Report for critical listening
The song we choose was “Less of You” by Keshi.
We choose this song as we felt we could boost the theme of loneliness with
where we recorded and how we recorded.
First, we thought about places to record and gave a reason on why to record
there. Such as a car park as that would, show the loneliness of the song with
the reverb and emptiness of a car park or a small room with very little reverb
as this could show how closed of the singer is from the world. We eventually
nailed it down to two locations. Number one was the balcony in the lecture
hall and number two was the archway within meeting house square.
We choose both these as we though they fit the theme of the song.
Location one the balcony in lecture hall was chose as it looks over the city
allowing the street noise and ambiance of the city to be slightly heard.
It also lead to a slight reverb sound, which added to the loneliness of the
tracks.
Within some of the takes, you could hear people shouting and screaming in the
background, which I felt, added to the recording. It added another layer of
ambience to the track but the screaming added to the track a lot as it sounded
like the screams of the person who wrote the song as it was about loneliness
and struggle.
The second location we used was the archway from meeting house square out
to the street. We felt this was a good place to record as it was quite echoic
which we felt added to the loneliness of the track. The other major attraction
to the arch way at meeting house was the noise of other people. I liked that
idea as it all most like he’s singing in public and nobody cares which is exactly
what happened to us when recording.
But this was also the problem as often the noise would be too loud and would
distract us from the recording. Such as once someone wheeled a bike up the
steps completely running the recording. After a few takes in the arch way we
had to abandon it as we couldn’t get a full take without being interrupted.
We settled on the first location the balcony in the lecture hall as we felt the
ambiance and reverb of the track plus the sounds from the street below added
a lot to the track. We did multiple recordings on the balcony till we were fully
happy with one and experimenting with the positioning of the band members
to affect the sound.