BPM YO

               This semester I learned that collaborations are extremely important and allow you to create things that you probably never would have made before. I also learned that I am not the best communicator and that I need to be more assertive. 

               Our creative process was quite slow. I feel as though we knew our goal: electronic dance music and flute. Unfortunately, that gave us a wide variety of options, and without a clear leader in the group we were quite stagnant in ideas. I feel as though the amount of options we had combined with our group lack of experience in dance music made all of us nervous about what exactly we should work towards within the classroom. For a while, Paige and I were mostly worried about how to make “dance music and flute” a cool and exciting project while keeping it challenging enough to give us a good grade in the classroom.

               I felt the pressure of making sure our project was “PAT” enough, and I feel like Paige thought that too; half the time I was wondering how to throw MAX at our project without really any creative experience in MAX at all. To be frank, I looked at all the other groups with a Kiran, a Sam, a Peter and so on and was concerned about how our group would be graded if we didn’t make our finished project complicated enough in comparison what the heck others did.

               In hindsight, Paige and I love to compose. Meryl is a great improviser. We should have jammed out. Our minds took ourselves out of our own strengths and tried to force us into a technician space that we aren’t that strong in.

               With all of that happening, I eventually freaked out about making sure we made progress and started to bulldoze the group. The first track we had was basically me making a bunch of decisions without asking for too much input. We threw Purplopia together and that felt good, but then I got worried about the tech of it all again and most of the work we did was focused on Listen to The Rhythm.

               Our progression was terrible, and eventually we had two weeks to learn to perform well two unfinished songs live and somehow make the sound travel around in a circle in a room and I took over because I was stressed out about failure. I stopped asking for input and just started doing. I could feel Paige feeling frustrated with our process. There were so many tech problems combined with our time limit and I lost trust in any hands that weren’t mine.

               The tracks turned out great in my opinion, but I feel like we could have done better working as a unit. I think we could have done a lot more if we got another shot at it. All in all, I learned so much about Ableton and the challenges of performing live.

BPM 4EVA