Band Creating

Rock Band

Our task is to begin creating a band that will appeal to a target audience that will fill fits best. We have to begin considering the genre, who is in the band, the band image, the logo, the album artwork and a lot more.

Our first task was to think of what band we want to create, at this point we had to consider what genre we wanted to do, who was going to be in the band and our target audience. Phoebe and I had some difficulty finalising our band genre however we decided to go with rock, we already knew this was an hugely popular genre that was increasingly growing, we considered all aspects when it came to what we wanted the band to put across to its target audience - we researched into existing rock, rock statistics, rock facts, who listens to rock and a lot more, more of this information can be found on my Critical Apporoaches blog with Jo Bird. We have also decided that we wanted our target audience to appeal to the ages of older teenagers+, myself listening to this music and with all the data we collected we know that 15+ year olds to listen to Rock music, old and new, so this would be perfect for what we are creating.

Rock Music 

Rock, rock music is a popular genre of music that originated as ''rock and roll'' in the United States in the 1950s, and developed into a range of different styles in the 1960s and later particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940's and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music. rock music also drew strongly on a number of other genres such as blues and folk, and incorporated influences from jazz, classical and other musical sources. Musically rock has centered on the electric guitar, usually as part of a rock group with electric bass guitar and drums. Lyrics often stress romantic love but also address wide variety of other themes that are frequently social or political in emphasis.

Existing Bands - 

The most popular and frequently mentioned rock bands on the web go by:

Although most of these bands have now split up and a lot of members from these have passed away, there music still lives on to this day and is listened to a ton of different age groups, whether this is teenagers born in the late 90's to those who listened to the music themselves as teenagers in the 60s, 70s and 80s.. A lot of these band were formed in the 60s, with a 'psychedelic' feel to the music, including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and several others. The late 60s and early 70s began the roots of heavy metal. More bands shown were formed in the 70s where the roots of 'punk rock' began and 80s with arena rock, bands included Metallica, AC/DC, Guns N' Roses  and Iron Maiden. As the music still lives on, this is a huge contribution to why Rock Music is still popular in this day. Not only this, these band that were hugely popular throughout the late 1900's have immensely influenced the music being made by rock bands to this day. 

This music is what has inspired our group to create the rock band 'Black Acid'. Not only do we like the music, but the fact that the Rock genre has become so popular once again in history can only mean good. The heavy sounds, electric guitar, drum solos and powerful vocals is nothing but inspiring and I feel that if we were to create a band similar to those like Nirvana, AC/DC , Iron Maiden etc, they would quickly become popular and sales would go through the roof. 

Our Image & Band Name

We have taken inspiration from bands such AC/DC, Nirvana, Guns N' Roses, Iron Maiden etc, we ike the music, the image, the logos and the album covers these all appeal to us therefore we think they they would be appealing to the target audience as well. 

We had to begin thinking of a name for our band, we like how existing bands had very unusual and individual names, they often related to love, sex, death, darkness, heavy metal, fighting/war. Phoebe mind mapped existing band names and we started to expand on our ideas. With the help of resources such as thesaurus we were able to think of words and link them to other words that had the same meaning but gave us a broader idea. We couldn't copy existing bands but they influenced us a lot on our name outcome...

After a lot of consideration we decided firstly on the name Maleficent Youth. We thought that this sounded appropriate for the type of band we are creating and the genre they are within. We took the idea of Maleficent after researching through the thesaurus on words like evil, black, devil, darkness. We thought including the word maleficent would fit as it does relate to corruption, destructive, wicked, malicious etc, things that we wanted our band to portray the image of to make them look powerful and stand out within a crowd of existing music. Again we didn't want to just have one word, we added the word 'youth' purely for the bands target audience, the word youth links with teenagers, youth meaning 'adolescence', 'boyhood', 'ignorance' etc so putting these two together fitted well.

The other name we came up with was Black Acid. Straight away we thought that this name sounded better and stood out more plus it was more catchy than Maleficent Youth. We came up this name with help  of our planning, we initially just put two words together that sounded good then looked into it a bit more and thought that what we came up with was more interesting than we thought - Black Acid is in fact a type of drug which is known to be very 'very hard to find' and 'very powerful'  this could potentially be good for the image of our band for example the music they create is hard to find elsewhere, it's there style and there individual as well as this, the band is very powerful, influential and impressive - Black Acid is the name we have chosen for our band.

Black Acid Band Members:

• Two guitarists (male and female) who sing as well 
• One drummer 
• One bassist 

Name - Mike Ross, Age- 22

This drummer of our rock band is Mike Ross who is 22 year old male musician from Camden, London. With his a family who's background revolves around music, Ross has been heavily involved in a musical life since a young age but took a particular interest in drumming at the age of 6. Drumming from a young age has meant that Mike  has been brought up taking lessons, self teaching and having a lot of involvement in music. From his family being a part of a rock music background Ross has had a huge interest in rock and indie bands such as The Rolling Stones, AC/DC. Kiss, Nirvana, Deep Purple, and The Talking Heads who heavily influenced the type of music he would play. He was very interested in discovering new bands as he grew up and became huge fans of band such as Foo Fighters, Green Day, Radiohead and Limp Bizkit. Since his teenage years he knew he wanted to be a part of a huge rock band. At GCSE, Mike Ross took Music to gain more knowledge in not just drumming but other musical instruments as well, he then continued on to take Music at A-Level in a local college, and joined into temporary bands that performed in various local music places to get more experience. Before debating whether to study at University, Mike took a Gap year to be able to tour around the South of England with his small band from college who stuck together, he then met the rest of Black Acid band members through this and became good friends. After his band from college broke up, his new friends, came together and created Black Acid. Mike met Violet who decided to create the band but when they still needed new members, Mike took his best friend and brother who took up the roles of singer/guitarist and a bassist. After the four piece met they straight away clicked and formed the band Black Acid. Mike Ross has become determined  to become a well-known drummer along with his band in the music industry. The band at the band want to create music which is primary rock but with alternative, goth and punk rock added to it as want it to be a unique and original band. His style inspirations are Ringo Star, Dave Grohl, Phil Rudd and Lars Ulrich

Female Lead Singer: Violet Star, 21 years old 

This main vocalist of our rock band is Violet Star who is 21 year old female musician from Brighton. She's always had a big interest in music but specifically singing. Shes sung from a very young age and has been brought up with musical interest, ever since she was a child she would sing all songs but always be particularly interested in songs from rock or indie alternative backgrounds. Growing up she was constantly listening to bands which her parents listened in there youth like The Rolling Stones, ACDC, Kiss, Misfits and Nirvana. She developed her own taste in rock music and would constantly listen to artists like Foo Fighters and Green Day, from her teens her aim ambition in life was to basically become a rock star, she studied music at GCSE, then went on to complete a two year BTEC course in music and performing arts at her local college in Brighton, and finally after leaving Brighton forming her own band Black Acid. Violet Star was the main reason Black Acid began as she extensively searched around her perfect band mates to complete her unique and one of a kind band. She first met drummer Mike Ross and a local pub and after hours of discovery music, rock and teenage life they decided to create the band, Mike got his best friend whom also plays the guitar like Violet and he brought in his brother which also plays the guitar to complete the band, After the four piece met they straight away clicked and formed the band Black Acid. Violet isn't just a lead vocialist she also plays the guitar which shes been learning from a very young age, she's always wanted to sing and play the guitar so when she was old enough she began to attend weekly guitar lessons. Violet has always been a high achiever and felt the decision to go down the musical route would help her and make her become successful and well-known. Violet Star wants to do collaborations with Fleetwood Mac and the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the future when her band has become established. She also believes the style of her band would be primary rock but with alternative, goth and punk rock added to it as she wants to be a unique and original band. Her style inspiration are a very mixed bunch as she likes the tradional rock style but get influences from Alice Glass, Courtney Love, Debbie Harry, Gwen Stefani, Shirley Manson and Joan Jett.

Lead Guitarist and singer: Sebastian Miller, 24 years old 

The lead guitarist of Black Acid is Sebastian Miller whom is brothers with one of the leader vocalists and fellow guitarist. Sebastian is 24 year old musician from the Brighton area who has a love of rock music, epic fantasy films and alternative fashion. He's another child from rock has been brought up with strong rock influences especially as his parents were apart of a mixed gender rock band in the early 80's. Sebastian has always enjoyed rock music, being a big fan of Nirvana, Led Zeppelin and Guns & Roses and has said in the past that hes always wanted to be apart of a band like one of those. Throughout school, college and university he took a slightly different turn to his fellow band memebers. He did extremely well in education flying by with A/A*'s at school, then going on the achieve brilliant grades at A Levels in Sociology, Music, Maths's and Photography. Finally the aspiring guitarist went on to university to get a degree in Sociology before deciding that he'd put his educational career on hold to focus on his life ambition of becoming a rock musician. This was when he found his chance in the form of Black Acid and jumped at the chance to become a lead guitarist. Sebastian's fashion influences are from a range of different people as he likes the style of new and rock musicians, some fashions include Mick Jagger, Liam Gallagher, Brandon Flowers, Pete Wentz  Joey Ramone and David Bowie. The type of band Sebastian wants Black Acid to be like is ACDC and The Pretty Reckless as he feels both those artists are original and unique. Sebastians has always been mostly interested in being a guitarist even though he started his musical career as a drummer in a band when he still was at school. He first started guitar lessons when he was just 12 years old as his grandfather would teach him how to play the guitar every Sunday. Sebastian wants to improve his vocal skills so he can start to sing on tracks which hes wrote for the band and is able to have his own touch to the voice sound of the band. Sebastian's favorite film is Alien, Rock N Roll High School and School of Rock.

Bassist: Lars King.  26 years old

Lars King is the bassist of Black Acid, and became part of the band when Mike Ross approached him to join, already being best friends with Mike, he immediately said yes. The 26 year old from Crawley began playing bass in his early teens due to boredom and a huge interest in rock and jazz music - he other favourites include movies, photography and travelling around Australia. He became a fan of rock music after discovering band like AC/DC, Misfits, Doors, Def Leppard and Iron Maiden through the internet and quickly became influenced to start creating his won music. Throughout school and college King kept up his love for playing bass through doing Music as a GCSE and also plenty of lessons from the school, including being majority self taught. He then continued his education in college, achieving brilliant grades at A Level in Photography, Music, Psychology and Graphics. He then took a gap year to travel around Australia and learn more about different cultures and music, also being going sight seeing. After this he went to University of Brighton and did a degree in Music. In this time he joined two different bands that did small gigs around Brighton. After becoming part of the band Lars King continues to do photography and work on his graphics as well as doing small gigs and touring round with Black Acid and gaining a small fan base. King massively want to be a part of the sound of the band, and would like his music to be influenced by band by the likes of AC/DC and Iron Maiden. 

Logo

To determine the bands image and start thinking up ideas of a logo we looked at existing bands, inparticular the ones shown above, These bands are some of the most popular rock bands all around the world, not just for there music but for there image, the way the portray themselves, there style. We considered the use of colour e.g blacks, electric blues, reds, white those that could represent power, strength, confidence, truth. Then we looked at the type face, almost every one has bold, capitalized, 'loud' font - Misfits, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath each have a logo that the majority of people around the world would see and know of it, and if you dont know the logoyou'll know the symbol that goes with it.

The Misfits have made use of horror film and science fiction film to inspire themes and imagery, with makeup, clothing, artwork and lyrics drawn from movies and television series, many from the 1950s through to 1970s. We took a lot of influence from Misfits logo design. We both were really intrigued by not only the typeface but the logo that came with it. The logo was not actually designed as such, it was inspired by two iconic trademarks from the horror film industry. The skull was appropriated from a poster for the film series 'The Crimson Ghost' and the typeface resembles that of the move magazine 'Famous Monsters of Filmland' The band iconic 'Crimson Ghost' logo is known around the world and whether it's just the typeface or just the Crimson Ghost, people will know of it - and this is what we for our band. For our logo we wanted to take inspiration from the typeface rather than the skull however we do want to incorporate something like this into the album cover.

Now, because we don't want to be as 'metal' as a band like the Misfits we didn't want to use the skull idea incorporated into our logo, although we have ideas to use something similar for our album cover (seen below) so we also took a design idea from the symbols from Led Zeppelin and their fourth album Led Zeppelin IV or Zoso. The group decided the didn't want the album to be called Led Zeppelin IV, so therefore decided to choose a metaphysical symbol which represented the band members individually. We focused more on second symbol shown, this symbol was chosen by the Bassist John Paul Jones, and is known as the Triquetra. The symbol has many different meaning for all different art, religions, ancient uses etc. All an all, the symbol is most known for its representation of love, honor, protection, it is also known as representation of cosmology and theology (land, sea and sky). We wanted to incorporate a symbol in our design, we didnt want to completely copy the one from Led Zeppelin, so managed to alter it slightly to how we wanted.

Second Idea

The second logo idea has been very much inspired by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, and The Doors each having a very unique and interesting logo but very recognizable.The below Led Zeppelin logotype, which was designed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis in 1973 as a part of the cover art for Houses of the Holy, artistically and elegantly portrays the band’s name. The whole logotype has a dynamic quality which typifies the brilliance, magnificence and diversity of the band’s wonderful music.

The Doors’ logo. The simple, bold geometric shapes; the reflective double-O’s; the tiny but essential psychedelic “THE.” That simple one-color logo is by now one of the most recognizable images in rock history.


When thinking of the next logo idea I wanted something completely different compared to the first idea, but of course still wanted it to relate to a rock band.  This is where the inspiration from existing band came in. Obviously the most important thing about these existing logo's is the typeface, so I looked for something similar but didn't want to copy. I think this Typeface we chose, which has been taken from dafont.com relates well to the band, its individual, unusual, electric looking and very powerful. The great thing is it is't just a plain font, in incorporates shapes, lines, triangles which make it look that bit more intriguing, which is a great image for the band.

The layout of the logo came quite easy, I first simply writ out 'Black Acid' to begin with so I could use the tools on Photoshop to alter the height, width and where each letter was in relation to the others etc, this helped my come up with a lot more ideas. My initial thoughts was to not have the logo on one line as Phoebe and I felt that it took up to much space and didn't come across as eye catching as it would on two lines, underneath eachother. My first idea for having it on two lines is shown in the bottom of the picture below, I had the idea to reflect the 'A' in 'black' and 'A' in 'acid' and align them so it looked symmetrical, but this ended up looking quite packed especially with the dark color. The middle logo is the one we have chosen and I came up with this basically with trial and error, The first thing I done was try to align the 'A' and the 'K' so it looked more precise and clean cut then I altered each letters height and width to see how it made a difference, after adjusting the width between the letters 'I' and 'D' in 'Acid' it became a lot more easier to read.

The choice of the black outlined font actually came from the Misfits logo, where it didn't work with the first logo I thought I could try it out here, I think it makes the font stand out well, and also means it can be put on any kind of colored background and still stand out.

Feedback and Changes:-

After presenting to a focus group we received a considerable amount of feedback to help with our bands progression in the music industry - the main advise from the critics was firstly define the band genre of music, Phoebe and I knew what we wanted to aim for in out hands but didn't define and point the specifically out in the band presentation. By then we had only described the band as 'rock' and didnt give it definition of sub-genre which we later knew was going to be heavy rock - the changes to this feedback can be seen in the first bit of the research. 

The second a main focus to change the bands name - the audience could recognize that Phoebe and I were aiming towards a band that had the 70s to 80s 'heavy rock' vibe and the name 'Black Acid' did not fit the genre. The feedback was mainly that the name would rather suit a heavy metal band rather than heavy rock therefore Phoebe and I began to immediately think of new ideas for the band. After a considerable amount of planning and thinking I came up with the new and improved name 'Rock Capacity', I made sure to take my time in thinking of a band name that would fit to the heavy rock genre, I looked at existing bands in particular AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple who are similar to the image we are aiming for, and researched into where there name was born - many of them linked towards themes like power, love, electric, success and much more - I got the idea of 'Rock Capacity' from thinking more towards the powerful and dynamic side of rock. 'Rock' obviously being the main genre of our band and 'Capacity' having the meaning volume and limit. Therefore 'Rock Capacity' meaning that the rock music the listeners will hear from our band will be the best and to the limit of existing rock. I believe the new name fits the genre a lot better, it defines the band, gives them a great image, the two words flow together and I feel as though it will succeed in making out band stand out. 

The feedback has been very useful so far in improving our bands image and style to how we knew we wanted it but perhaps didn't quite portray it. The focus group although gave fierce feedback made it easier for me and Phoebe to rethink and revamp out whole band and look at it from how the target audience would see it - we then realized this is when we needed to make the right changes to improve. 

After the name changes we had to change the logo to fit the new name, we didn't want to change the logo font as we were particulary keen to pursue with this design - we did however slightly change the positioning of the words and also changed one word to white with black outline and the other to just black - we both thought this made the logo stand out slightly more that having just one colour. Below is a picture of our final design:- 

CD Cover Design

This is our CD Cover Design which we created through Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. All the images used on our CD Cover were our own photography. We felt the images we took had related to our genre which is why we thought they'd look best on our album cover. We got design inspiration from Black Sabbaths albums as they tend to use a variety of photography rather than just graphics.

This is our front cover of our CD cover design which we created through Photoshop and Illustrator, we edited the actual photo by increasing the photo quality, the contrast and the brightness. We used illustrator to incorporate the Rock Capacity over the original 'The Lanes' sign, we gained colours from the original sign and added theto the Rock Capacity design. This is another photo which we edited for our album cover, we increased the colour quality and changed the colours lines from blue to bright pink. We feel confident with these photos as we used original photography and edited it themselv

Photos for Album designs

CD Designs

This is our CD Cover Design which we created through Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. All the images used on our CD Cover were our own photography. We felt the images we took had related to our genre which is why we thought they'd look best on our album cover. We got design inspiration from Black Sabbaths albums as they tend to use a variety of photography rather than just graphics.

This is our front cover of our CD cover design which we created through Photoshop and Illustrator, we edited the actual photo by increasing the photo quality, the contrast and the brightness. We used illustrator to incorporate the Rock Capacity over the original 'The Lanes' sign, we gained colours from the original sign and added them to the Rock Capacity design. This is another photo which we edited for our album cover, we increased the colour quality and changed the colours lines from blue to bright pink. We feel confident with these photos as we used original photography and edited it themselves. 

EP MGMT Logo

This is our logo for Ellie and I's management company logo. We created the name 'EP' through combining our first letters of our names which we found created an interesting and unique management name. We created the actual logo through Adobe Illustrator and designed it around inspiration from previous logos we looked at. We feel confident with our logo as we feel its a professional looking logo and of a high quality standard. 

This is our logo for Phoebe and I management company logo. We created the name 'EP' through combining our first letters of our names which we found created an interesting and unique Poster 

These are the Rock Capacity posters which use a range of our own photography and the bands logo. We decided to go for a simple and polished look as we wanted the posters to look sharp and defined. We created the posters in photoshop and illustrator to improve the photo quality and incorporate our logo. 

Stick On Tattoos 

Stick on tattoos was one media product Rock Capacity created. We thought stick on tattoos was an interesting and unique idea as rock bands have the connotations of tattoos. This is a light hearted and fun idea which wouldn't be taking 100% seriously, due to our target audience being younger people who wouldn't be covered in hundreds of tattoos we thought this would be just a fun thing for our target audience to do. I created the stick on tattoos through Photoshop and using the original font which we found on Dafont for our logo and experimenting with different letters, numbers, and shapes. We feel these tattoo designs are all different and will attract the target audience as its a unique and fun idea.