When mixing the live drums and bass, I often referred to lecture content from the ‘Mixing Essentials’ module (Mynett, 2019) in my first year to help achieve a professional standard mix and when creating various synths within Logic Pro X, I drew inspiration from ‘Desktop Music Production’ lectures (Herbst, 2019) detailing how to use LFOs and various techniques to shape synths. This content helped me experiment and create synths that complimented my music.

My aims when mastering the EP were to add brightness, clarity, and presence however reflecting on this, I feel I may have slightly lost some of the low end on the tracks however this did not impact the final result and I am satisfied with the concluding sound of the EP.

 

When arranging the songs, I carefully decided which would be more acoustic and which would have more electronic elements. ‘Night Terrors’ is a vulnerable song about insomnia/ nightmares so I knew it needed to be musically ‘stripped back’ so the lyrical content could be digested by the listener without the music being a distraction.

‘Live Outside’ is about nature, so it was appropriate for it to be acoustic featuring layered acoustic guitar and string parts, however, ‘The System’ and ‘My Doomsday,’ (whilst still having acoustic elements), contain synthesizers and experimental production techniques as they mention ‘machines’ and ‘screens’ so they should have a futuristic feel.

Initially, I wanted ‘When the Blue Sky Fogged’ to be acoustic, however after trial and error I realised that it suited an electronic feel, as the song details the ‘bubble’ of being young bursting as you enter adulthood and begin to face difficulties in life, so I wanted it to have a ‘floaty’ feel which was achieved when using synths and components within the DAW.

When composing vocal harmonies for each song, I was inspired by ‘The Japanese House’ who famously uses lots of layered harmony lines, creating lush soundscapes (for example in her album ‘Good at Falling’ (2019)) and I wanted to achieve something similar. I looped certain sections of vocal lines and recorded multiple harmonies on top of each other, picking the takes that suited best for the song.

 

In ‘Night Terrors’ a large choral ‘Ooooh’ can be heard as if it is being sung by many people at a concert and this style of vocal is influenced by Coldplay, for example in songs like ‘Higher Power’ (2021) and ‘Orphans’ (2019). A lead guitar line inspired by Coldplay’s ‘In my place’ (2002) can be heard in ‘Feed the Weekend’ as they are both high pitched, simple, and reverberant.

I was also inspired by the vocal production in the song ‘Gold’ by Kiiara which chops up vocal lines to create a repeated idea that results in the song’s memorable nature, so I used this technique in ‘Feed the Weekend’, a song about procrastination and constant work-deadlines so this repeated vocal idea adds to the intended repetitiveness of the song.

 

The lyrical content is reinforced through the accompanying music by word-painting and sound effects at various moments. For example, In the opening song ‘When the Blue Sky Fogged’ the lyrics ‘time refused to stop’ are accompanied by a fast-paced ticking clock sample (Williams, date unknown).

 

My Doomsday is about experiencing health anxiety and as it is the longest song on the EP it was necessary to utilise the sound design to keep the song interesting for a prolonged amount of time. I recorded samples of my phone ringing, dialing, and hanging up to be used as a representation of ringing the doctors multiple times, and an echoey church bell sample (mixkit, date unknown) is used to reinforce the lyrics ‘Ring the bells out loud’.

 

‘Live Outside’ describes being on a walk, therefore birds can be heard at the start of the song which I recorded in my back garden with a Zoom H5 microphone to set the ambience of the song.

It contains the lyrics: ‘sensations in my body flower’ in which I layered multiple harmonies over the word ‘flower’ to word paint a flower blossoming as shown in Figure 4.