Archive for March, 2015

It’s a long path to a finished product

Posted: March 16, 2015 in Composing, recording
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Just finished a few days’ EP mixing. Regular readers (do I have any of them?!) will be aware that I’ve been working on an EP for the better part of 18 months…..why so long, you ask? Mainly because recording, mixing and mastering is of necessity a slow process when you have a budget of nothing. I’ve begged, borrowed and bartered my way through the project so far – and been blessed in having some hugely talented musicians share their talents with me on this basis – but there’s a limit to how much you can rush people who are working for nothing. If I have  a bass player booked for a recording session and he gets offered a paid gig the same day there’s only one call to be made at his end –he’s gotta take the paid gig. So, we wait. I’m at roughly the 70% point now – which in my experience is the point at which there’s the greatest risk of project abandonment. Starting things is easy, finishing them is another story.  Still, after a long delay it’s good to be back in the studio, mixing and listening to the material with fresh ears. Stay tuned 🙂

recording pic

Funding fun

Posted: March 7, 2015 in Random Musings
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It’s that time of year. Funding applications. Music Bursary Awards, Artist in the Community Awards, Artist in Residence Awards….there’s certainly no shortage of Arts funding in this country, it just takes a very particular type of personality to sit down and craft a successful application  – and no matter how many times I do it I’m always taken aback by how time consuming the process is. Sometimes it feels it wouldn’t be worth the time that goes into each application even if you were guaranteed you’d get the funding, let alone in the almost certain knowledge that you won’t.

But a happy side-effect can be that it can give some focus to your ideas – nothing like having to describe a project on paper for making you think about what you’d actually like to accomplish! And funding opportunities can steer you in directions you may not otherwise have thought of; last year I applied for and got funding to participate in a project called Connecting through Creativity without really knowing what it was, and was initially somewhat dismayed to discover that the emphasis was on Visual Arts. But there can be something liberating about participating in an arts discipline other than your own, and it allowed me to learn a lot about creative processes, possibly more than I might have had the project been built around a music framework. Plus it was fun to hang out with visual artists for a bit….spending too much time with musicians is probably not good for one’s health.

Advice to anyone else currently working on funding applications: however long you think it will take, add a day.