Sound the Ocean’s Nick Kraenzlin visits Spark
Nick Kraenzlin along with Nic Manders spoke at Spark on Thursday explaining how to create and record a professional song.
Sparkles were treated to a video of Sound the Ocean’s upcoming album during SPARK week.
Wintec music graduate Nick Kraenzlin returned to campus on Thursday, this time as a successful musician, to talk about his projects.
Kraenzlin, front man for Kiwi band Sound the Ocean, along with the band’s music producer Nic Manders spoke about the process of turning a basic demo song into a professional recording for release.
The pair explained the process with examples from the band’s first single, Ghost Town, off their debut album, Wait for the Morning, set to release late this year.
Wait for the Morning began during Kraenzlin’s time at Wintec, where he was required to create a series of thematically-linked songs following a theme of hope.
The creation process was guided by Wintec tutor Jason Long, who said it was interesting to meet Nic Manders after watching Kraenzlin’s songs develop.
“The process that he had to learn through the post graduate study with his critique presentations allowed him today to contextualize and communicate his process through all of the recording,” Long added.
After Kraenzlin graduated Manders helped to shape and develop his songs for recording.
The musicians who stuck to it throughout the recording process soon banded together under their new name, Sound the Ocean.
Their music video for Ghost Town was played to the crowd on Thursday before the pair broke down the process of how it came to be, playing a raw recording of the song’s first version which was almost half the speed of the final product.
The men explained how Mander’s musical experience shaped Kraenzlin’s post-graduate work into a perfect piece to play.
Kraenzlin summed up the changes noting how Manders had told him to add more spice, less punk and more class.
“He’s someone in this country who’s really inspired me musically,” Kraenzlin said, “in our case he took a session band and gave it a direction, helping us to find our sound. That’s something that’s been invaluable to us and we’re still grateful for that.”
In response Manders added,
“It can be very difficult to part with your first idea, I’ve never met someone like Nick who can take criticism and work well with it.”
To hear Sound the Ocean’s latest music, free to download, visit www.soundtheocean.com.
