Blog 18

Blog 18: 2-Hour Meeting Answer #3

1) What makes a successful EDM event?

2) An artist lineup is crucial for the attendance of people to your events, especially in smaller less reputable events.

3) I have only so far been focusing on ways that major EDM events generate enough revenue, but since they are already big they have all the necessities needed to attract people. With smaller EDM events an artist lineup is always needed for people to know before the actual event takes place. Such of these would include smaller EDM events held locally within a city such as clubs held in the Avalon, where they announce the artist that will be performing that day along with ticket prices and supporting artist. They announce the few artist that will be performing in order to attract the local people to come and see them and not have to wait for major events or festivals to happen. These events are also generally offered for less than those of major events since they only have very few artist but many people that will attend as well as generating income from drinks or merchandise sold the day of the event. Such an example is that of the picture below which shows the main artist Morgan Page alongside with the supporting acts of that night.

4) The main source that helped me answer this question is that of the website Digital DJ Tips from the 6 different articles that they offered and that helped a lot with EDM events in general.

5) From here I plan to use this information and figure out how many local events and clubs do this where they actually show what artist will be performing that same day at their club in order to attract people and seeing if they sell out shows and roughly how much revenue they can generate.

Blog 17: Fourth Interview Questions

Fourth Interview Questions

1. What makes a successful EDM event?
2. What do you look for when you attend an EDM event?
3. What are some of the most common ways that you find out about these events?
4. Why would the venue where an event was being held at be important?
5. How does distance play an important factor in your attendance of an event?
6. Would you have preference of bigger events than smaller ones?
7. How would safety play a role in your experience at an event?
8. How would the reputation of an event persuade you to attend it?
9. How does an artist lineup play a role in your attendance?
10. Would an event held outdoors be better than that of one held indoors?
11. Why does genre diversity play a huge role at these events?
12. How and why is ticket pricing important?
13. How would an event in the night compare to one held in the afternoon?
14. How does a stage setup influence your decision on attending future events?
15. Would it be better to have multiple stages or to just have one big main one?
16. What would be some factors that would not make you want to re-attend an event?
17. How would waiting too long to enter an event affect your experience?
18. How big of a role would themed events play a factor in an event?
19. How does only one headliner compared to multiple ones affect your decision on investing money to attend the event.
20. Are there any other other factors prior to the ones mentioned that might affect your experience good or bad in EDM events?

2-Hour Meeting Answer #2

Blog 16: 2-Hour Meeting Answer #2

1) What makes a successful EDM event?

2) Creating a successful lifestyle/experience in order to potentially create a brand.

3) One example is that of local events or clubs that offer their select experience to their customers that always make them come. Insomniac Events is also another in which people buy tickets to the event prior to actually knowing any artists that will perform that day. A fact that I learned was that people don't usually go for the drinks, artist, or venue but for the lifestyle that you offer to them is the main reason people attend these events.

4) How to promote and throw your own parties part1 from Digitaldjtips.com was the main source that made me realize how big of a factor it was to create a lifestyle for your event.

5) I plan to continue my study of answer #2 by looking up information of different events around the world such as those held by Insomniac Events or Ultra Music Festival and research their beginnings as to how they created their lifestyle, the number of years it took, and how they grew and changed over the years in order to create the massive events they do.

Independent Component 2 Plan Approval

Independent Component 2 Plan Approval

1) For my independent component 2 I plan to promote for local clubs that are driven towards EDM in order to try and see how much promotion goes into these event.

2) My independent component will meet all 30 hours since I will be given roughly 2 weeks or more to promote for the event prior to the actual date and from what I am aware I will have to be around different areas promoting for hours handing out flyer and getting visual evidence that I did.

3) My first answer to my essential question was that of successfully promoting an event to get as many people to attend your event and with my independent component being promoting I will gain a hands on experience and see how people of the event manage these things.

Blog 14: Independent Component 1

Independent Component 1

• Literal

a) "I, Jorge Estrada, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 30 hours of work."

b) The source that I used a lot was that of sonicacademy.com which is a website that offers various different tutorial on producing not only to help in EDM but in other genres as well. It is a website that mostly focus on EDM, however, it offer various features such as that of the specific program that you use which can vary from Fl Studio, Logic, or Ableton which is the one I am focusing on using. The website also offers options that vary on the type of genre you want to focus on. I focused mainly on the sub-genre called Progressive House since it is the style of music that I enjoy the most and want to really create in the future. This was my main source but aside from that I also looked a various youtube videos, specifically from a youtube channel that focuses on actual EDM artist being filmed in the studio and briefing over and demonstrating how they create some of their songs and showing footage of how they do it and the different techniques that you could use and are the ones that the artist utilize themselves.

c) Digital Spreadsheet

d) During these 30 hours of work I looked at multiple videos and courses that sonicacademy.com offered and from what they showed me I created a song that I worked on and kept adding onto it and worked different days since I cannot completely do everything as fast or easily as the courses demonstrated. I plan to completely finish the song and build upon it. By the end of the school year I plan to have a song or multiple ones and get someone to lay vocals over it and upload it onto soundcloud.com and share it with people to demonstrate how far I have gotten.

• Interpretive

  During these 30 hours I produced a track that took a lot of time and effort and at this point isn't even 100% done in my opinion. A vast number of hours were actually that of looking at tutorial and videos on how to produce the certain genre and all the components that need to go into the song as well as knowing how to figure out if you need to fix something or rearrange it and knowing how to identify these items and try to fix them. I also learned that it not only matter what the person in the tutorial teaching you thinks but it also depends on what you think sounds good and will work. You want to make sure to always add your own touch and style to it.

My song

The song itself took a lot of work to accomplish. The course I took in order to complete the song was comprised of all the different elements that i would need in order to make the song. The pack included things such as the MIDI files which are basically all the notes that you are gonna use in order to create the melody. You need to load a MIDI file int the session view of the program Ableton and it will automatically give you the melody you want from that file. This MIDI file however has no audio or sound since you need to add you own sounds using either sample files or using a present from  VST plugin. Once you get the sound you want to use with your MIDI file then you will be able to tweak the sounds until you get the desired sound you want using the MIDI file notes. You can use various plugins and add different EQ's to them in order to alter the sound as much as possible and to the liking of your choice. The MIDI files are just some of the things that come with the course that i took. There were other files that were included in with this course which was that of that samples that you could use in order to make your song sounds complete. These samples were those such as drum kicks, snares, hi hats, among other melody sounds. You need to use these samples to your liking and you can alter them as much as you choose. You could also layer different samples in order to make them sound complete and in order to build a better percussion or drum kick. When you are creating a drum kick you want to make sure that you layer not only a kick sample but also some snare and hi hat on top of the drum kick in order to give it a fuller sound than just bass. When you're creating your percussion you want to make sure to make at least an 8 bar loop but alter the loop to the point where it isn't that repetative and won't bore the people who listen to your songs. When you create your main lead or melody you want to create a big enough bar loop in order to be able to layer different sounds and be able to smoothly transition it into your overall song. You want to get certain parts of the main lead notes and layer them with different sounds in order to build your track even better and in order to create a different sound as the track builds up even more. You want to make sure that the sounds you layer aren't clashing with each other and sound coherent in order to please the people who listen the song as much as you can. Layering is done by copying certain notes and adding them to a different audio or MIDI file and you paster in on there. Then you want to either get a new sample or use another preset from one of your VST plugins. Just like you use certain notes from your main melody in order to create a build up and transition the drop and main melody together you want to do the same when you are creating your break down in order to not just abruptly end the drop or main melody. You want to take the main elements of the drop out and leave only certain notes that won't make the transition noticeable. When you have your drop you want to have your whole melody transition already and add a drum kick which is present in every fourth note. This gives the song the whole club feel to it. You also want to alter your percussion and make it add to your drop. A song is usually comprised of two different drops minimum, so in order to please your audience as much as possible and not bore them the second drop should usually have another different element added onto it that the first drop did not have. This can be done by simply get certain notes from the main melody that you did not use before and pasting it onto a new audi or MIDI file and adding layering another different sound onto it. Once you have all the main components finished you want to spend a lot of time on the EQ and effects that you want to add to your sounds. These effects and EQ's will add a lot to your sounds. This is the hardest part of completing your song since it will make it come together as a whole and editing all the EQ's will make sure that none of the noises will clash or collide with each other.

• Applied

The component overall made me understand one aspect of EDM better than before and made me realize how much has to go into producing your own songs. It made me realize how competitive this field can get and that you really know what you are doing an what each parts does in order to have the capacity to create multiple songs and not go in blindly since if you do, you will get lost along the way really fast. Creating a basic song structure and from looking at the videos I was able to learn how certain sounds within songs are acquired and from that I would go back to songs that I have and can notice all the different instruments that have to be taken into consideration and added to the main melody through a method called layering where you add certain sounds to certain notes of the main melody that in most cases can really add a lot to the song and its structure overall.