Introduction

Hi everyone! My name is Mariangela, I've spent the past seven years in London, and I've recently completed the first year of the Audio Production degree at SAE Institute. I came from Italy to do a short course in English and fashion at Saint Martin's, and I meant to stay here for two months, but I never left. You're probably thinking: why fashion?! Well, I also got a degree in fashion design in Milano, and I tried to persuade a career in this sector and in particular the Visual Merchandising area and management. I've never got passionate about it and at the age of 30, I decided to change my life and follow my real dream, which is getting into the music industry. There is a famous verse from Pablo Neruda that I found very inspiring, it says: "We were born to reborn". My goal is to work in a recording studio and recently discovered myself interested in doing Foley. I'm however open to anything that comes in my path, and I'm always open for collaborations. I have a very creative mind, and I aim to explore music in 360 degrees, combining it with art as a form of installation and as a form of therapy. On the side, I would like to start doing volunteering in hospitals and something that I've been thinking for a while is to bring there sound healing (planning to get a certificate after the graduation). At the moment I'm trying learning deejaying and music production. I uploaded my first track which I talk about in the second post, I hope you'll like it and enjoy my blog!

Reflection

My previous experiences are very distant from what I am studying right now. For some aspect, however, they've still been helpful, for example, working for a few years in retail made acquire the ability to build good relationships with my clients. Fashion has no mercy, and this prepared me mentally on how to approach this new journey and keep my mind always focused on the target. If we analyse design as a creative process, we can divide it into different steps. First, you create a mood board and research influences based on the theme assigned. Second, you elaborate the various information acquired and start the creative process sketching the ideas. The last step is to finalise the design by making it industrialised and considering the type of consumer and its needs. Although some artists will say that their music is unique, it's still influenced by popular music from their cultural environment and by listening to other musicians pieces. When I made Comparsa, for the electronic music production course, we had different guidelines to follow. Firstly creating a song with a Daw, in my case Ableton, using at least a synth and Midi instrument inspired by two tracks. and do a hypothetical promoting plan (which brings to the third step of the design process). Except for some basic music theory learned in the previous module, I had no idea of how to write music or use digital tools. I wanted to make something inspired by Nicola Cruz's song Obsidiana. I started researching the instruments that he uses and include them in my melodies such as sitar guitar, percussions and flutes. I listened to various Latins conga rhythms, and I finally choose the Conga the Comparsa which is typical from Cuba. I watched tutorials of percussionists playing this particular rhythm and reproduced with the MIDI instruments. The majority of the melody are synths recorded in the studio such as the Roland Gaia and the Roland Juno Stage which I deeply love!

Visit my Soundcloud page

https://soundcloud.com/mari-pagano

Strengths and weaknesses

In this post, I will talk about my strengths and weaknesses throughout the first year of my degree. As I already mentioned, when I started this audio production course, I wasn't even able to identify a bass guitar in a mix, shame on me!! I started learning everything from scratch. When I studied fashion design, instead, it was different as I'm naturally talented in drawing (I've always been told to study fine art, but I never liked the easy way, that's not my style).

Definitely, my main weakness has been a lack of knowledge. Still, I'm a very hard worker, and I never lose my focus until I complete a task. I've spent the first two trimesters always watching tutorials on YouTube (bless all those engineers who make those incredibly helpful videos!!). I also have crazy attention for details which has been a good aspect for the quality of the work, however, sometimes it also made loose too much time and distracted me from the primary duty. Being aware of my weaknesses made me become much more organised with my work. During the second trimester, we had to record a band, so I started reading manuals and watched interviews about microphones placement methods. I made a plan of the techniques I wanted to use and a list of mics to use for each instrument and voice, and I managed to record everything smoothly in just one day!

In the third trimester, I had to do all the sounds and music for animation, and mix them in 5:1 (six-channel surround sound audio systems), I choose Fable. Fable is a cyclical fairy tale with a man and a woman who are cursed to be forever apart. In this assignment, I tried to use all my creativity, which is probably my strongest quality, to compensate with the lack of technical mixing skills, plus I had to learn how to use Ableton in a couple of weeks!. I researched foley techniques and worked on different ways to produce the sounds required. I'm mostly proud of sounds achieved for the bats, that I made using little bells layered with flapping gloves which I used to obtain the sound of wings. I was also very pleased with the resulting sound of roots that I made squeezing a leather belt and pitched it down. I also enjoyed making the soundtrack with my beloved Juno, that was my very first time and I'm please with the result. You can watch the stereo mix down here (I still have to change the volume of the music and fix a couple of effects and I will re upload it once I get access to the studios again), I hope you'll like it and please let me know your thoughts.