In these blogs I'll explain my thought process behind the songs, my way of approaching the promotion of the EP and how I intend to achieve my aims.

AIMS

For my first EP and release as a solo Artist I'd like to achieve some air play, ideally BBC Introducing in Nottingham as it's local. But I would initially like for people to acknowledge that these are my first solo songs and that they are decent songs and that this can only be the start for me and I go onto write better songs from here. The main goal is to get audiences singing these words that I wrote back to me on stage, and with the right marketing and networking hopefully that will become reality.

Target Audience

My ideal target audience would be 15-25 year olds who are into indie music, especially new artists such as Sam Fender and Tom Grennan. I think this is the ideal age category for my act because it's perfect for exposure and word of mouth as these age groups can easily upload a video or share my song to their friends as these are the prime ages for social media. However I'm not writing off reaching out to other ages as my music may also appeal to older generations as they might recognise some of my influences such as The Beautiful South, The Wedding Present, Oasis, The Beatles,Paul Weller and many others.

I have decided to call the name this EP '2020 EP' because it's my first release as a solo artist and I wanted it to mean something to me. 2020 was a tough year for a lot of people including me, as I wasn't able to go out and do the thing I love, which is performing. That's partly the reasoning behind the title but also because I really found an interest in writing songs and in lockdown 2020 I had written the best songs I've wrote so far and a couple of these songs are products of that.

As I'm typing this I already have the songs for my Solo EP written and recorded, but I do need to plan for when I release it into the world. The EP tracks are :

1. 2020 Vision

2. 30 Days

3. Stick With It

Recording '2020 Vision'

The song is recorded at a tempo of 113 which I decided on using the 'MetroTimer' app which I was recently recommended to download, it's very useful. My home set up consists of a standard focusrite Interface and logic pro X. I started the process off by recording an acoustic guitar track as the base layer for the song. To follow on from that I used my Fender Telecaster for another layer to go over the top, I wanted the track to be mainly driven by the electric guitar so I mixed that louder than the acoustic but it's still there holding the tune together. The next part of the process was to add another guitar track in to play some nice delicate picking bits. The song currently has no percussion as I thought it sounds really nice clean, I will think about possibly developing it into a full band recording in the future. My thought behind that decision of no percussion was inspired by Artists like Frank Turner who's early releases just featured his guitar and his voice.

In terms of effects, on the guitar tracks I used a Waves Doubler, I did this to make the song sound as full as possible because there's no bass or percussion in the recording. EQ is an essential part of any recording, it was definetly going to be the main aim for this song to get the nicest tone i could achieve to go with the clean electric guitar going through the song. I got the final tone by using the logic stick EQ to get rid of the lower frequencies as I wanted the vocals to shine through the song brightly and clearly.

2020 Vision is the single taken from my EP which is going to be released 2 weeks before the whole EP. The came about around late last year (2020) and it came together over a few months. I was taking lots of inspiration from Blur at the time, especially Graham Coxon's guitar playing. I tried to make the guitar chords and the speed I played them to be almost Blur-esque. You might be able to tell where I'm coming from when you hear the start of the song when it goes from the first C chord and then sharply into the Em. At the of the verses they mostly finish on the G to go into the pre chorus and from there the chords go down to F by sliding down the frets, 3rd to 1st to be precise, using a standard barr chord shape. I like this element of the song as it was inspired partly by bands such as The Libertines and The Fratellis, a good example of something similar is the chords in 'Whistle for the choir' By The Fratelli's.

Another interesting part of the song, guitar wise is in the chorus when I'm singing the first two lines. It starts with a C and goes down to F and slides in the same shape up to G played on the same strings but just on the 3rd fret and it slides back and fourth. I'll include a short video demonstrating this.

I don't mean to be cliche or cringe anyone out when I say this but the first line of lyrics that say "She's dressed in white, she's usually in black so it's a nice suprise", these lyrics were written when my girlfriend at the time was wearing a white top of some sort and the words just popped into my head. The rest of the verse was actually inspired by her previous partner and how he got caught out, you know what I mean. I tried to make it sound like a story throughout, hopefully you can tell this when you hear it.

This song is my favourite out of the few I've written in my life. This is because It has meaning and I used metaphors to get this across in the song, which I'm still impressed with myself by how I did it. The phrase "In our collision" in the song is a metaphor for meeting someone and beginning a relationship with them. So from that collision, " I came out with 2020 vision" which means I can now see the bigger picture that I wasn't thinking about before, I won't discuss what that is, maybe you guys can make your own interpretations? I know that 20/20 vision is usually a phrase for good eye sight but I used the phrase to also mean the year 2020, as in this last year has given me a certain vision.