DonovanLiaoHawkenProjects2021

  This week we're finishing up  the songs that we’ve started, and are starting to make the last song of the album. The last song was very important to us, so we wanted to make sure it was very touching, but not too corny. I knew I wanted some type of guitar because guitars can be super pretty, somewhat sad, and extremely nostalgic. That was the feeling we were going for for the last song. One night, at around midnight, I was chilling on my bed and decided to grab my guitar. I don’t know many chords so I kind of put my fingers in random places and hope it sounds good when I strum. However, with a stroke of luck, I found a really pretty chord progression that conveyed the exact same feelings that I mentioned earlier. I believe it is a e7, c7, amin7, bmin, chord progression. I spend a good while choosing what kind of picking pattern I wanted to use for the rhythm. In the end I decided to keep it very simple, and somewhat empty in order to maximize space for Angus’ vocals. You’ll ...

  This week I had the idea of inviting people to come and “observe” King, Angus, and I’s creative process. This idea originated from one of the breaks Angus and I took where we were very burnt out. We decided to watch studio sessions with famous artists and producers. One thing we noticed was that in almost all of these videos there were always “random” people in the background of the videos, hanging out in the studio. These people didn’t actually contribute to the process, but they most definitely contributed to the vibe of the environment. Everybody in those videos seemed to be on the same wavelength, regardless of whether or not they were actually making music. If the musicians came up with something fire, everybody in the room would get hype. It’s also always good to allow regular people to observe how music is made, because it not only gives the musicians more credit, but also allows those watching to appreciate the music more after being there during the inception of these so...

  We finally showed our mentor what we've been making. To be honest, watching Nwaka's reaction to Holograph has probably been the highlight of the project so far.  We try and stay humble by keeping our expectations low in terms of reactions from people we show our music to. But after Nwaka, it’s safe to say that we expect most people to be at least somewhat impressed by what we’ve done. Perhaps our egos have been lifted too much, but it feels good so we’re riding this wave and finishing the project confidently. We most likely will be adding songs onto the album even after senior project is over, so this is definitely not just a senior project for us. We expect to actually be able to “do something” with our music. Personally, I’ve been getting excited to see what we can make in the future and who we can reach with our music. Would it be too ambitious to aim to go on tour by the end of my college career? I used to joke with my friends and say that I’d bring all of them along wit...

This week I will not be going to track practices, since my season is over. That means I'll be able to spend the afternoons with my group making music. I wonder if the added time will affect our creative process. Before, it always felt a bit rushed towards the end of the day when I had to leave for practice around 3. It was hard because we had to budget time well, and we couldn't just work the whole time because we'd get tired. We had to make sure we had enough time to create, while having enough time to rest. And whenever we rested there was always a feeling that we were wasting time, even though we knew if we kept trying to make music with tired brains we wouldn't be productive at all.  This week Angus is getting his driver’s license, so that should free up my schedule a bit since I won’t have to worry about driving them around. As more and more of us in the group become mobile, things should get easier. Scheduling events shouldn’t be as hard and I can save gas money. ...

  I do not have a video but I have audio recordings, so I've uploaded a video of a black screen with the audio recording I made. This audio recording capture when Angus, King and I were working on a song that we wanted to fit the "indie" category. This album is meant to be tailored towards as wide of an audience as possible, whether or not that'll help the popularity of the album, I do not know, but I do know as a group we want to find our sound and want to branch out as much as possible to find what we like best. Since this is our first time really working together there are a lot of facets of our creative minds to explore and that is exactly what we are doing with this project. Specifically, in this song attached above, we had just finished coming up with the chord progression and Angus had pretty much finalized part of the vocal melody. We were messing around with the speed of the strumming and rhythm to see if it sounded a little better if we were to speed it up. ...

This week Angus, King and I have begun to start some of the songs in the album. I have been pretty busy with APs and track so we didn't get as much time to work together as we would have liked, but regardless, we still got a solid amount of work done. We've pretty much established our general workflow and what type of collaboration works best for use. Generally, when thinking of new melodies, chord progressions, or lyrics, we'll be outside, strumming the guitar, in my living room playing the piano, or even just walking around my neighborhood waiting for inspiration to strike. Then as we get a general idea of what the song is going to be about/what it'll sound like, we'll go downstairs in my basement to begin production and recording. It's a very natural workflow and I think it is quite productive. Of course, we don't confine ourselves to just that method of work. If we ever want to start with production (which means producing the beat/instrumental), we'l...