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I had my technical development drumming class. We started off going through some rudiments from the previous week. I was relatively comfortable with these but I still want to spend more time on the practice pad to get better. Alongside this we did some 4 way coordination exercises.  After this we moved on to the main part of the lesson which was the single stroke samba. This was quite difficult as I hadn't done much like this before, however I really enjoyed this part of the lesson and plan on continuing this practice at home.

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Today I had my rehearsal for our treasure by bruno mars performance. I felt prepared for this as I'd been practising it at home. When we first started practising the song we struggled getting the structure right. I think this was because we didn't have a singer yet. When a singer came in to rehearse with us it helped massively. I think this is because the vocals help que a lot of the changes in sections. After a few run throughs we had the song down and I was able to focus more on adding fills. Overall I was very happy with this rehearsal and feel ready for the performance tomorrow.

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Today I had my first production class. We learned about the three main types of mic: dynamic, condenser and ribbon. I also learned about the different polar patterns mics can have. I enjoyed learning about this and think it will be very helpful when trying to record for my live performance and daw song.

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I had my pre production performance class where we took turns performing go your own way by fleetwood mac. I didn't feel very prepared for this as I only moved to Brighton 5 days ago because of this I was still settling in and hadn't had a lot of time to practise. Having said that the night previous to this I spent some time listening to the song to try and learn it. Due to my lack of practice I was a little nervous but managed to play the song fine which made me feel confident in my ability to learn songs quickly. Learning songs quickly under pressure is a skill I want to continue to develop because being able to take gigs on short notice will increase my opportunities within the industry.

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Today in my study group we spoke about resilience and the importance of mindset while at uni and throughout our music careers. It's important to have resilience because the music industry is unpredictable and as a musician I will have to deal with disappointment. For example it can be hard to find gigs and opportunities but I need to be able to keep looking and not get hung up on feeling bad about it. Its important to be able to have confidence in my abilities for example, taking last minute gigs. This can be scary but instead of turning them down I need to have the confidence in myself to put myself forward for these opportunities.

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Today I had a pre production where we practised crosstown traffic by Jimmy Hendrix. I felt fairly prepared as I had previously spent some time listening to and learning the song. I really enjoyed having fun with different grooves and fills throughout this song, however I struggled a little with the syncopated fills between sections, specifically staying in time throughout these sections.

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This is a video of me coming up with song ideas for the performance project. My goal is to write an original song which, in the performance, I will be playing drums for.

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today I had my navigating the music industry class. we looked at the 4 main sources of income for musicians post 2003. the 4 courses being SYNC, streaming, live and radio. As an example we looked at Sia who is now an artist in her own right but previously made money off of a publishing deal writing songs for other artists such as Rihanna.

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today I had my navigating the music industry class. we looked at the difference between a publishing deal and a record deal. publishing deals are for the songwriters or people have given ideas for a song whereas record deals are for the artists performing on a track. we also looked into PRS this is a good way to earn money from sync and to get money from publishing wrights.

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I had a production class where we were learning about MIDI this is simply the language used to let midi controllers talk to software.

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in our production class we had some time to play with midi and see what we could come up with.

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today I performed crosstown traffic in my pre prod performance class.

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I felt ready for the performance as I had practiced and listened to the song at home however I was worried about some of the fills but I played them fine. I really enjoyed this performance I had a lot of fun and enjoyed adding in fills. our main issue as a band was not having a lot of chemistry on stage. this could be because it was our first time all playing together but this is still something I want to improve on.

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Risks at the venue with control measures

-fire. to prevent fire we can keep a fire extinguisher available.

-electrical fire. to prevent an electrical fire we can be sure to not use damaged or old cables and make sure to switch off all unnecessary plugs.

-hearing damage due to loud music. to prevent this we can use ear protection.

-spillage of liquids on electronics. to prevent this we need to make sure to only drink bottled water and if not we need to not leave open drinks near electronics.

-trips hazards (specifically cables). to prevent this we need to coil up any unused cables and watch our step.

-stress of performing.

-pulls and strains from heavy lifting. to prevent this we need to make sure we warm up our muscles/voices before we play.

-dehydradtion. to prevent dehydration we need to bring plenty of bottled water.

-muscle damage (from not warming up)

-lack of sleep

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today I had my first rehearsal for call me in pre production. I was working with people that I've not worked with before so wasn't sure how it would go. we actually picked up the song very quickly and managed to play through it a few times from start to finish. I was really happy with this because sometimes new bands don't go as smoothly. The only mistakes we made were small and not repeated so the only thing we really could have improved on was practicing more before hand.

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For my area to improve on, I want to research production as it's something I don't feel very confident on. I understand the foundations but I need to learn more to get to the next level. I feel very comfortable programming drums so I am specifically going to be looking at how to write basslines for electronic music.

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over reading week I got logic and started to play around with production. on of my goals is to make as much electronic music as I can to learn a good variety of techniques.

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over this week I was practicing making a variety of basses on logic. I started off using alchemy (a logic stock plugin) but really strugled as it was not a very visual plugin. after speaking to a music producer friend I found out about vital. I found this much easier to work on so I spent the week experimenting with it and came up with this song. below I will go into more detail on what I learned about vital.

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This is a screenshot of my main finished bass on my song. the main things I have learned is how to use LFOs, what different shaped waves are used for, how to use a filter and how to use a phaser to change to tone of a bass.

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I wanted to learn more about making bas so I decided to try and make a bass for liquid drum and bass. (details posted below)

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This genre is more of a chilled out genre so I wanted to make a bass less dirty and a bit more low key. I did some research and found out that a Reese bass is what's most commonly used within the genre. I tried my best to replicate the bass. I wasn't really sure what I was doing so I just experimented and learned through trial and error. I ended up playing a lot with filters and learned how to put an LFO on a filter.

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Today we performed ain't it fun by Paramore. I really enjoyed performing this one. I felt relatively prepared for this as previous rehearsals went well. I performed this song three times. on my first performance of the song I was told I wasn't giving the drums enough power but I think this was because I didn't feel warmed up because on the second and third performance I felt a lot better.

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Today had my rehearsal for Aint it fun. it went okay. I felt relatively comfortable as I had practiced at home throughout the week. I did struggle with some of the stops going from the hi hats to snare on there up beat. I think this could be because I'm left handed so the movement feels a bit unnatural. also I kept messing up pushing the tempo going into the 2nd and last chorus but I think this is just due to me not knowing the song enough so if I spend some more time listening to it I should be fine.

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Medal

one thing that is going really well is my live performance project. I have a clear plan of what I want to do with a set band and i have a date planned for both rehearsal and recording.

Mission

I am slightly struggling with the case study, I am not naturally very good at written work so it just takes me a long time to make progress.

Improvement

to improve this I am simply going to put more time into it. this will be easier now I have no more lpw classes.

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Red Room-Hiatus Kaiyote

tempo 81bpm

key Bminor

time signature 4/4

structure verse 1, verse 2, verse 3

chords

C#m7

Cmaj7

Gmaj7#11

Bm7

G#m7b5

G#m7

Gm7

Gmaj7

C13

Bm9

Cmaj

the tonality of the song is minor however it does borrow chords from other model scales.

rhythmic ideas. straight 16th note pattern on rim of a tom. most of the songs is a simple kick on 1, snare on 3 pattern however towards the end of the song there drummer ads some subtle changes to the groove like changing the the snare to to and of 3 for a bar and also adds some tasteful fills.

lyrics

I got a red room
It is the red hour when the sun sets in my bedroom
I got a red room
It is the red hour when the sun sets in my bedroom
It feels like I'm inside a flower
I got a red room
It is the red hour when the sun sets in my bedroom
It feels like I'm inside a flower
It feels like I'm inside my eyelids
And I don't wanna be
Anywhere but here
I don't wanna be
Anywhere but here

reference

hiatus kaiyote, red room, brainfeeder, Spotify, 2021.

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Today I did session work for Ava's live performance assessment. Ava first send me the demo for the track about two weeks before this. I haven't changed the drums much but I cut down on a lot of fills, because I thought the song needed more space, and focused more on dynamics. I think this helped give the song more movement without taking the focus off of the other instruments (mostly Ava's vocals). on the lead up to this we were only able to have one rehearsal. This is mostly due to not booking rehearsal rooms early enough. we have learned to have things organised further in advance. the actual performance went really well. I felt happy with my dynamic range throughout the song I think the main problem was that we could've been tighter as a band. again this is more related to not rehearsing enough.

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This is my DAW version of red room by Hiatus Kaiyote. To start this project, Grace sent me a demo of the song with her vocals. I used the band lab stem splitter to isolate her vocals. although this sounds fine if I was to do this project again I would ask her to record a demo of just her vocals as the stem splitter made them sound a bit messy.

after this I recorded a breakbeat with my friend George who played around with effects. (see the original break in the post below) I put this break beat into the track, chopped it up and quantised it this gave the break a more messy, jungle sound. if I was to do this again I would record the break closer to the right tempo because quantising it put the pitch of the drums a bit too hight and I lost a lot of the boomy drum sound.

next I found the piano tabs and played in the chords. this was because although I wanted to remix the song I wanted to keep some elements the same.

my idea for the song was to have the first half as a more relaxed 2000s jungle track with vocals then have it switch up to a more aggressive Baseline sort of jungle. where I use the vocals as more of an instrument than actual words. to achieve this I cut the word "red" out of one of the vocal tracks, picket it and put on some effects. for the more aggressive sound I had to change from my own break and use the amen break wich I then also chopped up. this was annoying as I wanted to use only my breaks. if I were to do this again I would record a wider selection of breaks using different drums and different levels of dynamics.

next I made the "aggressive" sounding basses. to do this I used vital, the same plugin I was playing with in week 7. although I am mostly happy with the bass sound I think if I had more time I would like to spend a few days experimenting to get them just right.

after structuring the track I went through my files and found some classing jungle sound effects to use throughout. I think this helps the song stay somewhat consistent even though the difference between the two sections is so big.

overall I am happy with this track. I think having such a big switch is interesting and unique. I think I've done a decent job layering vocals to accent certain lyrics and I think most of the ideas are there. the main things I would do differently is; record more breaks at different dynamics and tempos, spend more time on the sound design of my basses and record vocals separately to avoid using a stem splitter.

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today I had my performance for son of a preacher man. the biggest problem with this song was the intro. I'm not really sure what happened but I think one of the guitarists wasn't sure when to come in but whatever happened it really threw off the band. I tried to communicate this with guitarists on stage wich you can see in the video but I think as a band we didn't know each other well enough to haver that good communication on stage. I felt like my timing was slightly off in places I think to fix this I would just listen to the song more. the transitions between the sections were pretty smooth and the fills fit the song well.

overall I thought this performance was okay but could have gone better. the main two this I've taken away from this is I need to know the song more to really get that timing perfect and that as a band we should've practiced together more to get better communication.

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today we had our first rehearsal for Cochise. this one was really fun because it left a lot of space for creativity. we had a lot of fun changing up the ending with the stabs. overall this went really well. I will listen to this recording and have a practice to keep it fresh for the performance but wouldn't change anything.

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today I had my Cochise performance. I made a mistake with the intro tom groove right at the start. it was nothing major but something to improve on if I was to do it again. I also made a mistake stopping on the wrong beat before the guitar solo. again it's not a major mistake, I think both of these mistakes just come from not knowing the song that well. next time I will start listening to the song on loop before I even start practicing so I have the structure to muscle memory. I did do a nice fill before the stabs with I'm happy with. and all of the actual groove went pretty well. there only other thing I could improve on is sometimes it felt like I was very slightly rushing or dragging. I think the comes from not being confident in my timing so again I think this would be solved by just listening to the song more. over all I am happy with this performance.

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today I started my home practice getting ready for the live assessment. I spent a lot of time experimenting with how to get the right tone for the drums and figured out my method. I put a weight on the snare. this completely deadens the snare and gets rid of all the overtones. I also used a hotrod stick in one hand and played on the weight instead of the hi hat, this again makes a more dry quiet sounds and fits way better with the song keeping it closer to the original.

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today I had my live assessment where I performed red room by hiatus kaiyote. the first issue I had was that the snare stand was a bit wobbly. because I couldn't get it secured it meant when I put the weight on it it kept tilting the snare in weird directions. this really threw me off and made me feel like I was concentrating more on the snare than I was playing the song. because I didn't feel happy with the set up I really struggled to play around with interesting fills like I normally do so it felt a little flat maybe even boring to listen back to.

after the second take I felt warmed up and ready to play a better one but we where then told we didn't have any more time. this really annoyed me because I know I can play much better than that and maybe if id had another 5 minuets to set up or play another take I could have done better.

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today we had a lesson in the basics of jazz drumming. we learned the fundamental jazz time as shown in the video but also practice a variety of comping exercises. this was perfect for my original smart target of wanting overall better stick control. I will continue to practice this at home.

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today I recorded my progress since week 4 of practice jazz basics. in the video I wanted to play around with comping as I have been practicing some exercises since the last video. I think my progress is clear and I will continue to find and go through a variety of different exercises.