Looking Back - Nervous

Today's blog is going to be a little different to what I usually do in terms of project updates and other things. As an alternative, I thought I'd take you guys through my reflection process after I've finished a track and put it out. For this I'll be going back over one my latest tracks 'Nervous' and all the things that were wrong with the processes of creating it :'). So yes, in short I'm going to be picking myself apart today... Let's begin.

Procrastination/Laziness

I'll start with the obvious, procrastination and laziness are two things that uni students seem to struggle with regularly and I was no exception. Originally I had planned to have this track done by week 4 of my trimester but of course that never happened. However, this was due to a lot of different factors. Believe or not, I don't actually have my own DAW yet so I'm forced to work around the studio schedule at uni so I can use their facilities. If the studios were fully booked out on the days I had off then I basically couldn't produce anything that week. This combined with the limitation of only being able to book individual studios for 4 hours maximum a week made things rather difficult as I was constantly jumping studio spaces. Although this wasn't entirely a bad thing in the long term as it maintained my signal flow knowledge of different spaces and allowed me to listen to my track on different speaker systems, which aided my final mix. 'Nervous' was eventually released on SoundCloud in week 7 of my trimester as I wound up getting rather busy with my job and internship (new blog coming about that soon by the way ;) ).

lack of creativity

Before you get the wrong idea, I'm not saying I hate this track because I love it, not because its perfect (because it certainly is NOT :')) but because its where everything started for me in bass house and it always will be. However, in hindsight I do wish I got to let myself go a bit more with the creativity of sound and synth design. In reality, the only times I got creative in this project was when I created my main synth, added layers and placed a sin wave bend at the start of my drops. After taking some time to think once this track was out and listening to a lot of other tracks from my influences like Dr. Fresch and DustyCloud, I realised that I could do so much more. Self confidence is something I struggle with a lot and it usually winds up preventing me from achieving 100% of what I really could do. In retrospect 'Nervous' actually wound up sounding more like a G house track rather than bass house due to its rather basic synths.

Mixing and Mastering

This is where it gets a bit strange, as most of the mixing for this track was actually done on the fly while I was making it, I wound up basically skipping the process entirely and jumping straight to mastering it. This in retrospect was a stupid decision as even though I was relatively happy with the final mix, there were small elements such as the high hats that stood out a little too much and certain bass layers that could've had the slightest bit more volume in the mix. The mastering on this track was also the first time I'd ever mastered a track before so it didn't necessarily come out exactly the way I wanted it to. On larger speaker systems the track sounds great but when played on smaller devices such as bluetooth speakers and iPhone's, there is a slightly screechy frequency that seems to linger and this is due to poor sculpting EQ on the master which I should've put more time in to.

Composition

This wasn't as much of an issue but there were slight errors in composition that I felt I should touch on. The vocal samples in track were a 4 bar loop that was either repeated or chopped up in certain sections, the most obvious sections in terms of vocal chopping were the second breakdown and build-up. The second breakdown wasn't too bad but the second build-up is what I wanted to touch on. Towards the end of the second build-up the vocal chops have a very slight pause right before the climax, that might just be my OCD talking but I do wish I put the effort in to fix that before I just upped and dropped it...

To finish Up

Overall, this track was incredibly fun to make even with the limitations being a serious annoyance. In order to free up these limitations though I am in the middle of saving a lot of money to invest in the start of a home studio space so I can produce from home and at uni to maximise my practice time and effectiveness both in and out of the studio. The next blog I'll be bringing you guys will be a long awaited part 2 blog about my internship with 4ZZZ radio! Until next time!

Levels :)