Week 6 - Busy, Busy, Ill.

Hello! Thanks for checking in again, so this week was a bit messy. We’ve got a week off from lectures next week so I chose to go home on Friday, but I ended up being really ill from Thursday with a really bad flu which meant that I was so exhausted and ill that I couldn’t do work.

ALLORA

I was behind again this week on the edit for the ALLORA video, as it ended up taking quite a long time and other things came in the way. However, I managed to finish the serious edit as well as the serious promotional video this week! I sent it over to the girls, but they wanted a meme version, so I started working on that as quickly as possible. I decided to do the meme edit on the promotion first as it was shorter, and I could gauge if I was along the right track before beginning to re-edit the full 21 minute video. I’m trying to finish both videos as soon as possible, with the aim for the promotional video to come out a few days before the actual video. As I was super ill over the weekend I couldn’t really do any work so I’m trying to get it all finished next week.

I also didn’t get a chance to meet up with them but we kept in decent contact over facebook messenger. There wasn’t much to catch up on apart from the video so a meeting wasn’t vital.

Songwriting/Artist Section

I started off by recording some vocals for songs I've written previously on Monday whilst I was at uni.

On Wednesday night I had an overnight studio session. I had asked my guitarist to come in and record his part for ‘In My Feels’ but he already had plans, so he’s going to do it in the overnight studio session I have booked for next week. Instead, I decided that it would be fun to try and write and produce a song in a night with Merryn (my flat mate who I’ve written quite a few songs with, or asked her for advice quite often).

I didn’t have a complete idea for what I wanted to write about, except I started writing some lyrics on Tuesday night, and loved the idea of ‘overnight’ how things can change overnight, what can happen ‘overnight’ and ironically we were in an overnight studio session.

Merryn had a play around on guitar and I had a play around on a push pad and an 808 kit that I found on Ableton.

Once we found chords that worked, we started singing some melody ideas over the guitar and drums, until we were happy with the general melody. Next up was lyrics. We discussed the feeling for the song again, and I brought some lyrics in that I had from the day before, and the structure of the song I originally had in my head, which was different stages of the night out/house party about this one person you’ve found and have lust for, so: verse 1: dusk, verse 2: dark/night, verse 3: dawn - taking some inspiration from SG Lewis’ trio of EPs.

We collaboratively wrote and recorded the first verse and chorus, which is on the demo page here.

We couldn’t finish the song in the studio as I started to feel really ill, coming down with flu-like symptoms, so we recorded the guitar, some piano and the vocals for the first verse and chorus. I’m going to finish writing the second verse next week and hopefully produce and release the week after. I’m not worrying too much about the mixes, I’ll mix each track as best I can, to the sound I want to but I’m going for the ‘bedroom pop’ vibe so if it’s a bit messy it fits in well with the ‘DIY’ style.

It was a reasonably quiet week for songwriting this week. This was due to me becoming very ill over the weekend and going home over the weekend, as well as focusing on other projects.

I have realised though that I need to produce and mix one track fully, and release it that day, in the shortest amount of time possible because at this moment I have so many unreleased, half finished tracks, and then writing more and just adding to the pile.

Performance

We got back to rehearsals this week with one rehearsal on Thursday. I could tell that I was starting to get ill again as my throat was really croaky and tired but we tried to get on and go through what we had because I was worried about not going over some songs for two weeks.

It was clear from once we started rehearsing that we really needed the rehearsal because things were a bit messy especially since having not rehearsed for two weeks. It was good to remind ourselves of the songs, but the harmonies need to be worked on because I keep forgetting my harmony, or I change it up when I sing sometimes which means that I duplicate Luka when she sings the main melody line. I know that with more rehearsals and more time that we can perfect it and it’ll be really good in the end. I also need to finish off my Ableton files and think about if I want one song which is quite instrumental, but with me playing around with the push pad and triggering samples whilst Alistair, India and Holly play. We will see.

Thanks for reading! Make sure you follow my social media accounts and check back for more updates.

Speak soon,

Sabrina