The next meeting me and Lizzie were to have, involved the recording of demos of the 4 songs she chose to record. She played the songs through a few times and we sat with guitars together to which I would improvise around with parts that I might include in the final product. This was a great idea as it gave me a real feel for the songs and gave me a chance to learn the base structures of each song straight away. We put a phone just to get the audio recorded to which I could sit down in my own time, play through the songs and also compose the other instrument parts over it.

 

Wild Things – Lizzie Sawyer (Demo) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_2eh6Y3Jqm1YzdNUlRya2hiSnM/view

Miles – Lizzie Sawyer (Demo) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_2eh6Y3Jqm1SUUwUXFHQ0NlMDQ/view

You, The Ghost – Lizzie Sawyer (Demo) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_2eh6Y3Jqm1djJIMTNUMEZXbTA/view

The End – Lizzie Sawyer (Demo) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_2eh6Y3Jqm1OEZqakVlTUxVd2s/view

 

After I had a copy of the demo, it gave me an opportunity to go over each song closely, composing other parts, and to any structure changes that could be made to the finish tracks. Lizzie gave me permission to change any orders of the songs around and to add any instruments that I’d like to initially add, and we could discuss these at our next meeting.

After meetings and discussions for our research, we decided to focus our EP in a similar style to Laura Marling producer Ethan Johns. On Ethan Johns’ about section on his website, he boasts a wide list of things he can do, whether it be producing or playing music himself or composing parts for other musicians. We chose to follow Johns’ style when Lizzie decided, and asked if I would play guitar on her recordings, as she didn’t feel overly confident in recording all the guitar parts for the EP. We decided the best way to go about recording the EP would be for her to play the base structure (guitar & vocals) of each song, record them as a little demo then I could go off and write parts for the extra instrumentation. Ethan Johns is someone who works similarly to the way this EP is going. Working closely with the artists he would collaborate with, he would compose parts, record instruments, then produce and mix it later. As I would be composing additional parts, recording parts in the studio, then producing the EP, we thought that Ethan Johns represented what we were looking to achieve the closest.

 

Ethan Johns ‘About’ – http://www.ethanjohns.com/about/

 

For the initial research, we sat down a looked at list of producer’s and artists who we could use as influence for the EP and to give us the type of direction we would look to be heading in with the sound of the recording.

Artists which we’re highlighted in the playlist we created were :-

Mike Rosenberg (Passenger)

Laura Marling

Ben Howard

We also choose some producers to take example of their process and techniques used on their work. A key producer who is a similar example to the process we will use was Ethan Johns who worked on Laura Marling’s 2013 album “Once I was an Eagle”.

Ethan Johns produced, engineered and mixed this album as well as featuring on it as a session musician adding overlays to tracks.

In interview with Sound on Sound, he says explains his techniques and ideas:

“I have compressors. I’ve got some [Universal Audio] 1176s and [Dbx] 160s. I mean, I like compression, I like messing around with it. But I’m using it much less now. Interestingly enough, with this new Laura Marling record [Once I Was An Eagle], as I went on in the mixing, I very quickly started to unplug all the compressors. If you listen to Heartbreaker, there’s almost no compression on that at all. There’s no bus compression on any of the Kings Of Leon records I’ve made, none of the Ray LaMontagne stuff, it’s all completely open. There’ll be minor compression on individual things. If you’re recording to digital, you’re compensating for the fact that there’s no tape compression, so you’re trying to soften things”

Ethan Johns explains his use on compression when recording digitally and why he choose to use it or not use it.

Link to the interview: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun13/articles/ethan-johns.htm

Elizabeth Sawyer (known by the stage name Lizzy Sawyer) is an acoustic singer/songwriter hailing from Norwich, UK. An artsit with plenty of written material already, she has appeared on local radio stations preforming and has even featured with BBC Introducing.

 

When performing live, Lizzy tends to only have a setup featuring an acoustic guitar and vocal and occasionally features her boyfriend who adds an extra guitar. After discussing what avenues we could possibly take we decided that an overlay of extra instruments would be a beneficial feature to her recordings even though it does not feature in her live set up.

Lizzy is available on social media and has over 400 likes on her Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/lizzysawyer/?fref=ts) we could be seen as a good promotion strategy for her material.

The first thing we did was look into her influences and artists in particular who she enjoys listening to to get an idea of what sound she was going for.

We sat down with her, discussed and made a playlist in which she chose particular artists and songs in which she takes influence from and to give us an idea of what category she would like her music to fall in.

After getting a sense of what direction to go in we could start looking at the aims of our project

 

For our the second audio project of our final year we had to choose and look at something which was to different to our first semester project which was a radio drama for Compass FM.

A friend of ours, Elizabeth Sawyer is an acoustic singer/songwriter who was looking to get some material recording in pursuit of getting some air time on the radio. With this in mind we had to set some targets of what we could aim for, speaking and discussing this with the artist of course, we discussed the number of songs we were to record, any extra arrangements on the recordings or additional instruments the could be layered over the top of it and what direction she would want to take it in.

We came up with the idea of putting instruments such as mandolin’s, ukulele’s, piano and clean electric guitars over the top of her acoustic guitar and vocals, which are the only two instruments she preforms with when live.