I have now finished my EP Alice Falls. I always find it bittersweet at the end. I’m sad that it is over, and I can’t change it anymore and ecstatic that it is out in the world for others to hear. This project was definitely harder than my past ones as it was emotionally difficult and also required composition which I have only really done once in the past with my Hip Hop RnB Merge which I did collaboratively. The final Ep can be heard below.
To update on changes since the last post I mainly change a few small elements in the first three tracks thanks to some valuable feedback. I was given the feedback that the lows had too much energy in the first track. To control this, I lowered the lows in the piano chord by about 2dB with a large Q. I then placed a slight gluing compressor on the double bass to not attack the initial transient but to grab the tail so it wouldn’t continue reverberating (using the same plugins as stated in Is That Ground...?).
I’m going skip over track two as I changed the most on it. One the third track the kick was too strong and slightly out of time. I went back to Ableton initial and re-sequenced the kick MIDI to be in time but still be in time with the cowbell and hats. I then reimported the new track and placed an EQ on it to shape the sound a bit more. I then got rid of my volume automation and turned down the whole track. I then added in automation points and increased the volume of the kick in the cello parts by 3dB to make it more prominent as it gave the feeling of an elevated heartrate. I also changed the delay to the AIR Linear Delay as it worked better with transients.
Now to the second track which has been my nightmare track from the beginning. It was just the vocals that gave me problems with mix. This is due to me knowing I wanted them and had ideas just no idea how to control that. I had tried automating the volume this did not work. I instead of having a gluing compressor that I would tend to do on lead vocals however, I didn’t really want the VOX tracks to perform the same job as lead vocals. I instead went for strong compression that squashed all of the recordings to the same level. This fixed the volume control issue. For one line in VOX3 which was too quiet I also broke it and increased the clip gain and crossfaded it with the other clips. I then kept fiddling with the reverb. I tried a slight reverse reverb as a colleague suggested however, that person sounded demonic. We quickly destroyed the memory of this version and kept trying. I ended up on a church reverb in a small room. This gave it the feel I was aiming for to make it sound unnatural. I took inspiration from two songs in particular for my mixing the first being Alexander Hamilton from the musical Hamilton. The second is Spooky Mormon Hell Dream from The Book of Mormon. In the first song I took the concept of hard panning from side to side that happens at 3.43. I took the inspiration from the latter in the way that it uses time delay effects in the dream sequence to add a level of knowledge of who is real and not (all characters apart from Elder Price).
For this project I released it on my Soundcloud. This was not my preferred platform. I wanted to upload it to YouTube with a full animation sequence however, I am well aware of my limitations with time and so I got Ariel Moor to create album artwork instead. This is because this is a common way that musical theatre songs can be showcased not on stage and is draws in a younger target audience. If we look at the target market that I was aiming for which is 18-25 year-olds, and mainly females. Firstly, musical theatre demographics. In Australia only 12% of attendees fall in the 18-24 category however, it is more likely to be attended by females (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2013). YouTube’s demographics is that 11% of their users are between 18 and 24 of the 88 countries that is available in (Drazovic, 2019). Also 5% of the uploaded content is music and 10% of the uploaded content is animated which gives this project a chance of having a platform (Drzovic, 2019). Of course, my market competitors are animations of musicals some examples are below for the musicals SIX and The Guy Who Doesn’t Like Musicals.
Overall, despite not distributing this EP in the exact way that I wanted I’m proud of the end result. I’m also pleased that Ariel likes the EP to and can see the full audio-visual experience I was aiming for as she told me I sounded crazy in our first interaction (in a good way). Obviously if I could, I would have wanted live recordings over samples however, samples made it easier for me to experiment and change the sound. I know that in the future if I want to, I can always rerecord it with live instruments now I have the compositions. In the end I’m just happy that I could tell this story despite the story being unfinished.
References
Alyza. (2020). Don't Lose Your Head - SIX animatic [Video]. Retrieved 31 August 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tkaD0PWRPc.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2013). ATTENDANCE AT SELECTED CULTURAL VENUES AND EVENTS. Canberra: Australian Bureau of Statistics. Retrieved from https://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/ABS@.nsf/0/78A1186DA255C1C6CA257968000CB4D1?opendocument
Basura, B. (2019). Cup Of Roasted/Poison Coffee - TGWDLM Animatic [Video]. Retrieved 31 August 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9CkYdRJA-Q.
Drazovic, Z. (2019). Eye-Opening YouTube Stats for Marketers [Blog]. Retrieved 31 August 2020, from https://www.rivaliq.com/blog/youtube-stats-for-marketers/#:~:text=Twenty%2Dthree%20percent%20of%20all,add%20to%20your%20YouTube%20channel.
Stoll, A. (2016). Alexander Hamilton [Video]. Retrieved 30 August 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoP5fALDv94.
Trafalgar. (2017). Spooky Mormon Hell Dream — Book of Mormon (Lyric Video) [OBC] [Video]. Retrieved 30 August 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0-iS3M6OvY.
Comments