Decades Self Review

Overall progress:  Where you were at after the first half-term?  How you have improved? How have you learnt from your mistakes?  What areas have you still struggled with?  Are you happy with the work you created for the whole Decades project? Technical skills  What skills have you developed over the course of the term?  What is the technical or musical skill you are most proud of?  Logic skills: How developed are your skills? Where do you need to improve? Has this affected your work?  Compositional skills: knowledge of melody, harmony, rhythm, chords, keys, arrangement Time management/working methods  What problems did you experience in the first half-term?  What did you do differently this time around?  Did you complete all of the work on time?  Did you spend too much time on one piece, to the detriment of the other?  Did you make use of the access time that is available to you?  Are you happy with the music you submitted? Research  Did you improve your research methods in the second half of the term?  How much time did you spend listening to the key artists?  Have you been able to bring their influence into your work?  What have you learnt that you can apply to your own music in future projects? Group Project  Do you feel that the group project (playlist presented online) was successful?  Do you think we reached our target audience?  How we can improve in the future/what should we do differently?  What is your idea of the perfect way to present our classes music?

1. After the first half term, I felt eager to go deeper into composition as much of the first half-term featured most skills that I already knew.

2. This term, I have made improvements in bringing specialities into my track with the aim to make a more unique sound. I feel after olly's and farz's lessons I have learnt ways to branch my tracks out. Before, my tracks were fairly basic and wasn't making the right choices when trying to use more advanced features

3. I have struggled with making most of my sessions as I feel although I wasn't behind I could've slotted in more work with a teacher present. I also struggled with composing chords/melodies as it is not my strongpoint

4. I was more than happy with my final projects as I did a lot better than I thought I would. I expected the sampling of songs to be difficult as it is an untouched area for me but once I had learned tools such as time and pitch flex, I found completing the rest of the song easy once I had that sample finished

5. Skills I have developed: Sampling from songs, arranging tracks, signal grouping, time stretching, reverb, noise gate, modulation. These are all things I have learnt elsewhere but have developed massively during this term

6. With composing, it is not my strongpoint as I came here with little knowledge of conventional music structure/composition but throughout lessons I have gained a lot more information about keys, chords, e.t.c. I've learnt a bunch of chords and scales which has helped me set emotions to my tracks. I've also hugely advanced in melody making and especially stacking melodies with chords.

7. I am proud of skills such as reverb and flex because without learning these tools this term I would not be at the level of making tracks that I'm at now. These skills also have a large impact on my preference of genres, learning these made my tracks fit into the better

8. With time management in the first half-term, I felt like throughout lessons I was developing my skills but not successfully applying them to my tracks as i progressed making me have to finish my tracks in one towards the end. This term I aimed to do one section of the song each lesson, giving me the time to focus and master each section carefully. For example, the first week I created my drums, then the next week I started my melody and chords, then my bass and so on. I did my effects and arrangements throughout all the lessons. I also booked a production room to work on my first track which was helpful as it was refreshing to work on a track I was making in a classroom in a more personal environment

9. Research was vital to me because many of the artists that had been presented to us as stimulus were unknown to me so I had to listen to a lot more songs at home. Before working on my track I would spend 5-10 mins flicking through music videos of the artist I was working on to get into the vibe of their music. I also had to do more composition research when creating my James Brown inspired song as at first I was trying to balance the funk drum beat of my sample with basic scales. Once I had done more research into chords connected to genres, I was finding that using more funk like chords was making my track sound a lot better. without doing this research I wouldn't have found a flow

10. Our group had all made extremely different tracks that have a clear stem from the artists we looked at. everyones tracks was at a good standard of production and all sounded nice. The contrast is a good way of presenting our music but I feel it is better for all of us to create tracks in similar sounds/genres when giving a presentation as I feel it sets one energy in terms of audience satisfaction