When I first picked up Persona 5 during quarantine, I fell in love with it and developed a hyperfixation on the series. But little did I know that it would inspire me to plan a tribute concert to the Persona series and this feat would be the most stressful, yet exhilarating of my life. To give a frame of reference to people that may not know what the Persona series is all about, it’s a Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) series created by Atlus. Each of the games revolves around high schoolers that explore dungeons and fight enemies with a manifestation of their inner being, referred to as a persona. The series is ripe with psychological themes surrounding confronting the darkest parts of oneself, friendship, and most importantly awesome music. I had started to learn many of the songs from the soundtrack during quarantine and dreamed of putting on a concert once lockdown restrictions were lifted. And as Vice President of UW Bothell’s very own music production club, I gradually started to get accustomed to a position of power that would allow me to make this show happen. The idea was initially rejected by Oliver, the president of the club, for being a niche topic, but with enough persistence, I was able to get the idea greenlit at the very start of Fall 2022. As I was going to be spearheading the project, I would mainly receive his assistance through working with club council and facilitating meetings. I started off a bit slow being overwhelmed by my vision. I had all of these clubs I wanted to reach out to, tons of effects, a live band, and costume changes. But the overwhelm of all of those things distracted me from the bare minimum of what I needed to do to make the show happen. So I talked to my voice teacher and with her advice, I formulated a new action plan, one that would be so much easier to follow through with. I’d be collaborating with the Digital Arts Club instead of handling multiple collaborations, singing to backing tracks (barring one instrumental song we would be doing), and I would not be having multiple costume changes.
Resources I Needed to Put The Project On
Music Production/Scoring
The main resources I used for the music production process were Reaper, Musescore, GarageBand, and Google Docs. In a separate google document, I made a list of every song in the set list and tried to look for its corresponding karaoke track. I was able to find karaoke tracks for the songs I would be singing except one which I would need to make from scratch. I organized all of the tracks by set list order and listed what types of modifications they would need or if none were needed at all. This would make it easy for me to keep track of which ones I needed to work on. I was able to download the videos for the karaoke tracks I had found as mp3 files and drag them into Reaper to record background vocals. Before going into recording anything, I listened to the parts of the songs that had harmonies over and over again with headphones to really be able to hear all of the details. I then got a sheet of the lyrics and wrote the notes for the melodies over the lyrics, using different colors to differentiate different parts from each other. I would then do my best to sing each of the parts I had extracted from listening to each track, adjusting certain parts using trial and error until I honed in on the exact sound I wanted.
As for music transcriptions, I was going to originally have my guitar teacher in charge of those because music transcription is not my strength at all and I don’t enjoy it. But he was not able to do so for the two songs in the set that were going to have instrumental accompaniment on them. So I was left to my own devices. I downloaded Musescore, which I had not touched in ages, found some arrangements for the songs that I kind of like, and did minor reworking to the arrangements to make them stripped down to the instruments we would need (piano and violin). This reworking process took about a couple months. As I did not have Reaper installed on my Mac, I ended up exporting the audio of each part into GarageBand tracks so the performers I featured and I would have something to practice with.
Club Collaborations
The first and arguably most important task that would kick off the project would be to hold a meeting with the Digital Arts Club in which I planned to pitch the idea of the show, give an official set list along with rough visuals for each song for the artists to reference, and talk a small bit about featuring one other performer to play keyboard and rap on two songs in the set. Oliver was my rock throughout the initial stages of planning this show and it wouldn’t have succeeded on the scale that it did if he didn’t help me. For reference, here’s a snappy little list of the things that he did to help me prepare for this meeting and beyond:
- Oliver helped me prepare the documentation for the meeting by taking note of what I had already written down and organizing it into a template that I could flesh out in time for the meeting. This allowed me to take the grandiose vision I had of the show that made me overwhelmed in the past and ground it in reality; what can actually be achieved on a low budget by college students.
- He helped me narrow down the initial set list which was massive in my documentation. He encouraged me to only pick a handful of songs I liked. Once we had decided on the songs, we ordered them into sections based on what games they were from (Persona 3 songs would go first, then Persona 4 songs, then Persona 5 songs) and marked which ones would have instrumental accompaniment or feature another performer. After the list was cut down the set had 11 songs, but I was going to have Oliver feature as a violinist for two songs and would later on recruit Joe to do keyboard and rapping parts.
- During the initial meeting, Oliver redirected me whenever I went on tangents regarding music production, recruiting performers, or theatrics. Since this meeting was with the club that was going to be doing visuals for us, everything else had to be kept to a minimum. I didn’t have a lot of experience conducting meetings so this was incredibly helpful.
- Oliver took on the role of logistics coordinator as he chose to handle the club council interactions that would allow us to reserve and decorate the space for the event as needed.
Space Reservations
Oliver had a bit of trouble getting a hold of club council to schedule a meeting for reserving a space for the concert. When we thought we had secured a date, it ended up being moved around a couple times until we could get in contact with them. We showed up with our documentation and I described what kind of stage, decorations, and refreshments we might want for the show. We were looking to hold it in the ARC some time during spring quarter. They gave us a couple dates and times we could reserve the ARC for the concert and the best one was on May 30th. During hell week. The show would literally be put on during the time of the quarter where people are hunkering down to catch up on schoolwork or studying for finals. Neither of us wanted it because we knew we’d be risking low attendance but it was the best option they gave us so we took it. All that was left to do was actually get ready for the show and a big part of that was practicing.
I had scheduled a when2meet with the two of them and asked Oliver to reserve the usability studio in the discovery hall for us to practice. He was able to reserve the usability studio for the next month up until the show, which was good, but also very stressful because we would only have a month to practice. Because we’d be only playing some parts from the musescore arrangements I prepared, I exported the audio of the parts that wouldn’t be played and put them in a timeline on GarageBand so we could play along to them. Before our reservation of the media space started, I was able to get Joe to practice with me on campus outside of the library. Which was pretty fun as we gave the campus a little sneak peek into what we had prepared.
Creating Key Visuals for Artists
Gearing up for the show, I also had to create a more organized mood board of visuals for the artists. I created a chaotic set of potential visuals in the meeting notes, but the artists creating the visuals wanted a more specific set of references to work with so I decided to create a canva presentation which was basically one massive moodboard. Since the entire set list would have three sections categorized by songs from a singular game, I wanted the visuals to reflect that heavily. The presentation I ended up creating consisted of the following:
- A slide denoting each section of the set list and a color palette to go with the corresponding Persona game
- Default visuals for each section
- Specific visuals to transition from one section to the next.
Both of the artists I had recruited were in their senior year working on their capstone projects so it was very important to emphasize which parts would require the most effort and which ones they could cut corners on.
Advertising
As the concert date creeped closer and closer, advertising became a much more concerning factor. And a big part of that was coming up with an official name for the concert. I had always referred to it as the Persona concert but Oliver thought that was uninspired so we sent out a Google form for people to suggest what the name of the concert should be. We got a lot of suggestions ranging from ones that I thought really captured the essence of the show and its set list to very funny ones. Eventually, I decided to make a list of my top 5 and originally, the name I had chosen for the show was at the very bottom of the list. But it rose to the top quickly when I had drafted a poster design that I thought would complement the name well. The next step was to actually make official posters.
I had planned on designing the posters in Clip Studio Paint as I thought at the time that would make the advertising process go by faster. For reference, the show was over a month away and I was looking at getting 3-4 weeks of advertising. I then had to bite the bullet as I realized I still had backing tracks to finish mixing at the time and tried to lend the task over to the Digital Arts Club. They denied the request to make the poster since they had only agreed to do visuals as part of their collaboration, but redirected me to the Multimedia Graphic Designers. With the help of Oliver, I filled out a form that described what logos we would need on the poster, the poster colors, along with a google drive link of the draft design I had sketched. After communicating with the graphic designer and waiting for her revisions, I got a result I was proud of and it was time to start putting up posters on campus. CEB was advertising a prom event which was happening around a similar time so we made sure to post our flyers next to theirs. We also got sandwich boards, one of which we put outside the library and another of which was outside the ARC. For online spaces, we posted the flier in the Bothell Beats discord, the UWB discord, the Digital Arts Club discord, and other respective UWB club servers such as Husky Gaming Club and Husky Game Dev. I also made sure to post about it on my personal Instagram account once the final draft of the poster was finished along with a very heartfelt description.
What The Show Was Like
Actually doing the concert was an incredible experience. Pretty much all of my friends were there and considering that the show was held during dead week, we got pretty good attendance. The audience gave me such joy and made it such an incredible experience. It was transcendental almost. I had so much anxiety about whether people would enjoy the show, how I would be perceived on stage, but in the moment, it felt like so much of that didn’t matter and all the work I had put in paid off. I did what I always wanted to do: to share music from my favorite video game series with the people I love, to perform songs that mean so much to me. And finally, I finally had the perfect outlet for that. But more importantly, I finished a large scale project which is such a rare accomplishment for me and I had put on a major performance after so many years. I was reminded of what I love about performing, the adrenaline rush of being on stage, the comradery felt in connecting with an audience, and just an overall ability to be myself, physically and mentally. Not just that, but an ability to feel in tune with myself, which is something I don’t get very often being a busy college student.
Reflection and Conclusion
Most of the things that I wish could have been better don’t necessarily correlate with the end product itself, but more so with the process. I wish I could have started earlier and allowed my vision of the show to be more malleable to constraints and resources in the beginning. I’d rather reverse engineer my way to a possible final result than thinking everything must match the exact vision I have in my mind and forcing myself to be perfect in the process. I think my perfectionist mindset and my executive dysfunction definitely fed off of each other in that regard for the entire project. I also wish I could’ve prioritized this project rather than forcing myself to do a million things at the same time because many parts of this project took up more space in my life than I initially thought I would. I’d also want to make sure to stay in contact with any mentors that could help me during the initial stages. The last thing, I seriously wish I could’ve delegated more tasks to people than forcing myself to do almost everything. While the Digital Arts Club was working on visuals and Oliver was handling a lot of logistics, I was left with pretty much everything else and that was extremely overwhelming. Even in regards to little things like mixing tracks or transcribing sheet music, I think I should’ve accepted help more quickly so I could focus on being a better leader. Even with all of the things that I would do differently next time, this project was a major success in regards to learning leadership skills, helping Bothell Beats cross new frontiers, and most importantly performing the music of a video game series that allowed me to pursue my true self. And yes, that is a Persona reference.
