Today I felt like trying out a different type of 'research' rather than reading journals. I thought it would be interesting to hear from someone who is in a similar situation with me - another musician/producer, so I asked one of my course mates from my undergraduate degree (Creative Music Technology) to send me written answers to a few questions.
Kye Voce plays guitar and synths/launchpad in a band called Stitch and is also in charge of production/mixing the band's music. Currently the band live together in Bournemouth, taking a year off after graduation to just write music together, record it and post videos on youtube.
This is a video of the band that they re-posted on Facebook a couple of days ago and, after watching, I decided to send the questions to Kye:
Here are the questions and answers:
1. You (not sure if just you or all Stitch members) produce your band’s music. Could you please comment on how you feel about being a musician/producer (is it liberating - you can allow yourself to be creative without limits, is it too time-consuming? how much time do you spend on production as opposed to writing/performing music)
I find that whilst it is liberating and exciting, it is equally daunting and stressful due to the fact that it is only myself and the other members of Stitch making all the creative and non-creative decisions. Because of this, I feel as though our judgment and creative decisions can become stagnated within the triangle of us three - we are our own creative team and therefore 99% of decisions come from within the band. This means that there is no set of ‘fresh ears’ to come in and provide an external outlook at the song writing, production or mix. We are therefore reliant upon our own self-judgement from the initial writing to the release of a track, which can make it very difficult to make critical and un-biased decisions. This can lead to doubting and second-guessing some decisions, which can become very time consuming as you can easily start going round in circles. I find often than not, that initial idea is the best and that I eventually end up going back to it.
2. How do you maintain an online presence? Have you got any future plans or strategies to gain more fans?
We are quite rubbish at keeping an online presence across the main social media platforms. We primarily use Instagram for regular casual photo and video posts, whilst our ‘serious’ posts, these being the release of originals, covers and announcements, are released on YouTube covers and then shared via Facebook and Blogs. We occasionally tweet, but we really dislike Twitter’s format - it’s so cluttered and demands so much constant attention to keep up with everything.
Our future strategies include releasing and getting our music reviewed through pre and post release blogs.
3. If you were to choose between: being independent or being signed with a big label who takes care
of all aspects for you (legal©right, booking&management, distribution, promotion, recording and production, etc.) at the cost of losing creative control over your music, what would you choose?
My preference would be to stay independent, so as to keep the primary creative control, however to increase the size of our team to include knowledgeable external team members. This would be in the form of producers, mix engineers, videographers, marketing, management, legal, distribution etc., as this would allow Stitch to focus more time on practicing and performing. However, this of course all requires money and funding, and to acquire this team would most likely require either a) Stitch becoming financeable profitable through our current course of action (Stitch doing all the work), b) finding external investor (i.e. a label), or c) pot luck in finding a team willing to do all this for very little initial money!
4. What’s your main DAW and three favourite plugins?
4. Logic Pro X is my main DAW and my three favourite plugins in no particular order are:
Waves EMI TG12345 Channel Strip
Waves H-Reverb
Waves S1 Stereo Imager
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