How did you chose your material?
We as a group were all into the same genre of music, even before we had to form a group for this project, we had already decided that we would play together. Metal was the first genre we wanted to play. Metal has many genres and is quite flexible in terms of adding other unique elements to it. Plus although all of us listened to metal, we all listened to different genres/subgenres of metal. We were able to combine different aspects of our musical tastes and create our unique sound.
How well did your performance go?
Our last performance at the cci theater went extremely well. we were very tight and we remembered all the changes in all of our songs. We learnt from our mistakes in the previous performances, and came up with a routine that was exciting and easily remembered. As the only metal band in the performance, i felt like we were able to give a first hand experience of a metal show. Although everybody was sat down, just performing with each over was fun enough.
What could you have done to improve your performance?
The only major mishap was that Oscar our rhythm guitarist, had broken a string part way through our second song. Its possible that we could work on out timing and execution of transitions in songs and between them. This is the case with a lot of bands, usually if bands are playing live without a metronome with IEM's, it can be hard to play at the original tempo. its possible that this may have lead us to some minor mistakes. But they weren't very noticeable.
What technical limitations did you have
A lot of the songs we had written involved many effect and pices of equipment that were hard for us to bring in to rehearsals or performance's. For instants, i used a double bass pedal for a lot of the writing process. It was quite essential to the overall setlist in many ways. However, due to the fact that there would be other drummers at the gig, its possible that they had never used one. Although they can just use one pedal, the kit itself would have to be moved round to even fit it on. So instead i just used a single pedal for our performances.
Another problem was guitar effects. For the production of our song, the guitarists, Tom and Oscar, used there own laptops and virtual amps to record straight onto logic. They had an arsenal of affects to work with. However they did not have any way to use these effects without their laptops. So instead they used the built in effects on the amps provided. It was hard for them to keep going back and forth to the amps and changing the settings. But they managed to work out a routine.
What did you decide to create and why?
Amongst our group, we all have quite similar music interests. In the main we are a hardcore band. But there are of course other musical influences from all of us. We wanted to be able to implement melodic elements into our original pieces which isn't always the hardcore way but this became the perfect blend of all of our favorite metal tastes. We saw what the other bands were doing in our class and it encouraged us to follow our instincts, even though everybody seemed to be doing something different. It was important to us to enjoy writing and playing the music. So ultimately we ended up creating a piece that made us feel good.
How well do you think you achieved your vision for your music and why?
Our vision was to create a type of metal that anybody could listen to and enjoy, to create an original sound that could drive a crowd at a live concert wild. We soon realized that if we were having fun playing it then we were likely to get others to enjoy it too. I think our music needs to be played live to an audience who are not expecting us to test this theory.
What could you do to improve your tracks and what issues did you have?
The production quality on our tracks is phenomenal, all thanks to our lead guitarist Tom. He basically taught himself how to mix and record. and for a beginner producer, it sounds amazing. As i said before most of the tracks were recorded using the guitarists own equipment. Recording drums was the hardest part about producing the songs. The first week we would spend trying to perfect the mix of the drums. The next week we would plan to record our first song incubus. However, This took longer than excepted and cost us alot of studio hours. Eventually the deadline was drawing close and we had to resort to programming the drums instead. Another thing is that we do not have a bassist, therefor our overall songs can sometimes feel empty on occasions, a "You don't realise you need it until its gone" type situation.