With regards to the success of the whole project i am quite disappointed with it’s destination; however, i have made many mistakes along the way that i can reflect on and learn how to do better next time. Throughout this post i will be highlighting some of these things.

I believe that a lot of the research we did surrounding concept albums was relevant and worth it’s time; however, the application of these resources was at fault. Both Jack and myself put in some good work to understand different aspects of concept albums and came up with many ideas that could have nicely shaped our end artefact. It was very interesting to pick apart The Incredible True Story by Logic and delve into some of his ideas.

One of the biggest things that completely derailed this project and it’s progress was the fact that there was no set in stone brief until the very end of the project. This meant that a lot of the work completed was unorganised and didn’t really have a clear direction. When calling out for help with musicians we didn’t specify simply enough what we wanted to achieve and what we needed help within the project. Our tutor Lee pointed out that if we were to ask simply enough could you learn this section of a piece and allow us to record it we may have made more traction with our clients. My problem is that i hyped up the project so much, it almost intimidated people away or even allowed them to believe they were not good enough for what we were looking for. Many of the musicians we were hoping to work with were first year university students which explains their uninterest or hesitation in our serious approach.

I felt throughout this project i was responsible for organising the vast majority of it. I reached out to all of the clients we got involved with and loosely planned deadlines for the project. After understanding that i did somewhat a poor job at parts of this role, i realise that my lack of organisation skills and planning let us down. I did some research into project management itself and understood what it was exactly i can do better next time. We did well at formulating plenty of ideas and getting on with the work; however, there was very little order to the process.

The book : Project Management for Musicians by Jonathan Feist

The book above mentioned that one of the first steps to project management was mind dumping which involves noting down all the ideas you have about a certain thing. both good and bad. we did this fine.

Next is to categorise all of these ideas into different sections for example research and production. After this comes the important part. Prioritising all of this into a chart so you can visually see what you need to do and when. How much time is acceptable to spend on a certain category of part of the work and when to move on, highlighting exactly what needs doing most and what doesn’t. This is something that we really skipped out on, and in essence we had no clear idea of how much time was too much or too little to spend on some things.

Towards the end of my project, i had wasted so much time doing things that didn’t really matter, all the important things got passed by.

I managed to at least create a few nice pieces of music with elements of Holsts score within them, but with better management the project could have been a better success. Lee introduced me to one of his methods of work when i mentioned cracking on with just one thing at a time, and this complements the idea of having a pool of work you need to get on with. By understanding you mood you are in and the amount of time you are able to crack on with something, you are able to capitalize on this and set yourself on a task that fits in with your current mindset.

An example of this approach may be arranging pieces of music rather than composing, or splurging away on relevant ideas to add to a pool of things that can later be arranged into place. Instead of just setting your mind on one thing for hours without end this approach may help. Instead of organising a specific thing to do in a given time slot, this way you can just allocate work and break times and take in consideration of your priorities from the organised chart mentioned before.

It wasn’t just poor planning that let me down, it was my ability to delegate jobs to other team members and keep them motivated and in check. I let a lot of the work hinder above my own shoulders as i was happy with my approach and worried that Jack wouldn’t do as good of a job. In the end, doing this all alone and not encouraging Jack to take up some of the work. Whilst saying this i do believe Jack could have done a better job at reaching out and doing his part in the production process.

In the end we did manage to record some orchestral instruments such as the piano and timpani; however, we did not really do much research into this at all. We simply spent time figuring out what sounded best with the equipment we had, which at the time was a C1000 AKG mic and a contact mic. In all essence i don’t believe this approach was too bad as i very much believe that using your ears to determine what sounds best instead of set techniques is whats important. After all of this the experience was also valuable.

So to conclude even though a lot of this project was a complete flop. I have learnt a lot what to do better next time.