For my final major project, I’ve produced a four-track EP and have mixed and mastered it. I’ve also created an original piece for the cover of the EP. I’ve written all the tracks myself, with the exception of one which is a cover of a song written by Jeff Buckley. As a whole, I feel like the project went fairly well, but I know there’s definitely a great deal I could improve on. Since writing my proposal, I’ve changed some of the themes and ideas, but I still feel it provides the same tone I wanted the EP to have from the beginning. It went from being a collection of songs that I’ve written when I’ve felt a certain way, to the EP having a main theme and story throughout. The EP is about an old man who stalks and then murders a young innocent woman. Even though the idea is much darker than the ideas I had for the EP before, it’s a lot more subliminal and subtle with the story.
This was my first time recording, mixing, and mastering so I can definitely improve my workflow and understanding of the techniques used in each process. I still feel quite proud of how it sounds considering it’s a first ever attempt. Even though I wanted the aesthetic of the EP to be quite raw and somewhat lo-fi, I know I could get the sound of the EP cleaner if I did more research and experimented more with mixing and mastering. There’s definitely nitpicks to be made especially with the mastering and EQing of the EP. Those were the two techniques I understood the least and need to learn more about. I feel that I need to work more on my self-motivation as there were times where I definitely could’ve been working, but decided not to so I could do other things that weren’t productive or beneficial to the project or to my skill set as a whole. I want to be learning and experimenting more in the future, constantly working on things, writing more songs, and trying new techniques and art forms.
I definitely believe that I could have used more of the 12 weeks efficiently and gotten more done and experimented more with plugins and other instruments in my songs, but I was never sure if I wanted more instruments and sounds in the mix as I wanted the songs to be quite raw. I do feel like the EP might have benefited from a song being more complex, but the one song I wanted to be more varied and complex, the ambitions I have for it would have been too much to undertake and I would’ve needed a bigger budget and musicians who can play stringed instruments. If I did go down this route, I’d need to research more into music theory and sheet music to have a better understanding of how to write music for classical musicians to understand. I’d also have to research more into recording multiple instruments at once and then mixing stringed instruments. Out of everything I needed to research, mixing was the one needed to learn about the most. Choosing a microphone, microphone placement, and recording is fairly simple, but mixing is a very big thing and there are many things you can do in the mixing process. There’s a huge range of possibilities with it so learning more about the basic mixing process and then learning about some experimental techniques is really important. Learning about EQ especially was really important and was something I had a very small understanding of and after conducting research, I was able to use EQ effectively and use it properly during the mixing process. Because I learnt about how to use EQ properly I was able to fix a problem I faced later in production. I had a problem where my vocals and guitar and very bassy and were overlapping so you couldn’t really hear any of the detail of the guitar or the vocals. Because I had a better understanding of EQ, I was able to use it to fix this issue and make the track sound fuller.
Tim Girdler's FMP 