Matt Yapp

BA Honours Popular Music

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The Truth Behind The Smile EP - Matt Yapp

Bandcamp: https://mattyapp.bandcamp.com/releases

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/matt-yapp-1/sets/the-truth-behind-the-smile

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1AGeK4PJxXDfMyoWSXO9l7?si=YZmKHuF6Qxu3Qo7VzE8_1g

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Background, Concept, and Ideas

At the beginning of the major project module, I set out to create an EP of my own solo material. I wanted to use this module, to test myself and showcase my abilities as a composer and as a producer.

Through this project, I wanted to explore the different aspects that take place when releasing either an album or an EP. Some of these aspects that I was interested in looking into included, the distribution of the music as well as the marketing and promotion.

The genre of music that I wanted to create for my solo material, falls into genres as such as indie and pop punk. This of course, is the type of music that I had planned to, and wanted to release when I first pitched my idea for the major project.

I had planned to write music that is similar to the work of bands as such as Moose Blood and My Chemical Romance, and I believe that I have been able to achieve this with my final product. I have done this by, using similar instrumentation as these bands, as well as, talking about similar topics in my music. A good example of this would be the first track on my EP, ‘Best it Gets’, in comparison to Moose Blood’s song ‘Gum’.

I have found however, that during the writing process of my EP, I have not only taken influence from emo and pop punk bands, but I have also taken influence from indie artists and bands as such as Catfish and the Bottlemen as well as Stereophonics.

I have always been fairly comfortable, when it comes to composing different pieces of music in multiple genres. However, my main concern when beginning this project was my lack of experience and ability when it comes to lyric writing. I had originally planned to attempt the lyric writing myself and then approach songwriters from the popular music course to give me tips on how to strengthen my work.

I began to try and write lyrics using different techniques, as such as brainstorming and the cut-up technique, after reading different books and online articles on how to lyric write. I was able to write lyrics that I was fairly happy with for my song ‘Not Over It Yet’ and worked alongside Tom Bentley to polish them and make them sound as good as possible.

I did struggle a lot with coming up with ideas for my other two tracks, so I asked Tom to ghost write the lyrics for ‘Best it Gets’ as well as ‘More Than I Ever Did’.

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Audiences and Markets

Being a new artist, it is difficult to know who your audience will be and where in the world you will have followers.

Being a member of Indigo Haze, and seeing the ways in which we gained followers, I decided to try and run my social media accounts in a similar way.

The first way I tried to gain a following, was to simply follow and invite everybody that I am friends with on my personal accounts, and see how many of those people would start following my artist page. I did this as I knew it would be a good starting point and would help to guarantee a few followers.

After a lecture on social media tactics, I decided that I would add different hashtags onto my Instagram posts. This was something that I know we did on the Indigo Haze account also, with all of our posts with hashtags gaining better responses than the ones without.

Another tactic that I attempted was, to put artists names that played similar music to myself in my Instagram bio and then follow people who follow those band pages. This again was something that worked for Indigo Haze. I did not gain many followers from this tactic, but I do believe it could be because I tried it before releasing any music. I plan to try it again now the EP has been released and see what the response is like.

You can see below the stats from my different social media accounts.

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Promotional Strategies

To try and promote ‘The Truth Behind The Smile’and myself as an artist, I set up social media accounts across a few different platforms. The platforms that I chose to use were, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I chose to use these social media sites because, after doing research on bands as such as Fatherson and Moose Blood, I was able to establish that these are sites that allow an artist or band to create a relationship between themselves and their audience. Sites as such as Instagram and Facebook, are also very good ways to showcase pieces of work and share different events.

I decided after a month of creating the accounts that I would delete my Twitter account. I debated for a while whether I should keep it active, but decided against it due to the fact I was not getting as many followers on that platform as I was on sites like Facebook and Instagram. I feel I was getting less followers and likes on Twitter because, I was not posting consistently enough.

Below you can see some of the content that I have been uploading onto my different social media pages.

The interesting thing that I have found, is that posts with pictures of me always seem to get better likes than the posts of posters and other content.

As well as posting on my artist pages about ‘The Truth Behind The Smile’,I decided to also share and post onto my own personal accounts to. The one form of social media that appeared to gain a lot of response from people was Snapchat. Once ‘The Truth Behind The Smile’ had been released, I posted my promotion video onto my Snapchat story, and managed to gain more listeners and interactions that way.

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Evaluation

By the end of the major project module, I have been able to write an EP of original material and release my music onto major streaming platforms as such as Spotify and Apple Music. I have been able to use this module to create an identity for myself as a solo artist, not only through the music I have created, but also through different social media platforms. In this evaluation, I am going to be looking at my project and discussing the areas that I believe went well, as well as the areas that did not go as well as I would have hoped.

All in all, I am very happy with the outcome of the three songs that I composed for my EP ‘The Truth Behind The Smile’. I believe that, the three songs on my EP are all strong pieces of work that showcase my ability as a composer of rock/alternative music.

I am very happy with the final outcome of all of the songs on my EP, especially because there were points over the course of the module that I was worried that the music that I was writing did not fall into the genre of music I was intending to write.

‘More Than I Ever Did’is a great example of this, with the original demo sounding more like a pop song than an indie/emo song which was what I was intending to achieve by the release of the EP. When comparing both the demo version and the final version of ‘More Than I Ever Did’, I believe the change in guitar tones and the addition of the lyrics really helps to drag the song away from the pop genre and into the indie and rock genre.

As well as the composing and the writing of the music on my EP, I decided that I wanted to produce and prepare all of the tracks for release myself. I decided to produce the EP myself because, I have had experience mixing and producing pop and indie music in the past, and wanted to challenge myself by mixing a heavier genre than what I am used to mixing. Overall, I am happy with how the production and mixing of ‘The Truth Behind The Smile’ has gone. My main concern when beginning the mixing process was that, I knew that I am not the strongest vocalist and was worried that I would not be able to make the vocals sound as good or as strong as the instrumentation on all of the tracks. I am also not very experienced in using any forms of auto tune, so was also worried that I would over produce the vocal. Looking at my final outcome, I feel that I have managed to produce the vocals to a satisfactory standard that matches the quality of the instrumentation.

When it came to the production, I compared all of my tracks to the music of bands as such as Moose Blood because, they are bands who play music within a similar genre to myself so I thought it would be a good to use some of their songs as reference tracks.

As well as having reference tracks, I asked a number of different people to listen to my mixes and give me any tips on parts of the mix that they would change. I found this to be a useful exercise because, it allowed fresh ears to listen to the EP and helped me to gain more ideas on what I could change or add to each individual mix.

In terms of mastering the EP, I asked Tom Bentley and Will Davis to master all of the tracks. I did this because I am not the strongest at mastering, and it also allowed people who haven’t heard too much of my music before to offer their opinions and views on my music.

Part of this project included distribution. I used Emubands, as they allow you to only pay once to keep your music online for ever. I chose to upload my music onto all the major streaming platforms, as well as sights as such as Soundcloud and Bandcamp.

When I first pitched the idea of my solo project, I had created a spreadsheet of session musicians that I wanted to play on my EP as well as a timeline of when I wanted to achieve everything. I explained in assessment 001, how it may prove difficult to get certain session musicians into the studio due to them either being busy with their own projects or with them not living particularly close.

This was the case with a lot of the session players that I had originally named on my spreadsheet. Due to having to find replacement session musicians, my timeline of events did not really go to plan when it came to the recording and mixing processes. You can see below the new list of session musicians.

In addition to the music, I had to create an identity for myself as a solo performer. I expressed in assessment 001 how I wanted to try and come up with an artist name similar to Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. I was unable to come up with any ideas that I liked so decided to simply name my artist name ‘Matt Yapp’.

A part of creating an identity for myself, included having a specific image. I decided a good way to create this image would be, through photos and the EP artwork. Over the course of this project, I have been working alongside different photographers to get the right shots for my social media accounts. As I have mentioned previously, I have been inspired by Moose Blood so decided to try and create a similar image.

The photos below are an example of how I have tried to create a similar image for myself.

I have experienced some difficulties when it comes to working alongside different photographers during this project. I have been on multiple shoots, but have struggled to get responses from photographers once the shoot has finished. This means that I have not received most of the photos taken on these shoots, and have had to use photos of myself taken from past gigs.

The artwork for ‘The Truth Behind The Smile’was designed by Conor Chipp. I approached Conor after seeing that he was looking for work, designing artwork and posters for people. I have also seen work that Conor has produced for his own projects, and knew that his style would match the music that I was going to release.

I discussed with Conor, the types of bands that I was inspired by and expressed how I quite liked the idea of having something not to complex and out there. After looking at the artwork used by the bands I had named, Conor went away and created the artwork, which you can see below.

One aspect of this project that I would like to explore, would to start playing live shows. I feel that, live music is a great way to reach out a larger audience who may not have heard off or come across you as an artist before.

I have never performed by myself in the past, so I have decided a good way to start is by signing up to play at Wychwood Festival 2019, on one of the university run stages. I am hoping that, the live performance at Wychwood will get a good response from people attending the festival and, will also help to grow my confidence as a solo performer.

All in all, I am very happy with the final outcome of my EP and I can’t wait to try and improve my solo work once I have left the university.

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MD6311 - Major Project Assessment 001

Everything below this post is from assessment 001

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Whats Next?

There are a lot of things for me to continue working on with. The main focus for me at the moment is to get on with recording the actual versions of the songs that I am using for my EP.

As well as the recording, there are some parts that still need to be written for certain songs. This includes most of the lead guitar parts, as well as all of the synthesizer parts and lyrics.

I am going to be working alongside both Ryan and Jacob to find parts that we all think well with the rest of the songs.

Lyric writing is going to be my main struggle because it is something that I have not done before. I have taken out books from the university’s library to help me get started and have spoken to some of the songwriters on the course (Tom Bentley and Courtney Yeoell) to read my lyrics and give me tips on how to strengthen them.

I already have ideas on what I want each song to discuss, so it is just a case of writing them down and putting them to music.

I plan to do a photoshoot with a photographer as soon as possible because it will allow me to set up my social media pages. Once the pages are up I will be able to try and grow my fan base. Below are photos from an Indigo Haze shoot, and these are similar shots to what I would want for this solo project.

Something that I also want to work on and sort as soon as possible, is finding a name to call my solo project. At the moment it will just be ‘Matt Yapp’ but I like the idea of finding something that is a little similar to ‘Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds’ because it is catchy and not as boring as just naming it ‘Matt Yapp’.

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Development Activities

Down below are links to each of the tracks that will feature on my EP.

Track One - https://soundcloud.com/matt-yapp-1/solo-project-demo-1

Track Two - https://soundcloud.com/matt-yapp-1/solo-project-demo-2

Track Three - https://soundcloud.com/matt-yapp-1/solo-project-demo-3

The first link is the track that I believe has potential to be the opening track of my EP. I feel that the song is strong and has a decent tempo behind it, grabbing the listeners attention straight away. 

I am considering on changing this track slightly, by adding some variation to the guitar parts. The rhythm part is currently the same strumming pattern all the way through. This could mean me adding some variation into the way the part is played, or I can add another part (bass or lead guitar) that helps give the listener something else to listen to.

The second track that I have linked is probably my strongest so far. There is a nice variation of parts that take place in this song and I can picture it being the final track of the EP.

There are some nice uses of pauses and dynamics in this song. My only worry with this track is that the introduction is fairly long. After talking to John Maguire about an Indigo Haze song, he told us that it is best to get the lyrics in soon to keep your audience’s attention. ‘Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!’ This is something I think I will look into when the recording process begins.

The last link above is the track I want to use as my ‘slow’ song. The main thing to realise here is that it is a different song to the one I originally said I was going to exand on. The reason for this was that I could simply not work out where the other track was going to go in terms of structure and instrumentation.

I may use the original idea at some point but i decided that for this EP project, it would not be as strong as I would like it to be.

This new idea came to me whilst I was in a rehearsal for a different band. I like the idea because the constant guitar part is catchy and will stick in the listener’s head. The idea behind this song is for the dynamics to continue to grow from start to finish. I have taken inspiration for this song from the song ‘Its too Much’ by Moose Blood, which you can find a link to below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyOY5nAtLuM

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EP Demo Ideas

Here are little samples of the original ideas that I have come up with for each of the tracks.

Track One: https://soundcloud.com/matt-yapp-1/track-1-guitar

Track Two: https://soundcloud.com/matt-yapp-1/track-2-guitar

Track Three: https://soundcloud.com/matt-yapp-1/track-3-guitar

I am yet to come up ideas on how these songs will progress. The next step is to work out structures for all of the tracks as well as other instrumentation.

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Market and Audience Research

For my major project, the release of my EP will only be on online platforms. In current times, the sales of physical music (CD) have declined and not many people are interesting in spending their money of physical copies of music, with the increase in use of streaming services as such as Spotify and Apple Music.

Coming into this project, I do have a little bit of experience in releasing music based on being in bands in the past. The most recent and noticeable release that I was involved in was the single release of ‘Glass House’ by ‘Indigo Haze’.

During this process, we wanted to find a distribution service that would benefit us all and help us stick to the budget that we had set ourselves. Another challenge we had when looking at distribution services, was finding one that would allow us to release the single under our own record label ‘Big Pappi Records’.

We looked into sites as such as ‘Distrokid’ because we know that friends of ours (Callum Cutler Music and Ryan Nicklin) have used them in the past to release their own projects onto streaming services. An issue that we found with ‘Distrokid’ was that we would have to pay £15 every year to keep our music on these streaming services, which was not something that we really wanted to do because not only would it cost us a lot of money in the long term but we may also forget about it meaning that the music would be taken down.

This is something that has happened to a couple of local acts around Cheltenham with the likes of ‘Harry Daniels’ and ‘Ten Tombs’ having their music removed from Spotify.

Another issue that we found with ‘Distrokid’ was that if you clicked on a songs credits, there would be a generated number shown as the source of which the music was released. Of course, this may not seem like a massive issue, but we wanted our release to be as professional as possible.

After doing a little bit more research, we found the site ‘Emubands’ and decided to release the single through them. ‘Emubands’ allows artists as well as record labels to release music for a small fee onto some of the world’s most popular streaming sites. These including: Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Amazon Music, Tidal, and many others.

‘Emubands’ offer their customers the chance to release their music by paying a one-time fee meaning that the music will stay on the streaming sites until you the client decide you do not want it on there anymore.

Clients of ‘Emubands’ also have 24/7-hour access to their royalties that are made through purchases and streams of their music, this is something that of course all artists want to be able to have.

‘Emubands’ also allowed us to release our music through ‘Big Pappi Records’ which was something we wanted to do to make everything look as professional as possible.

After having this experience of releasing music, I have decided that I will be using ‘Emubands’ as the distribution site that I will use. In a similar way to ‘Indigo Haze’ I want to be able to only pay one fee when releasing my project because it will help to stick to my budget.

I am also a fan of how you can see which record label the band released their music through. After speaking to the guys who also run ‘Big Pappi Records’ (Tom Bentley and Will Davis), they have agreed that I can release my EP under the company’s name.

For this project, I will have to create and set up social media accounts to help build my profile as a solo artist. The main social media sites that I plan on creating accounts on will be: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I have chosen these sites because they seem to be the ones that are most effective when trying to reach out to a large range of people.

The main audience that I will be targeting my music towards will be people within the age range of 16 – 50.

The most popular form of social media for bands at the moment appears to be Instagram. During a lecture with Mark Daman Thomas on social media, Indigo Haze became curious to try out some of the tips that were given.

To begin with, I found that people are more likely to follow your account and like your photos if they’re not overly serious. We discovered that pictures posted of gig posters on our own accounts, always seemed to get less likes than photos from gigs or videos. We also discovered that the use of hashtags on a post does actually help gain a greater audience. You can see examples below of posts.

After seeing how effective using hashtags can be, I plan on using them myself to try and gain more fans. I was hugely surprised when Tokai guitars liked one of our posts because of us hashtagging them in one of our posts.

Looking at some other artists who are local to Cheltenham, I have discovered that a good way to promote their music is to post promo videos. This is something I am interested in trying myself to grow my fanbase. The example below is from local band Tree//Haus.

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Project Overview and Planning

To summarise my major project, I intend on creating a professional sounding EP containing songs that I have written and produced myself.

Through the music that I am creating and releasing, I want to be able to not only show a professional sounding EP but also show my development as a song writer.

This project will be inspired by artists as such as Moose Blood and Fatherson. These are both bands that I have listened to for long periods of time and play a genre of music that I am really interested in. I have never really experienced working within the emo/pop punk genre before so this is something that I feel can challenge me. This project will teach me multiple different things, as such as: promotion, lyric writing, and how to release your work onto major platforms without the use of being signed to a major label.

There is a lot of planning that needs to be done in order to complete this project. I have decided to approach musicians in which I feel are best suited to this style of music, however not all of these musicians’ study at the university or are local to Cheltenham meaning that planning in advance for recording sessions is vital. A list of the musicians and their locations can be found below.

The main challenge that I will face when it comes to the recording process is finding a time that is suitable for Rob to come to Cheltenham as he is going to be the one travelling the furthest to record. I am very confident however, that as soon as the drum recordings are complete that the rest of the instrumentation will not take a long time to actually complete.

For this project, I will have to work on building my name as a solo artist as I have only ever been known through bands that I have played in. This will involve creating social media accounts as well as maybe even playing different gigs around the local area.

In order to create social media accounts, I will have to organise photoshoots and find people to help me with artwork. This will also be useful for when the EP is finally released, as it can be used on sites as such as Spotify.

The plan for my EP is to have it released onto major streaming services by the end of April/beginning of May. In order to do this, it is important to have an idea of when each part of the process of this project is completed.

Timeline (All of the dates below are not fixed and can be changed)

December

29th: have all track demos completed and sent to session band members

January

Drums and bass guitar to be recorded (no set dates as of yet, waiting for confirmation of availability)

Rhythm guitars to be recorded (realistically wanting to have this done by the end of the month but can be achieved during early February.

Photoshoot (to be arranged with photographer)

February

Lead guitars and synths to be recorded (beginning of the month)

Lead vocal to be recorded (end of the month)

8th: Artist name to be decided

12th: Social Media sites to be active

March

Backing vocals to be recorded

Mixing process (this is to be started at the beginning of the month)

April

Mastering

EP promotion

May

3rd: EP released (subject to change)

29th: Module Hand in Date

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Major Project Pitch

The music that I want to write and release falls under different genres including, indie, rock, emo and pop punk. I would describe myself as somebody who has a fairly grungy voice and I have only ever experienced singing backing vocals in rock bands, so I feel my chosen genre may benefit me.

My main influences for my music are bands as such as Moose Blood and Fatherson so in terms of creating a target audience, I will need to promote my music in the direction of fans of bands like these.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPArfXixaWM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWYf4PBAmfA

As well as all the music related things as such as the recording, writing and mixing, there are other aspects I will need to consider during this project. One of these things is growing an artist profile. I can do this by using social media sites like Instagram and Facebook as well as playing different shows supporting bands and artists who are a similar genre to my project.