Weekly Reflection (Week 5)

This week I booked some sessions in the MIDI studio to work more on my track. I began by having a listen to what I’d already done a few times and thought about what would make the track more interesting now that I’ve changed my reference track to a song with singing. I had originally planned to create an instrumental track but since I’ve never really used my voice as an instrument I thought I would give it a go. I quickly came up with some lyrics and chose two microphones to have a shoot out and see which best suited my voice. Out of the SM7B and The NT2A, it was the latter that really brought out the higher frequencies and produced a nice clear sound for me to work with. I recorded a phrase and doubled it then hard panned them left and right to create a nice stereo width. Adding a lower harmony gave it some more excitement and since I can’t sing the greatest I applied some effects to give it more of a dreamy feel which suited my lyrics anyway. Using EQ, compression, reverb and chorus I was able to somewhat hide away my singing imperfections and create a layer that suited the song.

Vocal tracking session in the MIDI studio at SAE.

After getting more of an idea about where the song was headed I took my track to a studio in Indooroopilly called Bedlam where a member of my band lives and works. I wanted to see if we could come up with some synth parts using a Moog Voyager and lay down some guitar similar to those you’d find on my reference track. We created some patches and found some decent guitar tones and basically just jammed over a loop of the track and recorded a bunch of sounds that I would later sift through to find the bits that work and comp them together. I took a bounce of what I had done in Ableton in imported the track into Pro Tools at Bedlam and recorded everything we did in there. In a later session, I took the audio files from Pro Tools and imported them back into my Ableton session so I could mix them together with my track.

Guitar and synth tracking session at Bedlam Records.

This was also the week I found a design student from SAE named Breanna Brzoskowski to work on the cover art for the single. She responded to a call out I posted in the SAE interdisciplinary group and sent me some of her work which I immediately liked.

Some of Breanna's past work.

After agreeing to work with her on this cover design, I began sifting through the images I had saved a few weeks back (when Tycho was still my reference track) and selected a few of them to send her to get the ball rolling. I still wanted to go with a design like this even though my track had changed because I felt it would still work. I wanted to capture the nostalgic feeling of the 80’s as the type of synth patches I have created resemble this. I knew that referencing Blade Runner images would surely point her in the right direction and wanted to incorporate circle imagery that represented the sun or moon to inspire the feeling of longing or wondering.

Reference images I sent to Breanna in relation to the cover design.

Rough draft designs from Breanna.

It wasn’t long before she got back to me with some draft ideas which were very close to what I was searching for. I decided to go with the bottom right design as I liked the idea of the moon peering through the city of Tokyo. I sent back some revision ideas and would wait to see what she’d come up with by next week.

We’re now getting closer to week 6 and so I’d thought I’d better reflect on how the project is going with the guys in my group. Even though we’re all really happy with the work we’d done individually, there are some problems with our project plan and the way we executed the work. I think from the beginning we should have decided to do a 3 track EP so we all could have worked on a track each meaning we’d all benefit from using Ableton a lot more as working alone is where you get most of your learning done. We should have done this and then also arranged a lot more time together to help each other out with the tracks so they would be much more cohesive as an end product. I think a way to go about resolving this issue in the future would be to spend more time on the project plan so everybody has a very clear idea of the work they need to do and can see the path that the project is going to take. Having said that we have all enjoyed working on this project so far anyway :)