Musical Product 8/03/2012

The list of songs that I plan to record for my musical product are:

• Make you feel my love - Adele
• At Last - Etta James
• Guns and Horses - Ellie Goulding
• Mercy on Me - Christina Aguilera

I have recorded music before on Cubase in order to practise for gigs and listen back to see how it sounds and just to have something to show people when asking whether I can organise or play at a gig or an event.  So far I have recorded Make you feel my love by Adele. Me and Rob (sound engineer) did this by recording the guitar first - seperately - so it wasn't in the background of the vocal track and didn't leak over. I then added some different effects to the guitar and saved these as a preset. I then did a few takes and got the vocals recorded and added some reverb, chorus and echo. After, I saved these as presets so that I can use them on future songs to make the album sound the same as a whole.

When recording make you feel my love we started by recording the guitar and vocals into Cubase however the vocals were clipping when we recorded them and started distorting and we couldn't find where the problem originated from so we just decided to record the whole thing into Garageband instead which actually proved to be easier to use in terms of adding effects and techniques to the track after recording- although they were limited. One thing we did find quite annoying with Garageband is that if you input another track and you only need certain parts of it, even when you trim it down the size of the file still doesn't change in your documents so it is taking up more space then needed in your documents. Eventually we found it is best if you trim the track in another piece of software before inputting it into Garageband to reduce the size of the file.

I didn't have to book any rooms as I just did the recording at home using: an acoustic guitar (TangleWood); a microphone - louten horizon (for both guitar and vocals); two rokit speakers one on either side of where we were mixing the track so that we could listen to the music properly as a surrounding sound and pan it left or right when needed; an alesis USB audio interface and an RNP pre amp.

I currently have all the guitar recorded for all the songs (using Rob's help) and one of the tracks completely mixed down however still have 3 songs to finish off. If I were to make this a full physical product I would still need to create and design the artwork for the EP, the posters and flyers to promote the EP and also set up a lanch gig along with similar promotion. This would then hopefully allow me to gather feedback on the tracks that I have recorded, the artwork and the musical product as a whole from my target market, which was revealed from the primary research that I have gathered.

I can't actually distribute this EP physcially or digitally because it would be breaching copyright laws however if the songs on the album were my own I would probably distribute one of the songs off the album before the others maybe as a free download just to give the public an idea of what they will be getting out of the full musical product before trying to sell/broadcast the album in as many places as possible. These could include:

• Amazon (physical & digital)
• HMV
• Independent record stores
• Radios
• Lists so that people can choose the music for TV programs, adverts and films