George Lauder Bursary - Week 1

Time is flying by already! It's hard to believe that I've done my first full week in NYC! It's been amazing finally settling into the city groove, becoming familiar with my typical commutes, visit more iconic locations and beginning my courses at NYU. Since there will be a lot of details to cover, I will breakdown my day-by-day to showcase everything I got up to during this time! I probably will not go into as much detail due to the sheer amount of things to cover, but if you have any questions please reach out!

Monday 9th June

After a pretty intensive weekend, I decided to take things slow on Monday especially as my courses started the following day. In order to access the university facilities, I would require my NYU ID card which needed to be collected from the NYU Card Center which was located at the main campus in Washington Square. After getting ready, I hopped on the subway and made my way to the campus. I picked up my ID card and decided to explore the campus area as one of my classes would be held close by, I sat in the main square for a while, watching as a band played jazz music and allowed bystanders to join in with random percussion instruments! As I was quite tired from the last few days I decided that I would relax for the remainder of the day so I took a stroll to explore the surrounding area before grabbing the subway back home. Not incredibly exciting but I know that I'll have plenty of other opportunities to explore the city.

Tuesday 10th June

My first day at the Clive Davis! It was an early class starting at 9am so I arrived early to ensure I could get a look around the building and get familiar with the facilities. My first class "Engineering the Record I", is done in 2 hour blocks every day where our main project is to create and record our own song. The first class was mostly just to get familiar with the studio and live room space for our projects. After class, I grabbed lunch at the local NYU dining hall with two of my classmates, Jackson and JV. We had a great chat about each other, our music interests and other audio related subjects! I then had to catch the subway to my next class 'The Basic's of Music Licensing' (BoML). This is a slightly longer class at a few hours but we began by getting to know one another, learning about our favourite movie scenes and analysed specific uses of music in visual media such as the iconic opening scene from Edgar Wright's Baby Driver or typical adverts which aired with questionable choices of music. I enjoyed having a more in-depth converstation about how music is found and chosen for visual media. Following the end of my class, it was time for me to head home, get some food and do a bit of work on my own projects (more to come from that soon!).

Wednesday 11th June

I followed a similar schedule to Tuesday in the morning. Starting at 9am, we began our next class of 'ETR I'. We started by going over what our first project would be, discussing the groups we needed to form to get the project complete and also began going over the fundamentals of recording (the class does not have a lot of people who have audio engineering experience so it is important to cover the basics so they gain a good understanding of how to record, regardless of my existing experience). Following this class, I went to the dining hall with Jackson again to grab some lunch before heading back to the Clive Davis for my next new class, 'The Virtual Producer - Beats & Beatmaking' (VP-B&B). This class is held on Zoom as our lecturer is not based in NYC, but we got introduced to everyone in the class as well as our lecturer. He has worked with the likes of Lil Wayne, Nas and the incredible Ms. Lauryn Hill, so quite the client list! We covered our syllabus and began working on our first piece of work where we had to reproduce the drum beat from Run D.M.C's 'Sucker M.C.'s (Krush-Groove 1). I really enjoyed working on this, it was quite fun to remake the entire drum beat from scratch. Our homework for the following week was to choose two other tracks from a list provided by our lecturer, out of the list I decided to choose 'Clear' by Cybotron and 'Juicy Fruit' by Mtume. 'Juicy Fruit' in particular is famous for being sampled by The Notorious B.I.G on his song 'Juicy'. After class finished I decided to head back to the accomodation.

For anyone who knows me even slightly, they will tell you that I am a massive fan of The Weeknd and I had noted before coming to the U.S that his final tour as 'The Weeknd', would be passing through Philadelphia at the Lincoln Financial Field towards the end of July. After looking at the logistics of travelling and staying over in Philly I decided on this night that it would be worth it. So I went ahead and purchased a seated ticket, and as you can imagine, I was incredibly excited to see him live again after seeing him in Manchester at the Etihad Stadium back in 2023.

Thursday 12th June

I followed an incredibly similar schedule to Tuesday today, so I won't go into too much detail here! 'ETR I' covered further fundamentals to recording such as microphone types, polar patterns, microphone placement, etc (again things I am already aware of but great to have this information reinforced and help my other classmates understand these concepts). We were advised to pick our groups as our project would be due on Monday and I was asked by two of my classmates, Dana and Jean to join their group. I oblidged and we planned to record on Saturday. Following my class, I grabbed some lunch and hopped on the subway for my next class 'BoML'. In this class we covered topics such as the origins of copyright and music publishing in the U.S, learning about key events and locations such as Tinpan Alley, the creation of Performance Rights Organisations such as ASCAP and BMI, and how licensing works today. After my class, I hopped back on the subway but accidentally got off at the wrong stop after misreading one of the signs in the train! I found myself at the south of Manhattan, in an area called "The Battery", a small park which looks out onto the Statue of Liberty and is home to some amazing memorials commemorating the many fallen servicemen who died in the Atlantic from different branches of the U.S military during World War 2. After spending some time exploring the park, I decided that I would head home and make sure I got off at the correct stop this time!

Friday 13th June

This was my first day off since Monday so I decided to go out and about to explore Central Park! I took the subway through to the south end of the park and began making my way up the west side of the park, I also chose to listen to a couple of albums that day while I explored. For my time in central park I chose to relisten to Frank Ocean's Blonde, one of my favourite records (probably of all time). The park was a breath of fresh air from the concrete and tall buildings that surround me on a day-to-day basis, I loved getting to see all the small details which are dotted around the park, including the "The Lake" as it's called, Bow Bridge, Belvedere Castle and The Great Lawn. I decided that I would go and explore towards the some of the Upper East Side and discovered that I'd barely even walked half of the park! So I will definitely need to come back another day to look around the rest. I ended up walking along to the banks of the East River where I sat and looked out on to Roosevelt Island and further across the river. I decided that I would take a different form of transport to get home as I had heard about this alternative way to get up and down Manhattan, that being the ferry! I found myself at the ferry port on East 90th St. where I boarded the ferry and off we went. The journey only took around half an hour and I got to see a lot of the cityscape of both Manhattan and Brooklyn on both sides, we passed under the Queensboro Bridge, Williamsburg Bridge, Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge before arriving Pier 11 where I walked to the nearest subway to finally arrive back home after a long day. Probably around 10-12,000 steps completed!

Saturday 14th June

The plan for today was to complete our first small project for ETR I! I paired up in a group with Dana and Jean and arrived at 11:30am for a 3 hour session. The goal of this first project was to record 4 instruments which were in time to a simple drum loop (quite easy but for context my classmates don't have a lot of studio experience so this is their first recording project). We got started by recording bass where I stepped up to play a simple riff to accompany the drum loop. Dana is a violinist, pianist so she decided to utilise the Rhodes keyboard in the live room for the track. We rounded off the instrument list by recording some vocal hums from both Dana and Jean as well as a simple shaker. A simple project but effective to teach the other students the basics of recording, it was also good to reinfornce existing knowledge for myself. After our session, I got some lunch and booked out an edit suite at the university to continue working away on some personal projects. I invested in a new plugin to utilise for my mixes, for any engineers this was the Valhalla Vintage Verb! An incredibly versatile and high-quality reverb plugin which is used by a lot of major producers and engineers on their songs, well worth the investment! I finished up for the evening and headed back home to rest up and relax!

Sunday 15th June

Technically this was a day off for me, however I decided to go and lend a hand to one of the other ETR groups made up of Jackson, JV and Sabrina as they requested for a bit of help to understand the mixing console. During the session I learned that Sabrina is an artist and she told me about an upcoming project that she is working on and how she is looking for a producer and engineer to help it come to fruition and asked if both me and Jackson would be interested. I instantly said that I'd potentially love to be involved depending on the type of project and the timescale, especially since I was limited to my time in the U.S. We discussed some further details and she advised that she would send me through a demo so I could get my opinion and decide what I wanted to do. Afterwards I grabbed lunch and headed back home to carry on with some more mixing and other work that needed to be completed before Monday. Not a massively eventful day, but the beginning of some potential connections and even a project!