Week 1

Tuesday 25th March

Introduction and objectives

Today I am going to be Researching different artists I want to sound like and instruments I am thinking of using, focusing on key techniques they use in this genre. I am also going to be doing some practical work on my songs, for example working on the chord progression and trying to expand it for a chorus or a bridge. I'm also planning to have an interview with my collaborators asking them if they have any questions and also I'm going to be telling them my plan for FMP and what I would like from them and when I would need them and if that works with them if not I plan to make a small time table. I also plan to do my presentation today so I can sign off for the FMP.

Daily Project Blogs

Since Kyran and I do not want to work together for several reasons, I am starting a new FMP on my own. I have decided to create a country 4 track EP. The reason being, I have a huge passion for this genre and a few people in my local area, and even country, make this kind of music and it is something I am really interested in doing for my future. As I am now a few weeks behind I have started working on my songs as soon as possible And started contacting people to work with. I want to improve my guitar skills so I have been trying to create some chord progressions I can give to a guitarist to which we can improve with their skills as I am extremely limited. I started writing the first song on my track which I took inspiration from one of my songs I used for a portfolio to get into uni however I had not planned to release it. I have started off by using quite common country related chords. Some of which being C, G, D and Fm. I started using the c chord shape and moving it up and down the strings with a kind of picking style which showed little aspects of slightly folk music. When writing this, I remember lucy will be playing guitar so she can use more unique chords and other creative ideas I had not thought about. I was able to produce a good verse, and I then decided to try to create some ideas for vocals. One of the lyrics I researched in unit 1-11 was storytelling and this is one I am going to use when it comes to this first song as it is the one I am most confident with. I decided I was going to draft a story about two people drifting apart as one wants to live in the city and the other wants to move to the countryside. I started off by looking up some songs I know are slightly like those I am trying to copy with the vocal techniques. For the Rythm and raspy vocals, I am going to try to copy an artist called Sam Barber especially the Cover of the song Dancing in the sky a video can be found below. I took the lyrics I am going left you are going right and started experimenting with different phrases and trying to make different lines that rhyme words with right. However, I had not created a melody, and that is why most of the lines are longer than each other, as it is only an experimental stage. However, I am going to shorten many of these lyrics. All the lyrics I produced today can be found below. ( this is a screenshot of my notes on my phone) Instead of using the belting Sam Barber uses and the technique of going up and down in dynamics I plan to hold the notes and engaging my core to help bring in my raspy vocals and I'm going to make a video later on today of me trying this technique with a few phrases you can see below.

Interviews: I had an interview with the three main musicians I want to collaborate with for my FMP, and you can see each one in the YouTube videos below. All of which said they wanted to work with me however Fazer had a lot more questions with time. However, I expected that as I knew he had a lot of work to do as is as he is creating a 6-8 track EP for his FMP.

Lucie Mansell: After talking to Lucie, she was initially a bit hesitant however after explaining to her I have taken this into consideration, shes busy before Easter so when I told her all the recording is after half term, she was very keen and willing to work with me. I told her that I wanted to have her help with the guitar chords and riff. I told her I am going to send her the chord progression I have already created. However, I told her I would like her to experiment with them as they are not as rural as I wanted. I also told her to use any chords she thinks will work with the chords I have, and she seemed confident and like she was ok with this. As I know Shes a very talented instrumentalist this shouldn't take her too long. George Lingard: My interview with George was a lot easier as I explained to him about timings like I had for Lucy and he made it pretty obvious he is willing to do more than two songs for me however I don't want to give him too much to do as he might be behind on work and cancel on me which would cause a lot of problems so not giving him huge chunks of work to do makes it a lot easier. I explained to him I will send him the chord progression played by lucy and will find out the tempo and send it to him. I am also going to give him examples of songs I would like similar drums to. Frazer Hynd: My interview with Frazer took the longest as he asked me questions about what I needed from him. Since I need him to play bass, he cannot rehearse and record on Mondays and Thursdays, which means we can only do it on Wednesdays. This means I will have to make this official with Lucie and George, however it worked out as I am not free on Thursday anyway. He was also incredibly happy with me doing it after easter as that worked out well with him as he is extremely busy in the first section of FMP before Easter.

Interview with Lucie Mansell

Interview with George Linguard

Interview with Frazer Hynd

Problem solving

Due to me and Kyran not wanting to work together anymore I had to restart my idea, and I was also now two weeks behind everyone else in my class. However, one way I work around this is on Monday having a one-on-one with my teacher and talking to him about my plan and what I will need to do. In this conversation I told him what my back up plan was to create a 4-track country EP and due to the fact, I already had an idea I was able to catch up with my proposal and presentation. What this did meant yes, I was behind however I was able to catch up rapidly and keep most of my ideas for my last FMP however only change a small amount of work with my proposal and presentation. However, I did have to add a large chunk. The reason I'm going to be able to catch up is I planned to create a country ep in summer so this is a good way to do it now and I already had some good ideas in my locker for example demos and also chord progressions I could use however I would like to make some songs from scratch when I have caught up.

I decided to instead of doing different genres instead create fusion songs where I use aspects of genres, I like this way. I don't have to worry as much when it comes to songwriting. I had to change my research plans as I'm going to be focusing on country music instead of many different genres; for example, focused on artists and equipment instead of different song writing techniques. However, I will research this country music. I am also going to be doing a small amount of work on the techniques I am going to use in the genres that I'm fusing with country. Due to this situation I'm going to have to go into a lot more depth when it comes to country music and artists however the way I can deal with this genre is use different research techniques as I have researched country music in my Units 1-11 so I'm going to look into thing I didn't before a lot more than the other aspects like equipment instead of the history of the genre which I already know as this project is to learn new thing that will help me in the future.

Research

Today I started researching Sam Barber as I want to make a similar style song so I wanted to learn where he got his inspiration from etc. I also was able to find a video of an interview so I'm going to do more research on this throughout the rest of the week trying to find out where he gets his lyric ideas as well as there really good and emotional.

Evaluation and Conclusion

Today was extremely successful I was able to achieve nearly all of my objectives apart from 1 being my presentation and this was due to the fact there was a large amount of people willing to do it and due to the fact I had many plans for the day I left it till later on but everyone's presentations took too long. Tomorrow, I am going to do it in the first lesson like I should have to get it out of the way and finished. My interviews were successful and now I have a solid plan and just need to carry on creating my songs, knuckling down, and getting at least one hopefully two done or near being finished by the end of the week. Also, today was particularly good, and I hope to have a similar day with the amount of work completed, as this way I will stay on track.

Wednesday 26th March

Introduction and objectives

For today, my plan is to focus on practical work with my songs and try to create some chords that work with my lyrics and melody. I am also going to be researching equipment I am going to need in the studios when recording and different instruments I am going to be using for my songs and how they work performing and recording. I am also going to talk to another collaboration I want to work with to help me with guitar as I have got a little stuck with ideas to make my song more country styled.

Daily Project Blogs

Today in my first lesson, I sat in a practice room with a guitar I borrowed from the college and started practicing the original chord progression I had created yesterday. I decided to try it with the lyrics I had made and the melody I wanted the song to sound like. I found out that it was out of pitch with the chords and didn't sound correct. What I did was try to find chords that worked with my pitch and melody the chords I found that did infact work. These were Em, G, D, C, A What I did was experiment with these chords trying to make a chord progression that worked. It was slightly off pitch so I decided to use a capo on the 4th fret as some country artists I listen to do this so I thought it might make it a bit more country like. For the E minor I found if I hammer it on it created a lot of weight for the guitar part and really showed of the sound I was looking for. I had found the chord progression I liked and for the chorus I thought instead of starting on E minor and C, it changed the whole vibe of the song and worked really well only changing one chord. It still didn't sound like a country song so after filming my progress and singing through the song. I looked up some chords that Artists I like use by going on the songs I enjoyed and looking at the chords to identify the sequences in which they are using so I can adopt a similar approach. One I found that really caught my eye was a B7; this chord after a bit of practice recording worked amazingly for my song in the middle of the chord progression and I released if I finished on a E major it worked really well going from a diminished like chord to a clean one. I still was struggling to get the sound I wanted so I contacted some high graded guitarists I know if they can help me. I spoke to the first yeah Billy who's picking skills are amazing and is exactly what I need for my country style I'm looking for. He arranged to meet me in the second period to make a plan of action for what we can do as soon as possible as he wanted some advice for his FMP as well. This helped me as I was extremely stuck and don't have loads of time to create such a large amount of songs.

Interviews: I had an interview with Billy Phillips, a first-year guitarist who is in grade 7. I wanted to work with Billy as I said earlier because of his amazing picking skills on the guitar, and this is exactly what I am looking for with my song, as I would like some fast-picking techniques in most of my songs. We spoke about having an hour-long session with each other where I will sing him the lyrics focusing on the melody as he is incredibly good at creating guitar parts if he has the melody which works perfectly. He also said he is keen to work with me on this. He also had a lesson with this guitar teacher Matt about this, and he was able to teach him some amazing guitar picking skills that really show off the sound I am looking for in country music. (The interview I had with Billy can be seen below in this text.) We spoke about him understanding most of the conversation was about arranging a time. However, after he explained to me how he was really prepared as he had done all his work from memorizing the melody, I sang to him and worked with that.

Problem solving

One main problem I had today was my struggle with guitar and not being able to make my chord progression / song sound like a actual country song. I started of having a problem with my chords that did not work at all with the lyrics I had created and the melody I wanted to use for my first song. In this moment to solve the situation I had to decide if I wanted to change the lyrics and melody or the chords. I decided to change the chords for two reasons, I was extremely happy with the lyrics I had produced as they were very meaningful and the chords weren't really in the country genre style so I wanted to change them slightly any way. I fought a good way to go about it would be start over completely and restart the chord progression. I then had the problem that the new chord progression had a similar problem regarding the fact that it didn't sound enough country for my liking however I found a way to overcome this. I contact a very talented guitars who new a good way to play the kin d of music I'm looking for. In the future I would contact people before starting and ask them to help me and write my songs with them.

Evaluation

Today I had a very successful day however I have become quite stuck with my practical work and I'm falling slightly behind schedule and I want to keep up with this. However, I've found a way to deal with this as I'm meeting Billy Phillips for a rehearsal hopefully we can complete one song and then I will be back on track for my FMP if were able to do any more that will be amazing but we can't go over as I have agreed to help out two first year students with there project but we've agreed if either of us have any spare time we will carry on working on it trying to create any other parts of songs if that's ever some bars of lyrics or if its a few chords we want to use for a chord progression and we think will work extremely well with one idea we have for a song.

Thursday 27th March

Introduction and objectives

Work with Billy on creating my song we are going to only focus on trying to create one song however if we have any extra time. We're going to try to finish one song today so it will be ready to record and be finished before easter so we don't have too much recording to do later on as there is a huge shortage of time in the studio and a lot of people want to work with my producer. Another thing we want to achieve is have a set in stone plan for what we will do in the next rehearsal plans we have.

Daily Project Blogs

In the first lesson of the day I sat down with Billy discussing a plan of action for are first lesson as we only had a hour to work together as we both had other priorities. He asked me first to sing him the melody of the song so he could find my pitch to help him were to go. He then asked what chords I was interested in so I explained using the C shape G,A and D. He then started experimenting with picking styles asking me if I liked a specific one to say. I then said yes to one and he asked me to sing and then he played alongside me experimenting different chords in this style After about 20 minutes we were able to create a chord progression I was very happy and have the song completely finished with a verse,chorus,verse,chorus,bridge,chorus, chorus structure. We rehearsed the song through with vocals and guitar until we were very rehearsed and happy with the final outcome and we also dealt with little tweaks so we were completely confident and so we are ready to record it next week. I wanted the first song to be a acoustic track with just guitar and vocals and that's why Billy plays the bass and high notes together making it all work. Due to the fact we had a lot of extra time he agreed to look at making some more chord progressions and demos that I can take away and make lyrics for. I started off by giving him the kind of fusion I was looking for with my track, the first one being Blue Grass which is very much older country genre which is fast and what most people think of when they think of country music if they don't listen to it usually. I started of by showing him some examples of the kind of style I'm looking for. All of the examples I showed him were slower than the tempo I wanted and I explained that to him so he knew to speed up the tempo from the start. I asked him if he could use G,C and D and work around them chords. Not long after he came up with the perfect riff and chord progression I was looking for. After hearing this I tried to create some lyrics however I wanted them to perfect so I decided to wait until I was alone to come up with some lyrics so I recorded the track. We still had plenty of time after this. I asked him if he could create one with aspects of funk. He asked me what kind of funk I was looking for and I explained mainly in the rhythm but I wanted him to do it with country chords and after telling him this, he created a chord progression that was what I was looking for. However it wasn't perfect and it sounded a bit wrong as I was trying to create a proper country ep and not a fake pop culture country ep that you hear coming from many artists mixing genres so I wasn't completely keen on this idea so I'm going to go away and look at lyrics for it and if I'm not happy then move on and come up with another idea. All of the videos I recorded with Billy can be found below. Billy was extremely helpful as I was falling behind and now I have already finished one song and have two different starting points for me to expand with vocals and drums and Billy also said when recording he would be willing to record both guitar and bass which means I wont need to bother lucy as I know Shes already extremely busy. Talking to Billy due to the fact that his project isn't practical for example making any form of songs it means he doesn't have much work to do in his practical periods so he's going to try to work with me which ids perfect as it means were able to have a large amount of rehearsals together for studio time and creating and practicing the songs.

Problem solving

The first problem that we faced today was lyric writing, even though Billy was able to create 3 chord progressions for my songs I really struggled to create lyrics for them as I am a bit of a perfectionist, and I do not have a lot of experience song writing. What I really wanted to do was complete some more research into lyrics of country music and artists I like and take inspiration from these subjects and situations. For example, write about any situations I have been in that are slightly like these subjects and if I do not have any create a story line of something similar and use for example over the cut-up technique or character writing or place writing. What it meant was I wasn't able to create a melody to ever song which means I am limited with my creativity however I am extremely happy with the chord progressions so I should like the melody's that work with them and nothing we do is finalised so it means we can always slightly change things over time. Another problem we had was struggling with not having a structure with the songs however we can decide that with what I want to do with the lyrics but if I want a bridge it will mean Billy will very likely have to change his chord progression to show it is in fact a bridge and doesn't confuse the audience or it will sound like another verse. One thing is to create a bridge we will need to do another rehearsal on it as if I want to change the melody it changes the chord progression and that goes the same with if you change the chords.

Research

I finished my research on Sam Barber looking into his inspirations and collabs with other artists and how he rose to fame and other interesting facts and after looking at this I believed it would be good for me to take a similar style with my first song as I am looking to make it a modern country style and that's the kind of music Sam Barber makes If you want to find this information its under my artists page.

Evaluation

Today was extremely proactive as I was behind and now I'm actually ahead of my timeline and plan and this is why for the majority of my practical work especially song writing I'm going to try to work with Billy as he is extremely creative and talented and has helped me massively today. I am really going to try and next week make one of my song extremely meaningful and move away from what will make people have fun and dance possibly a bit rocky or really slow tempo and have it focus more on the lyrics and I know after today that Billy won't struggle with that all. I'm only going to have to give him the melody and tell him for example ring out the chords instead of doing some picking style techniques that he has used on the other three songs he's working on. I really want the last song to mean the most and affect people's emotions when being listened to like how I feel when I listen to Whiskey and You by Chris Stapleton which you can see in the video to the left of the text.

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