During the second half of the semester; Luke, Darcy and I decided to work together on a project, to develop our collaboration skills and production skills in general, and to see if we could create a sound which expressed what we wanted it to. We called ourselves, LXD, and created a three track EP.
Work Ethic
As far as working on this project goes, I feel the entire team was committed and worked hard. We were in regular communication and met regularly to ensure the completion of the project. Despite this, I feel that due to a lack of experience we underestimated the importance of completing certain things early, to the detriment of our final project. One example of this is the case studies, which we had intended on completing by the end of July. So while we were regularly getting together and doing the ‘fun’ stuff, we neglected the more tedious aspects of the course, only later appreciating the value of these tasks. Overall though it has been a valuable lesson in how to work on this type of project with others, and how beneficial activities like the case studies can be.
Creative Process
This is the first time any of us had attempted this type of collaboration, we had a clear concept and no idea how we were going to get there. We were quite lost at the start, but once we had our first cool riff it got easier and easier. We would jam with clips in Ableton to get a basic idea of the track, all the while anytime one of us had an idea we would see what would happen if we tried to fit it in. Honestly it was a mess, but the point is that we got better at it as time went on. It also got more difficult in a lot of ways after the first track as well though. Our concept had us going darker and more intense, and the sound that we had in mind was quite unfamiliar to both Luke and myself. Thankfully this was around the time we started to work on our case studies and realised we could deconstruct songs that had the sound we wanted, and then build something of our own, and we ended up coming up with something that at lease approximated what we had in mind. We were also lucky to have a great design team who helped us with some things, like names, which we were struggling with ourselves.
Teamwork
I think that we worked very well as a team. It was a huge learning process, and I doubt that any of us would say that we are great collaborators yet, but we are certainly better than we were before. From the get go we were very open and clear about our various strengths and weaknesses, and no one tried to outshine the others. There were some tense moments, but these were easily resolved and there was never any anger. We also balanced each other out quite well, with our different personalities apparently complimenting each other. We also worked with two guys from design who were very helpful, and great to deal with. We quickly built rapport and found that they were better in some ways at articulating our ideas than we were. We couldn’t always appreciate what they were saying, but it was clear to us that they knew what they were doing, so we were happy to get out of their way and let them do their thing. The only challenge with the design team was that occasionally it was difficult to communicate with them on messenger as we were often somewhat unfamiliar with the terminology that they were using, at least without being able to discuss it ‘properly’.
Equipment and production choices
There were a few constants with the tools we used to create the various tracks. One of the cornerstones of our production was the synthesizer plug-in Serum, which Darcy purchased earlier in the trimester. We found ourselves using it several times on most tracks, and we were able to create unique and interesting sounds due to way the plug-in works. Another key tool used was Ableton’s resonator, which excites certain the frequencies of specified harmonic intervals. We used this on various samples to help them to fit better within the mix, and also just because of the character it added. The other main tool we used was Trash2 by iZotope which was a godsend because we were able to distort the elements that we wanted to in the ways that we wanted to. Aside from this it should be noted that all tracks were made in Ableton, and most of the EQ and other FX were done using Ableton’s built in tools.
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