Documentation and Archive

Produce a blog on your personal website created in 1st year which documents the progress of the collaborative musical project undertaken within this module. The blog should include all evidence (documentation, photographs, MP3s, web links, etc.) of your collaboration. The blog should also include a written piece of about 1500 words which appraises the final performance, as well as your ability to document it.

When given the task of doing a musical collaboration I decided that I would look for musicians outside of SSR. Manchester having a vast array of musicians and collegues such as RNCM, BIMM and different universities therefor there are many musicians available for collaboration.

My firsts steps were to reach out to these various musicians through Facebook groups emails and online web forums, I explained what the task was and sent various links to similar songs and one of mine that would help them get a rough estimate of what the actual performance was going to be like. and what instruments they could play over. After sending out the emails I waited to see what type of artists replied. There for I could select artists that I think would be better suited to my performance.

After choosing a guitarist from university of Salford I decided we should meet for a coffee and discuss musical ideas and also become more friendly with him which always makes working together easier. After seeing the artists portfolio, I decided he was perfect for my performance and proceeded to keep in touch after that. After seeing my first artists portfolio I decide my second artists didn’t have to be a out going artists maybe just a percussionist or something similar to that  because I had decide that my guitarist was going to be the main aspect of the collaboration, therefor I asked a friend of mine who was a drummer in the  past if he would accompany the performance playing bongo as my track was mainly percussion .

 

 

 

 

 

Research

 

To incorporate the live performance aspect of the task is decided I would use Ableton push play loops of my song s. Push is an all inclusive instrument for laying down and tweaking your songs either live or in the studio - it can also be a versatile unit for performing live as you have lots of control over what you are doing. I think that this was the prefect choice for my live performance due the the versatility of the unit.

 

 

Final DJ Performance

 

Equipment

1 x Mac Book Pro

Pioneer DJM900 Nexus 2 Mixer

Pioneer XDJ100 CDJ x2

Push Controller

Independent interface for 2 x Guitar (rotating to 1 vocal and 1 guitar)

Headphones sennhieser hd 25

Various XLR, Jack connections

Orange guitar amp

 

 

Software

 

Ableton live

Rekordbox

 

Material

Original composition (the warehouse)

Dennis Cruz – everybody (original mix)

 

Team

Me – producer, DJ,

Jordan swann  – electric guitar

Matt ball – percussion

 

 

 

Positives

Overall I think the quality of my performance was good, I am pleased to say that the performance was a success in terms of meeting the brief. This was due to using an original song of mine combined with the live acts which I thought worked very well. However, I relied heavily on the musicians to improvise. Which isn’t a bad thing but could of gone wrong easily.

My first practice session was on the day of the performance for 2 hours and because I had briefed the artists via messages before that, every came together as planned. I made sure that my artists were accommodated properly making sure they were comfortable and had every piece of equipment they needed. I sat down and discussed all cables that were needed: namely XLR – Jack, Jack to Jack

The only thing we did in the practice session was run through the arrangement of where the guitar comes in, and whether he solos or plays chords. I thought that the electric would have more prominent   alongside my original track.

 

Improvements

What I think could have been improved is my personal live performance. I only played my song through Ableton scenes and maybe if I were to it again I would perhaps have different parts of the song to play to make the live performance different to the original mix of the song.

I also had trouble with Ableton in a variety of ways; my data collection was poor I found that all my files were in different location on my hard drive making transferring to different computers labours task. I was left with no other option than to manually input missing audio. This poor file management there for impeded the practice sessions making my artists wait for the problem to be solved.

Secondly routing the signal from DJ mixer back to Ableton to record external music from DJ mixer was a big problem. I have learned a lot from this experience, in terms of how the dj can be used  and using technology I have evolved from what I thought my career path would be of being just a solo dj and more collaborations in the future may extend from this task.. Future experimentation will also broaden my horizons of music. I think over all my ideas was great just  the exacution could of been better.

Looking back at the planning stage believe that I could have benefited my performance in various ways. Firstly, I think if had done more secondary research I would have had a broader knowledge of how dj’s actually are instrumentalists in the business and not my own perception of how they are. For example Chris Liebing uses machine live (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pohTY2x0J2Q) as shown in this video. If I had seen how he incorporates it into his live sets I would have had more of an idea than just guessing how I was going o play my song live there for benefiting the overall performance. Another source I should of looked at for inspiration that I later found was (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeqD3fAd2Ps) young punks which incorporate live instruments and able ton live in a interesting manor.  So if my research at the begging was more extensive I believe that my performance would have had more structure and been more cohesive rather than more of an improvised structure.