Final Update!

For the past eight weeks, Mathew Lanning and I have been working on a song book and album for songs from “The Legend of Zelda” series. For the first four weeks we focused on choosing and arranging the song, and then in the last four weeks we recorded, mixed, and edited.

We published the album, which has been uploaded onto our websites and the songbook has been completed! I learned a lot about the recording process and how to mix and edit the songs for recording.

The first week, we began arranging the pieces, and planned to arrange about three pieces each week. The second week we did the same thing and met each weekend to discus our progress. The third week we finished up the arranging process so that we could plan and begin recording week four.

recording week 5

During week five we continued recording and started working on editing the songs. We continued this during week six and actually realized we needed to record a bit slower. We spaced out our recording plan a bit more. During week seven I had issues with my external hard-drive and actually had to re-record everything. Luckily I was able to do that during this week and we were back on schedule. During week eight, we were able to finish up recording and editing and prepare to upload our album.

The overall project was incredibly beneficial to my future career because it gave me experience going through the entire process of recording an album, and gave me the opportunity to collaborate.

Going through the whole process gave me a chance to experience what it is like to plan recording on a schedule with a specific release date in mind. I have never done that before and there were a lot of things that go into the planning process that I had not considered. I think the most important part I learned from planning is that problems I expected to happen, like difficulties with putting our recordings together, were not actually that big of an issue. Instead, I ended up having issues with my external hard-drive, where I had saved all my recordings and ended up having to re-record eight of the songs. Luckily, we had saved extra time for other issues that we didn’t end up needing earlier in the project.

When we started this project, I actually was interested in recording as a career, so I thought this would be beneficial just as recording experience. I may have changed my mind about my career path since then and would prefer to focus more on performing for a live audience, but I think this experience was still incredibly beneficial. Recording forces me to listen to my own playing with a different mindset and realize what sound I want to create. Then I figure out how exactly I can get that sound before either doing it on accident or discovering a specific way to get a certain sound. I think this kind of mindset of experimentation until I get a specific sound could be an incredibly beneficial approach to practicing and thinking about playing in general. When I practice, if I’m not getting a certain sound I assume the answer is more practice, which it is sometimes, but perhaps other times it’s a matter of changing my approach.

I think recording projects like this one can be a lot of fun and incredibly beneficial as a learning experience. I hope I can find time to do something like this again as a way to step back from normal practicing.

Thanks so much for reading and following along! If you are interested, here is a video explaining our process in more detail!