Album reflection

The album's been released on Bandcamp https://199four.bandcamp.com/album/death-of-audio

On reflection, I feel that the album works well as a showcase of my talent as a producer, featuring a wide variety of sampling styles, original drumming and scratching (a skill I taught myself for this project). I feel that the album follows a subtle narrative exploring English pub culture, relationships, arguments and addiction, although I feel that this subjective, and I hope that people can draw their own conclusions from the meaning of the songs/album.

In terms of inspiration and direction, I feel that I have held true to the old school sampling styles of artists such as DJ Premier, Madlib and J Dilla, but have managed to interpret my own UK style to the album. A lot of this was through the choice of samples used, trying to mostly source them from European music as opposed to the typical samples of American Hip Hop (funk, soul, disco and blues).

I feel that one aspect I am particularly proud of is the cohesivity of the album, which was largely inspired by J Dilla's album, 'Donuts'. I have attempted to mimic the way in which he uses delays, scratching, pitch changes and FX/vocal samples to bring one track into the next.

In terms of drawbacks, I think that one issue I faced during the production of this album was the fact that I was still undergoing a learning process whilst making the album, particularly with mixing. This means that some of the older tracks don't have the same balance as those that came after them. An example of this would be to compare track four to track six. Track four was the first track that I produced for the album where track six was the last. Normally this would not have been such a problem as I would've been able to remix the older tracks towards the end of the project. However, I made the mistake of updating my Mac to Catalina, and in doing so lost a lot of the original projects. (Lesson learnt, never update your mac and always back up data).

The other issue I faced during the production of this album was taking my background in producing instrumentals for vocalists to use and making an album that stands alone without vocal accompaniment. After looking at various producers of instrumental Hip Hop, as well as looking at slow jams and old funk and soul records I feel that I utilised certain skills and managed to create tracks with enough variety that they are easy to listen to without the need for a rapper or singer. This was mostly through the use of sampling, scratches, extra drum fills and light equalising every eight or sixteen bars.