Week 7 - Another Studio Sesh

Hello! Welcome back to another week in my life effectively. I started this week off at home and very poorly, but recovered enough to come back to Leeds on tuesday. Thankfully we had “CARES” week, which is essentially reading week so I didn’t have to be in at 9:30am on monday morning and could chill out at home, but I wanted to come back to Leeds and get as much work done as possible because….final year!!!! Which means EVERYTHING IS DUE VERY SOON AND I AM NOW VERY STRESSED, but we got this!

On a brighter note, it was one of my friends’ birthdays’ this week which meant a house party!! And ya know, work hard, play hard! It was so fun, I honestly feel like a night like that to let off some steam was well and truly needed. Here’s basically the only picture I got from that night, which is a cute little polaroid:

Here's a cute little time-lapse that I made whilst the sun was going down which I really like too:

ALLORA

I finally finished the meme edit for the promotional video on Tuesday and sent it across to the girls, who loved it! It did take me a bit of time to figure out how to get the video to fit to Instagrams dimensions. I’m aiming to have the full video fully meme-edited by the end of tomorrow (Monday), ready to post both next week towards the end of next week. I want to make sure that I have both done so that I don’t leave a big gap in between posting the promotional video and the full video. Here is a link to the promotional video.

We didn’t have a meeting this week either due to completing the video and conflicting schedules, but we’re trying to find a time for a meeting ASAP as I think it’s really important to meet up regularly and just have a face to face chat.

Songwriting

I had yet another studio session this week. I wanted to take this opportunity to catch up on some recordings and try to finish off some production as much as possible, which is also why I didn’t start any new projects this week.

However, my guitarists did come to the studio this week to record his part for ‘In My Feels’ which was good, and Luka recorded her harmony, which may need to be rerecorded as I’m recording my part, I’m accidentally duplicating where she sings the main melody line. I’m aiming to have Becca record her harmony on Monday after our studio lesson. It’s very close to finished though.

I mainly recorded vocals for different songs such as ‘House Party 44’, ‘Afterthought’, ‘In My Feels’. However, my voice started sounding very tired, very quickly. I tried to use it as much as I could, however, I went home at about 3am because I couldn’t vocally give much more. These still need to be finished, production wise. I’ve been focusing a lot on the ALLORA work, so once that’s done I’m going to go back to writing songs, lyrics and producing.

Performance

We had one rehearsal this week with the whole band. We went through each of the songs so far and started on the second cover. I thought we’d give ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ a try for the second cover as it’s a classic that everyone knows, I know it well and we could do a very interesting arrangement of it. For the very first rehearsal of it, it went quite well. Most of the band knew their parts really well, and it’s coming together nicely. We decided to do a little breakdown section for the second to last chorus, where the instruments drop out so that you can really hear the harmonies, but my guitarist didn’t completely understand, I’m sure after another rehearsal or two it’ll be perfect.

I also had a chat with a couple of members of my band about rehearsals and schedules, due to everyone being very busy and most of them being in multiple bands. We decided that we need more than one rehearsal each week in order to perfect it to a performance standard. We also decided that it would be good to have some separate rehearsals, so one with the whole band each week, then one without the harmonies so that we can solidify the instrumental side of things, as well as possibly one with just the vocalists (and someone on an instrument for guidance) so that we can perfect the harmonies, without wasting peoples’ time. The only problem was timings, as I’d personally like to do each of these rehearsals in a university rehearsal space with microphones as I find it very beneficial to be able to hear myself sing, but that comes with time and space restrictions, however, I’m currently planning out my time each week so that we can work around it and have a set time each week.

That’s it for now everyone! It’s been a very busy, but also very quiet week this week. Make sure to check back again next week to see what I've been up to!

Speak soon,

Sabrina