Reflection of a Project
I believe the project as a whole was successful, the final track that was produced lived up to my expectations and I believe it could work as a movie soundtrack. There wasn't really any major issues that occurred during the project, due to relatively good time management all tasks were completed on schedule giving us enough time to sort things out if they went wrong. Some of the important events that needed to be completed for the project to keep progressing were, the initial recording and composition of the Guitar riffs, the formulation of a scratch track with those riffs accompanied my programmed Drums and Synths, re-amping the guitar tracks, finalising the synth sounds, and mixing and mastering. All of these were accomplished without problems making the project run smoothly.
The composition of the basic Guitar riffs that could be used as loops really helped in bringing the scratch track together quickly, once I got started that is. Having a clear idea of what I wanted the track to sound like made composing the riffs easy and meant I was able to create loops with different riffs that worked well together. I think this part of the process really assisted in gathering momentum for creating the track. Making the scratch track did prove problematic to start off with, having some many different synth sounds to choose from made the process more about trying to get a good sound rather than working the synth elements out more musically. With some guidance I leaned not to fixate so much on the synth sounds to start off with, just compose all of the elements then change the sounds later, after that the scratch track came together within a couple of days. Another major event that happened after that was to re-record the guitars but at a higher tempo, this changed up the feel of the track and gave it a lot more impact which is what Metal music is all about.
Re-amping wasn't that difficult and we managed to get a decent guitar tone out of it. I do think in the future though I will definitely spend more time making adjustments to the microphone placements to fully explore more or better tonal characteristics the amp can produce. I felt that even though the guitar sound that was recorded was good I do think I can produce something better which is only achievable by spending more time on it and not being content with getting just a few different sounds recorded.
Trying to create the synth sounds that I wanted did prove quite challenging and finding what ones I liked and worked well with the track mainly came down to experimentation and trial and error. This task is something I should have tried to delegate more over to my other group member, even though we did have a good couple of studio sessions working out sounds I still think we could have explored more options which could have made the project sound even better.
Mixing and Mastering the track also proved to be a little bit of a learning curve seeing as I hadn't done anything that mixes electric guitars and synths together before. Again I think the sound I achieved was successful but it could definitely be better, by getting a better starting guitar tone and synth sounds. The track has good energy but I feel like it is missing something sonically, with showing the track to other people and audio engineers I will hope to find out what they think sounds bad or good and what I could potentially do differently next time to achieve a better result.
Like I said before one of the big positive in this project was getting everything done on schedule and it really does help keep things progressing and not having to rush tasks at the last minute. Working on my time management skills and evolving them over future projects will help me to achieve my goals and milestones more effectively resulting in greater productivity. Probably the biggest negative thing that happened was the lack of involvement and enthusiasm from my other group member which left me to do the majority of the work. I can also see that I didn't try that hard in asking Oliver to do tasks either which could potentially have made him feel alienated from the project. I do realise that I need to work on my project management skills in regards to delegating tasks to other group members and not try to do everything myself, I think I did this because I know what I want to achieve and I don't like relying on others to help me get there.
In saying all that I do believe that when we were in the studio we worked very well together and managed to get a lot done in the time we had, maybe if we had booked more studio time for both of us to work on the project the outcome would have been different and potentially better with his input.
The overall plan for the project didn't have to change at all, we set out to create and Electronic Metal soundtrack for a movie and there was nothing that made us need to adapt the plan to achieve this. I think because I had such good understanding of what the outcome would be and made clear steps to get there everything went according to plan and never left me wondering what I needed to do next.
To finish off with a little more self reflection, I believe my time management, work ethic, enthusiasm, and attitude towards completing the project was good, the major things I have to work on is teamwork skills and getting out of the head space of trying to do everything myself. I believe the creative process I used of creating guitar riff loops greatly helped in making the project easier and allowed for better creativity when composing the synth tracks as I didn't have to compose multiple things at once. Having a good idea in mind and constantly referring back to the reference track helped me to create an end product that satisfies all the criteria I wanted it to and is a good showcase of what I can create musically.