Pictures Symble & Icon

Recreating a vinyl album cover

In this module we need to pich a song and recreat the album cover it had.

What song did I chose?

We had a selection of music that we can choose from, all the way from reggae to ambient.

I chose a jazz song by Miles Davis: So What. The choice was made by the fact I like jazz, I am familiar with the song and I know that the music by him has no word, therefore it’s the purest form of music.

Research

First, I started by looking at the varieties of different covers that Miles Davis had and specifically focused on the covers that had the song “So What?” in them.

The first thing I realised was that all of them have one thing in common, and that is they all have Miles Davis playing the trumpet.

This was because Miles Davis was such an iconic character back then, everyone knew him, who he looked like and the music he produced. Furthermore, every single of them Miles had his eyes closed while playing, that just goes to show how passionate he is about playing the trumpet.

Then I looked at some of the different styles of albums cover. Then I came across “Big Fun” and ” Bitches Brew”, they are done in very different styles.

“Big fun” was designed in a way that instantly you get the “fun” part of the album. the characters at the back of the album dancing protrade that the music in the album is fun to listen to.

“Bitvhes Brew” cover was designed by the artist called Mati Klarwein. He was specialised in Mischtechnik, it’s a techniquewhere the artists would layer different colour onto the painting. furthermore, Mati Klarwein used Egg Tempura to paint his painting where egg yolk is used as a binder and colour pigments are added to make the colour then painted on. the effect of doing so is that the painting would appear to be quite flat, and each line is distinctive.

My Design

My starting point was to focus on the music itself. How do I feel about it? What does the music make me think of? And what idea is the artist trying to get across.

What dose the music make me feel?

So What

by Miles Davis

Feeling the Bass

The song has a very strong bass from the beginning. The bass it self isn’t loud, you can just hear it. But you can feel the bass in your chest.

Joyful

The music started off with the sound’s pitch going up and down, I can sense that the musician (Miles Davis) is enjoying playing the piece.

Repetitive?

For the first part of the intro, it’s very repetitive, and the same part is also played at the end of the piece. However, you don’t get bored, the notes may be the same but the dynamic of the music is different each time.

Dynamic

The dynamic of the song swings from loud to quiet all the time, and with that, you can feel the emotion of the music.

Pitch

The pitch of the music starts off low with the bass the at one point suddenly grow to a very high pitch. that adds excitement to the music it self.

With Pause

The music is played in sections, in between each section, you can clearly hear that the trumpet stops and there are the bass and the gentle tapping of the snare drum.

Soft

Although there are parts of the song there is sudden high pitch sound, but it was played at such a way that it doesn’t come across as offensive. much softer than you’d expect.

Free

As soon as the trumpet starts to play, you can hear that the trumpet player is almost playing whatever he wants, the notes glide though out the piece. It is true freedom.

Model Jazz

Model Jazz is a sub-genre of Jazz where the piece is consist of only two or three cords, and the cord change is very slow so the artiest can have a longer period of time to improvise so that the audience don’t get borad.

Mood board

I created a mood board for some inspirations, this would help me to come up with some initial ideas. I found images that relate and may inspire me to an idea.

Initial Ideas

__

I first started to think how I can express the music through the album cover. Because of Model Jazz, the artist is free to express and improvise what they want to play, therefore I want to show the freedom in jazz through its album cover.

Jackson Pollock was my first choice. the artwork that he produces has no definitive structure. Different colours mixed in with different emotions and freely spread across the canvas.

Then I thought from my research, every album cover had a trumpet on it. So I thought of maybe incorporate all of the instrument that was used in the song, this way when you look at the album cover, you instantly know what kind of music you are going to be listing to. Furthermore, I thought by using the rule of thirds, I can create a simple but effective album cover, by having the trumpet body in the lower third of the page and the keys in the middle, you can clearly tell that it’s a trumpet, and knowing it’s a Miles Davis album, you know what to expect.

I also explored the title of the song. The title is sassy and it gives a sense of “I don’t care” vibe. So I went with on idea where the font of the title is messy, where normally you’d expect the font to be nice and professional looking.

Components of My Design

First I wanted to incorporate Jackson Pollock’s painting, but I didn’t want to cover the entire album cover in it. so I thought of using the rule of thirds, where I’ll only use the one-third of the available space for the Jackson Pollock painting. I decided the bottom third as that will give me the album cover more weight.

I chose three colour in the Jackson Pollock painting. First was blue, that’s because blue is the style of the music and the famous album for the song “So What” to be in was called all kind of blue. Second colour I used was yellow, this was because the trumpet is a yellow brass colour, and so is most of the instrument used for the song. And finally, the last colour was white, I put white on is because white mean purity, where it’s not been affected by any elements, and to me, that’s the spirit of the song, where the artist can explore the uncharted water of jazz, paint on the white canvas.

The second element I have is the trumpet in the middle of the page. This was done to more follow the tradition with other Miles Davis’s albums, where is a trumpet on the album cover. I image of the trumpet was of a trumpet bell if you were to look at it head on, also it represents the record itself as it’s in a circle.

Finally, it was the name. I thought I’d name the album cover so that it’s distinguished as the “So What” album.i thought that the font I could use could be something rough and messy. This way it would express as “Free”. But under further thought, I decided that the writing would look better if it was written in gold, as gold matches the colour skem of the rest of my album, and it makes the golden age of jazz.