This semester, I had the opportunity to collaborate with a variety of people on projects, including my string quintet piece ‘Forerunner’ and my musical theatre-styled piece ‘Mirror of You’!

 

‘Mirror of You’ involved a rock band, and I knew if I wanted this to work, I would need to find a ton people that would be willing to play their instrumental parts for my piece. Luckily enough, within the first few weeks of the project I had miraculously met two vocalists, a percussionist, a pianist and even a guitar/bassist who were all willing to collaborate! Now that I had assembled a full team of talented musicians the tricky part was figuring how to record it. While all of us had plenty of experience performing our instruments, none of us had any experience performing them in a recording studio setting. Because of our lack of experience, we ran into plenty of problems such as technical issues with the recording system, microphone issues, room booking issues (thanks to the contemporary students), playback issues, issues regarding rhythm and issues regarding the pitch of the instruments just to name a few! Me and the performers alike had to adjust to these new conditions, and with what little time we had we were able to improve and adapt. However, getting a final recording of this piece was a huge struggle due to the multitude of issues that occurred. The main purpose of this collaboration was to record a piece of mine for an academic submission, however we all learned a great amount about recording, performing, and mixing in the studio and the effort was worthwhile for some of us solely off the knowledge we gained from the experience. Fellow composition students that worked with me on this project especially benefited from this experience, as we had a studio recording assessment that this was good practice for (you guys can thank me later!). I currently do not have a copy of this piece for distribution but I’m hoping to do a high-quality mock-up of this piece sometime in the future.

 

I also had another piece that I was planning to get a live recording of. I began recording some violin and cello parts but was unable to get a full recording due to a lack of instrumentalists, it was lucky I was able to get one of my songs fully recorded at all though! I’ve created a mock-up of this piece which can be found in my list of semester one compositions.

 

Thank you to everyone who helped work on these projects with me! Some of the musicians who worked with me can be found at the links below: