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Chaz Feitel
Sunday, September 22
Student Production Challenge
On Sunday, Recording Connection students that had been doing their lessons at the House Studio D.C. came together for the first time to participate in a mandatory music production challenge. Upon arrival were split into two teams and assigned separate rooms where we would have to produce and record a new song from scratch in only three hours. I was nervous for this challenge in the sense that I had only been to three studio sessions and only covered the basics of "what this is, and what it does" and not "how to use it".
I've had a lot of experience in writing music before, but never have I been given such a limited amount of time to crank something out while having to take in several other individual's ideas and incorporate that into the track as well. The main goal of the project was to create a full length track with an "anthemic" theme while utilizing a guitar as the primary instrument. I could hear a dance beat with funk guitar layered on top (kind of like Daft Punk's Random Access Memories), but I began by asking what everyone else had in mind because the theme could accommodate so many different types of genres.
Fortunately one of our teammates had brought his laptop with him and had some digital beat programs we could work with. However, because of this I felt like we were forced into producing a hip/hop track. Not that I don't like rap, but I don't like having to write a specific type of music because that's all we have to work with. Given we didn't have a drum set and one of the tracks was already more than halfway finished, it was the most efficient method we had so we rolled with it.
After about 10-15 minutes of discussing which direction to go with it, we hit some major problems setting up the protools. In hindsight we should have made sure all the recording instruments (mics, cables, converters) were ready to go before we did anything else. Between working out the Direct In for the guitar and getting the mic signal to work, we probably wasted about an hour and a half (not an exaggeration).
On top of this, we struggled with the structure of the song itself. We had a grand idea of what to do with the song and how to add small elements here and there to make it really good, but we didn't actually write a song from start to finish. We had a heavy guitar hook and vocal hook, but only one verse which we had to repeat during the "second verse" which ended up costing us big time because of the repetitiveness.
Everyone, including myself, in our group seemed to be lighthearted throughout this project. It was the first time any of us had actually met each other let alone worked on producing a song together, so the playfullness was definitely a way of breaking the tension in the group, but it harmed us in the professionalism of the song and a failure to meet the goal of the project.
None of us really knew what to expect from the judges. When we all gathered around the stereo to listen to both team's songs we were all greeted with a fresh feedback of rejection. Neither song was good, we all knew that, but hearing it being torn apart by the judges really brought us back to earth in a very big way. It was something I appreciated. It showed me they cared about making us not only good at what we do but the best at it.
Next time we have one of these challenges I will know what not to do, and that's in most ways more important than knowing exactly what TO do. This isn't garage band in my basement anymore, and I'm relieved to know that.
