Sonic Performance: Week 5 - Balance, Ambition & Practicality

This week has been about learning to balance ambition with practicality. With the performance deadline approaching, things are starting to feel very real, and I won’t lie, I’m definitely feeling a bit nervous. It’s all systems go now, and there’s no turning back. 

I picked up all of my recording equipment, which was certainly a mission, lugging everything into my tiny car, but we got there in the end. 

I’ve begun preparing to film my performance and get everything ready to showcase. Although I don’t feel completely ready yet, the photography session I attended in Week 3 really helped me find my feet with the audio-visual side of things. This week has been about refining and fine-tuning the performance further. 

This is also the first time I’ve set up something of this scale on my own. I created a list of everything I needed and began gathering equipment, including multiple cameras, tripods, and lighting. It’s been a bit of a learning curve, but also really exciting to take control of the full setup. 

I did run into a few issues with the equipment, as some items were missing, which delayed things slightly. However, I used this time to continue practising my performance and further transform my dining room into a fantasy-inspired space, drawing from the mood board I created in Week 3. I’m really pleased with how it’s come together, I feel like it captures the atmosphere I’ve been aiming for and enhances the overall aesthetic of the performance. 

When practising, the performance ended up changing direction quite a few times. I found it difficult to recreate the same result each time, which I know will improve with practice. One of the main challenges was that I had introduced too many instruments into the mix, which meant I had to be extremely precise with timing, otherwise things would quickly sound messy. 

In the end, I decided to strip things back completely. I had created too many tracks and hadn’t organised my session effectively, which made things more complicated than they needed to be. Simplifying the setup has helped me feel much more in control of the performance. 

Looking back, I think I came into this project feeling quite ambitious, inspired by other performers I had seen. However, learning a new DAW and the Ableton Push 3 has been a much steeper learning curve than I expected. I spent a significant amount of time simply learning how to use Ableton itself. 

I had initially considered using my Zoom H6 to record the performance externally, but in the end it made much more sense and was far smoother to record directly into the project. 

I’ve learned a huge amount already through this process, and I’m excited to bring everything together. 

Next week, I’ll be sharing the final result, so stay tuned to see how it all comes together.