Summary of term 1

So far I've been put into two bands which has been very good. I've learnt that it's important to be open minded when it comes to playing songs that you're not familiar with and to always try new genres because it will help to improve you as a musician.

I had 3 performances last term, 2 were on the stage inside the music block and one was outside nesr the library and shop. The first song I played in a live performance was 'What You Know' by Two Door Cinema Club. This was with my old band which consisted of me on bass, Tom on guitar, Marco on keyboard, Emily on vocals and Jerome on drums. After the first week, Induction week, people were moved around to create new bands and we were put into our forms, my form is ED1B, and we were given our timetables. My second and latest band consists of me on bass, Charlotte on vocals, Xana on vocal/rhythm guitar and somtimes drums, Luis on Drums, Owen on guitar and Elesa on rhythm. The first song with my new band that we performed

I've done a bit of work on cubase, this has consisted of creating music to a short film. We've been taught all the basics of cubase which was all very familiar to me for I have used cubase many times before.

Learnt about microphones and the different types of microphones you can get like dynamic and condenser microphones. Usually dynamic microphones are used to record bass and condenser microphones can record most things like vocals and guitar.

Recorded a cover of Love Me Like You Do/Style in the studio with Phil and Nick who helped us to record the song and Nick did the mastering. The first thing we did was record the drums in the liveroom where we had two microphones on the snare, a microphone for the high hat, two overheads, two mics for the toms which were clip on mics and a microphone for the bass drum. We supported the drums by performing our parts in the studio so that the drums could be recorded. We didn't play to a click track because the drummer didn't know the BPM. This resuslted in the drums being out of time. When it came to recording the guitar and bass I, Xana and Elesa were plugged into the DI box in the studio while Owen was in the liveroom playing through his guitar from the marshall cabinet where a condenser mic was put infront to capture the sound. After the guitars and drums were recorded, the last thing to do record were the vocals where Charlotte and Xana took turns to record in the liveroom. Owen and I decided to redo our parts because were weren't to happy with our last performance and we realised that we could get a better recording therefore we recorded our parts again. The last piece of recording was the drums because the first recording was out of time therefore we tried to fix the drums by recording them again but that didn't help too much. The guitars and bass were recorded playing to the first drums, which were out of time, which were scrapped and then the new drums had to record to the guitar and bass which weren't exactly in time or sounded out of time because of the drums. We had to mix the track and make it sound radio worthy. We added some distortion to the guitars, some tone to the bass, added reverb to the vocals and panned the instruments to add some structure.