How I Define My Creativity

I came into trimester five motivated and excited off of a great trimester four where i got some amazing grades and feedback from my lectures. I was working for a production company where i was getting at least one gig a week, doing live sound for bands around melbourne. Although i have worked very had this trimester i am not satisfied with everything i have achieved. My first intensive was the Song Exploder assignment where i recreated a Keaton Henson Song in the production style of Ruban Neilson from Unknown Mortal Orchestra. The second intensive was the Mastering class where i learnt a lot about the final stages of a piece of music and got to master one of my own tracks that i will release later in the year. We then moved onto post production where i think i struggled the most. Throughout these intensives we have also had small day trips to Soundpark where we recorded a band to 2 inch 24 track tape, and Zenith Records where we looked at the process of vinyl production. Throughout all of this we were also tasked to be apart of a freelance project of our choice, and this is where i was most disappointed in myself this trimester. Because i had such an amazing trimester four and then this trimester i have finished up feeling so underwhelmed with my performance, it makes me think about my creative process. How do i define my creativity?

For the song exploder assignment i wanted to mix two genres that i liked but were at totally different ends of the spectrum in terms of genre. I chose to cover a Keaton Henson song “You” using the production techniques of Ruban Neilson from Unknown Mortal Orchestra. If you would like to read exactly how i did it, i have written a blog previously on it. I really liked this assignment because i got the opportunity to create something with restrictions and limitations. I was pretty happy with the technical efforts of this assignment but the end product wasn’t a piece i would show many people. The emotion of the original song came from the varying tempo and emphasis that keaton put into it and it didn't translate well into the style of Nuban Neilson. I didn’t get the drums right on the first recording session either and because of the limited time i had i wasn’t able to re-record them, i made do with what i had but it wasn't ideal. I learnt from this assignment that i am capable of creating something in a desired style, that is something i haven’t done before. I was able to research, and critically listen to a certain artist and recreate or emulate the techniques that they used. This assignment was my favourite and i think it says a lot about how i work creatively. I enjoy being given restraints and working with what i am given, the end product wasn't exactly desireable but i think i learn the most from this assignment all trimester.

The second intensive we had was a four week block learning about Mastering. I have never really done any research into master before so all of this was new information for me. We didn’t have any deliverables in this class but we worked in groups on either the analog mastering studio with outboard gear or the Avid S6 where we mastering using digital tools like Izotope. I learnt a lot about mastering and the guidelines that you can loosely follow to ensure consistency on an album and consistency across speaker systems. We also learned about the naming convention that goes along with mastering and what is expected of us in the real world. I also got the chance to master one of my own tracks that i will release closer to the end of the year. The parts of this intensive that i struggled with was this was the first time i didn’t have any deliverables and i was being marked holistically on what i was doing in class and the write up that i did at the end of it. This was a strange transition for me and i was starting to doubt my abilities because i had no official thing to hand over and prove otherwise. Although i turned up to every class and participated i feel like i didn’t work as well as i should of in these classes.

Post production is placed in the same category as mastering where there was no official deliverables and i really struggled with this. There was work given to us to practice on but i think my learning style detests doing something just ‘because’. We were given a short documentary to work on and sync audio and fade in music, everything was already there we just had to put it together. We were also given some short web series from the film students to work on. Everything we were doing wasn’t really any new information. There were a few things we were shown that i hadn’t done before but it was more practicing than learning new information like we did in mastering. Throw in my lack of interest for post production and members of my group really enjoying post production, i found myself not really participating in this class as much as i usually would. I learnt from this class that i need to have a driving force behind me to create something. I need a purpose to create rather than just doing something to practice how to do it. In the Song Exploder assignment there was a deliverable that needed to be turned in and i got really involved and passionate about the project. In previous freelance work there is a group of people in the audience that have come to see a band play and i am in charge of delivering a satisfactory sound to them, i am being paid to deliver something and i get extremely passionate about it and do the best of my ability. My creativity is defined by the task that is given to me. If there is an expectation i go out of my way to go over and above that expectation but if there is no expectation and something is done just to fill in time or practice, i don’t put in as much effort as i maybe should. Although i am disappointed in myself in this particular intensive and i don’t feel i have learnt a lot about post production, i have certainly learnt a lot about myself and what the best conditions are for me to learn and grow creatively and professionally.

This trimester we were also tasked with doing some freelance work on the side. The freelance opportunities that come up for me were all to do with post production, so i never jumped at them. I am not hugely keen on post production and would rather do live sound or studio production. Due to other unavoidable commitments that came up outside of uni i was really struggling with my time management and not finding enough hours in the day to get everything done. In turn i was working myself to the point of physically getting ill. I understand that this was all a result of choices that i made but i never found the time to get a freelance project done. I did do a few live gigs for some local bands Sophisticated Dingo, Plotz and Holey Peyote around melbourne but not enough to count towards my Freelance. I have learn that i need to maybe apply myself a little more than i did this trimester to ensure i complete everything that was given to me.