Dear all,

The next task I was given was to develop my own chosen specialism in music and produce twenty minutes worth of material.

The idea here was to work on crafting my own music based on what style I liked, and basically produce the best music that I could at the time.

This project took a little bit of time to get started. I was given a lot of freedom with what I wanted to create and all that was set was that I had to produce twenty minutes worth of material. I decided to make five different pieces in the style of ambient music.

I remember when I first started sketching out ideas, I found it hard to mentally get round the idea of producing so much music. The problem I had was that I was viewing it as one big project, and was thinking of blending all the tracks together and composing it all in one Reason project file.

After speaking to my teacher, he helped me realise that I could concentrate on one piece at a time and that it was important to view them separately. This really helped me focus on the ideas I had for each piece.

While I was working on this project, I was also working on the mixing analysis exercises (which I will talk about in my next post). To cut a story short, my teacher told me to analyse pieces of music that I aspired to be like as well as other tracks that I wanted to discover the sound of.

I ended up using this idea to help me compose for the project and used some of the music as reference tracks. I found this really helped me keep in mind the sound I was looking to create for each piece, and once I got going with it, everything just rolled on from there.

That’s all I got to say about this one as I ended up releasing the music as an EP. For more information on the individual tracks, check out my A Better View post.

Love from the stars, Jamie