MAR23084610 – SHR6E032F~002 Portfolio and video evidence

1. Project Overview

The nature of the projects that I did over both semesters was to create music for musicals and plays with my partner Hope. Hope is a playwright and lyricist who I’ve been working with throughout the year on projects, the main one being the play she directed called “The Other side of The Day”. This was my main project during first semester and was our only project to be showcased on stage so far. My role was the musical director, meaning it was my responsibility to write the music, source the musicians, teach the material and organise rehearsals. My goal with doing this play was to have it led onto other opportunities in the field of theatre music and gain valuable experience in writing music outside of my typical style. Since I’m used to writing music for my band and my own solo projects, this served as a good challenge to start writing music for other forms of media. Composing music to a set brief, such as plays, is good experience for the kind of freelance work I’m looking to get into such as sync placements and session work. Working as a musical director is also giving me experience in teaching as well as expanding my network which in turn will benefit my portfolio and help me find future work.

Our goals moving forward into the second semester was to create a new play and submit it to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This festival is the world’s largest performing arts festival and has helped launch many famous shows such as Fleabag, The Mighty Boosh, Flight of the Conchords, Baby Reindeer and many others. We submitted our play to Fringe through the Open Theatre Society at the university of Leeds. They take on student plays every year and only require a rough script. This is an ongoing project and the connections I’ve built has helped me do a paid role musical director role within the Performing Arts Society on the side.

2. Panopto Video – Final Product (10:53)

https://leedsconservatoire.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=4d4a1b49-736e-476e-8ebe-b43a011c4942&start=0

3. Chronological Monthly Diary

October:

First half of month:

Play submission got accepted by the Open Theatre Society, people in the society could apply for roles within the team such as the co-producers, co-directors and shadow directors.

Production team was formed of members from Open Theatre Society.

We started sourcing band members through mutual friends.

Second half of month:

We began auditioning for the cast members. The Open Theatre society promoted the play at the University of Leeds, and the auditions were open to anyone who wanted to take part.

There were two rounds of auditions and one round for callbacks. The callback was where we chose the final castings.

We ended up with a cast of four, two males and two females.

November:

First half of the month:

Band members sourced. Sent song demos to the band group chat to introduce the material.

First cast rehearsals at the Baines Wing Building on campus. These first sessions were to help the cast get comfortable with each other and their roles. Initially started with hot seating sessions based around group improvisation and physicality work. (Appendix 1)

Actors introduced to scripts. Began working on individual scenes without the full cast. Rehearsals were initially just single scenes with one half of the cast.

Second half of the month:

Rehearsals continue.

Headshots of cast, band and prod team were taken at the photo studios in Leeds Arts University for promotional material.

Band photo got used for the flyers handed out on the showcase. (Appendix 2)

A fundraiser for the play called “I’m With the Band” was held at Hyde Park Book Club. It was an acoustic set with three acts, and the earnings were used to fund stage design, merch and props. (Appendix 3 and 4)

Fundraiser in collaboration with SASHA society (students against sexual harassment and assault) as this play has themes of sexual assault and is meant to bring light to these issues.

Raised £300

Visited the Pyramid stage to design the stage layout and band setup.

December:

We started to setup the stage design. All the posters and props were laid out. We rented a drum kit from the conservatoire and set it up along with all the other stage props.

2^nd December was the tech run. This is where the band performed onstage for the first time. Tested our DI setup and in ear monitors. We learned our cue during the final monologue where we had to come in after Momo said, “I think that’s the point”.

3^rd December was the first dress rehearsal.

4^th was the first show day. We had one final run through of the entire show with the band and cast.

6^th was the final showcase. We got video reviews from the audience members, and the Open Theatre society committee gave it a written review.

January/February:

Main showcase is over.

Next stage is to plan a new play to submit to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Hope teamed up with Alyssa, the designer in the production team for ‘The Other Side of The Day’ and they became writing partners for the new play.

Main premise of the play was being developed, and rough scripts were being written.

I used this time to create new ideas that weren’t limited to a live band. Since we’d be pitching this idea to a much bigger production, I decided to implement other instrumentation to my ideas such as string sections.

I kept my music as demos and saved my ideas to make sure I was ready to present them to Fringe if the play submission gets accepted.

We did a few scripts read throughs together so I could help understand the themes of the play and what kind of music was needed.

March:

Deadline for Fringe during this month.

The first submission only required a rough script of the general idea for the play, so my music wasn’t needed just yet.

I continued to develop the music this month.

Ultimately, the play got rejected by Fringe, however, the society may accept the play for external productions. It is still under development for next year. (Appendix 11)

4. Evidence of Planning/Process

Phase 1:

Me and the director were set on the idea of this play a few months prior to the start of third year. It all started with the initial scripts and theme of the play. I knew this play was set in the 70’s and I wanted the music to convey that somewhat. To me this meant a more stripped back band instrumentation of guitars, bass, drums and vocals. My initial ideas were for a bigger ensemble and included piano, strings and brass to give a more typical musical theatre sound. This first phase was all about sourcing the band and production team. The production team was sourced through applications in the Open Theatre society. Once the play was submitted, people were free to apply for team roles. This didn’t take much time as the society is very closeknit and the members were particularly interested in doing a play with music since this has never been done in an Open Theatre production before. For me, sourcing the initial band members wasn’t any trouble as I contacted mutual friends who I knew would fit the roles. I say initial band members since we had someone drop out about a week before the showcase, as I will explain in phase two.

Phase 2: (Appendix 1 and 5)

This was the busiest and most important phase of our planning as this was all preparation for the showcase. We started with creating a rehearsal schedule from the time that we casted the actors to the last show day. This helped organise the workflow for everyone involved and it made writing the music a lot easier. The deadlines helped me get the songs done on time as I was still writing one of the songs during the first couple rehearsals with the band and since I knew the rehearsal schedule, I could finish the last one in time for when then musicians have finished learning the first song. Once we had the stage layout planned, we needed a budget for all the props. We created a list of which props were needed, how much they’d cost and where we’d get them from. We held a fundraiser during this time at Hyde Park Book Club where we had three acts perform acoustic music and worked as the sound tech. This event raised sufficient funds for this showcase and raised some extra money for the Open Theatre and SASHA society. During my own time I would work on finalising the last track and mixing the final masters of the tracks. I didn’t spend too much time mixing during this period as most of my responsibility was to run the band rehearsals while the production team directed the show case.

Phase 3: Get scripts from Hope

During this phase is where the first few days before the show case were taking place and our goals moving forward with a new play. It was during December where we did the first tech run. In appendix one, you can see that after the fundraiser was the tech run. This involved soundchecks for the band and sorting the stage design and lighting. The lighting was positioned on a truss and aimed at each band member, meaning we had a fixed stage position. We planned to go all DI, so we didn’t have any amps onstage. Although this isn’t accurate to the era, the pyramid stage didn’t have enough space for a full band setup, so we had to conserve as much space possible for the actors. Aside from the dress rehearsals, this is the most we did before the show days. After the showcase was over, we planned to create a new play to pitch to Fringe festival in Edinburgh. The rest of our time was in preparation for the application deadline in March, which meant a new script and new music was needed.

5. Reference Material/Inspiration

Musical Inspiration:

For the first track, my main inspiration was 60’s and 70s bands such as The Rolling Stones, Kiss, and Elton John. This is made apparent from the sus 4 chords I used through out as these bar chord extensions are very typical of this era. Song such as ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘Saturday Nights Alright’ and ‘Detroit Rock City’ all use this style of riffing. I wanted this song to be more theatrical and high energy as it was the opening song and the director wanted something upbeat to kick off the show. Despite the band being small, I added other instrumentation for the actual track, we just left them out of the production. This was more for texture in the final recordings since most of these tracks have a bigger ensemble. For the second track, the director wanted a more emotional and stripped back ballad and created a playlist of reference tracks for me. I kept the instrumental laidback and minimal to let the vocals shine. Despite being a modern song, I used the song ‘Run’ by Joji as my own inspiration, so I had hints of my own influences in the song. I felt the laidback ¾ pulse was an appropriate tempo for the ending song, especially since I added a heavier climax nearing the end to cap off the play with a dramatic and empowering ending. This song was used over a monologue, and given the context of the scene, it had to be emotional but also empowering as this is the moment she accepts her trauma and rises above her situation. For the last song, the director gave me more creative freedom as there was no specific scene for this song. It is for the new play that is under production and I started writing this before the script was fully fledged. It takes inspiration from Matilda and early Panic! At The Disco. I decided to expand the instrumentation and added new layers that I couldn’t add with the first play due to restrictions in the live instrumentalists.

Visual Inspiration:

Costume Inspiration:

The costumes:

Personal Inspiration: Panic! At The Disco (Vices and Virtues/Pretty Odd)

Reference material – suggested by the director:

6. Use of Technology

I composed all the tracks using VST plugins and amp simulators through DI. This was especially useful for the demos as it meant I could compose the parts directly into the session and record my guitar and bass parts over the programmed instruments. For the guitar tones, I used the amp simulator ‘Archetype: Gojira’ and dialled back the gain and selected a clean amp head with a bit of overdrive to create a crunch tone that wasn’t overly distorted (appendix 8). The first songs tone was to mimic the same kind of tones heard in songs by bands like ‘Kiss’ and ‘The School of Rock’. I ran the bass through the same setup and removed the overdrive and just kept the clean saturated tone from the amp. I used this bass tone for all the songs in the video as it has a nice clean warmth with a high gain grit which made it dynamically versatile for each section of the songs. ML Drums is a great VST plugin which has a nice dry kit sound which helps convey the sound of a raw stage kit (appendix 7). I wanted the production to sound as close to an onstage performance as I could, despite half the instruments being programmed. I felt this drum kit helped to convey that as the multi-sampled drum kit has different velocities and sample layers which help humanize the playing. I felt the vocals should be left as single-track recordings seeing as its only one character singing on stage the whole time. Multiple harmony layers wouldn’t be accurate to how the real production sounded and wouldn’t be realistic to the story since there is only one singer in the play. I did run into an issue of the vocals sounding quite empty in the track as they were only single takes. I decided to copy three takes of the same recording to layer them. I manually moved each take slightly out of phase with each other and pitched a couple of them down and up by a few cents to create a pseudo chorus effect. This and some heavy parallel compression helped give the vocals more body and allowed them to sit nicely within the track (appendix 9). I also had part of the monologue be recorded in the second song as musicals such as ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ and ‘Matilda’ typically leave the dialogue in the studio tracks to keep it feeling like a showcase rather than simply a song. The last track remains an instrumental where I followed the same production process, however, I added extra layers of instrumentation. This song was heavily inspired by ‘Vices and Virtues’ by Panic! At The Disco and the Matilda soundtrack. I utilised dramatic MIDI strings from ‘LABS’ plugin and the Kontakt 8 library and blended them with funky rock instrumentation (appendix 10).

7. Evaluation

Overall, I’m very happy with how the main project turned out and how it progressed over the years. We of course ran into some problems along the way; however, I believe we did an efficient job in fixing the problems before deadlines. For example, we had one of the guitarists quit a week before showcase, yet I was able to source someone new and teach them the material separately in good time. I feel this project has served its purpose in leading to future work. The main showcase has led onto me writing music for a new play that will be getting submitted to Fringe next year. On top of that, the connections I’ve built have helped me get some paid work with the Performing Arts society. I’ve gained valuable experience in teaching, stage production and even a bit of sound tech work. Despite some of the struggles, this project has been incredibly beneficial for my portfolio, and I am excited to see how this project develops in the future.

8. Bibliography

Edfringe.com. (2019). Nine famous shows that started at the Edinburgh Fringe. [online] Available at: https://www.edfringe.com/about-us/news-and-blog/nine-famous-shows-that-started-at-the-edinburgh-festival-fringe/.

Pushpatterns.com. (2026). How to Use Ableton Live 12: A Step-by-Step Online Course. [online] Available at: https://www.pushpatterns.com/ableton-live-12-course [Accessed 22 Apr. 2026].

‌www.youtube.com. (n.d.). How To Create Vocal Doubles Without Plugins in Ableton Live. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7kZSJ77NXT8 [Accessed 23 Apr. 2026].