish recording in week 9. The first issue was that the band wasn’t ready to record until about the middle of week 8 which meant that we really had to crack down on the rest of the elements shortly after. I should have moved the drum recording much earlier but in my original project plan, I had it set out so that we’d be recording the guitars etc to a click and the demo drums and NOT the live drums. So really guitar tracking was supposed to start in week 8 while the drums were still being time-corrected, which didn't end up happening. This is an example of poor communication between myself and the band, we never formally had a meeting as the lead singer (who I had been in the most contact with) said it would be hard to get everybody at the same time as they mostly record separately. I decided not to worry about it and upon meeting someone else in the band in a group chat, I discovered that there were quite a few things they needed to discuss with me whereas the lead singer was more so suggesting that we were all good to go. This means the timetable of the project had to change around quite a few times to further manage the project.

Another big issue was that the band wanted to record the guitar elements to the synced drums rather than the demo drums which meant I had to have the drums synced for them to do. I expected drum editing to take quite a while but not nearly as long as it did, It could have been done earlier but due to the number of other projects I had taken on this trimester it ended up taking a really long time to figure it all out. After this when comping the guitars together I had managed the session during my recording relatively poorly and got stuck matching the quad tracks of the guitars to the right tones etc. This is an issue I’ve faced a few times recording on my own when operating pro tools so I’d like to focus more on how to have a cleaner recording session rather than having multiple tracks everywhere. I’d also like to put more time aside for these kinds of projects and make the communication (including communicating time management) our top priority. Though many things went wrong with this project, It’s still looking to be finished just not within this trimester, on top of the negative aspects of the project there were also a few positives too

The biggest positive thing that I got out of this project was that I managed to get what I wanted from the project which was to learn a lot about something I’ve never done before. Although this project isn’t quite ready I still learnt a lot about different things within this genre and stepped out of my comfort zone, on top of this I am able to apply the skills I've learnt to other projects in the future. The best part of this project was the Drums that I recorded as I, and my peers thought this sounded great even with no processing on them. This is the second trimester I’ve tried recording something like a drum kit on my own so hearing that the drums sounded good was a positive step in the right direction. Although the drums did take a really long time to edit and this caused a lot of problems the editing on them turned out to be almost perfect, and I definitely figured out some of the issues I had so I’ll be able to remember them for next time. Because of this, I can apply drum editing to other genres like for instance If I wanted to work on a pop track with live drums I’d be able to do a similar process on these (this is something I can definitely see myself working on in the future). I also learnt heaps about drum triggers and other processing techniques to make them really pop. Another success is that I got much closer to the end of the project than I thought I would - I had a feeling this trimester that the project might not get finished in time, however, I still wanted to try it out regardless and I actually got much closer to an end product than I could have, this means that the EP will still be finished and hopefully released this year. Recording through the Axe-FX and Kemper rigs were also a great success, even though we had to do this twice I think this is a method of guitar recording that I really like and would love to do again in the future.

Next time I’d do something like this, I'd have to have more time management and project management around the project and communicate very clearly with my client to have a good end result, this would be the main thing for getting it all together and releasable within a time frame. We’ll have to see how the project turns out again in the end but I’d definitely consider working in this style of music again, If not I can always take the ideas through to other genres that I’ll usually work in and try out some of the various methods.

Thanks for reading!