Katie Dibben

Survived – releasing soon!

My first EP called Survived is going to be released very soon at the end of March 2023!

This is very exciting for me and something I’ve wanted to achieve since I got into music and decided to become a musician. This was back in year 9 when I was about 13 years old. I have always had an interest in music from a young age as I enjoyed the school shows and singing and having music classes. But it wasn’t until this age where I realised it was something I wanted to do career wise.

It was at this age as well where I wrote my very first song and found my love of writing music and expression through it. Finding j could make something personal to me was so freeing and became my way of coping and expressing myself whenever I couldn’t to another person.

Now in the present, I’m so grateful I’ve had the chance to bring one of my dreams to life. Mind you it hasn’t been easy and at times been really stressful 😂. However, I feel it’s been worth it up to this point and I hope my music can reach those who might need it. Whether that’s for expression, feeling less alone, feeling supported or understood, I hope my music helps any listeners.

My main message with this 5 song EP, is that life can really suck sometimes and throw all sorts of crap at you physically and mentally. But you can rise from it. Survive it. This EP shows pieces of my struggles and that I survived it and healed. My intention is to bring hope and understanding that things do get better eventually even if it feels miles away. So when this EP is released I hope you enjoy it and find it comforting or helpful in some way; that you are never alone and it doesn’t stay crappy forever.

With that in mind I’m happy to say Survived, my first 5 song EP, is being released by the End of March/1st of April 2023!!

Lastly, a big thank you to my producer (you can find him on Instagram linked in my posts) who’s helped set up recordings, helped mix and edit and offered ideas to develop my songs or solve problems and taken good photography of behind the scenes recording. Some of which are still to be posted soon.

A big thank you to my guitarist, my wonderful boyfriend, who’s played my guitar parts and adapted some to improve their quality. And thank you for helping me when it has gotten very stressful like today’s session 😂. You’ve been a great professional as well as a loving supporter.

A thank you to my musician friends for giving feedback and good suggestions on mixes. And finally a thank you to my family for being so understanding and supportive of my music and career choice. I love you all ❤️

Survived will be released onto Spotify, ITunes, YouTube Music, iHeartRadio, Apple Music, Amazon and many more. I hope you enjoy and follow for more posts as my journey continues ✨….

Update✨

Hello again! I don’t know about you but I’ve been super busy this last week trying to finish this EP before the end of the month 😬 here’s what I have done so far…

So first up I have got all 5 songs mostly recorded. We’ve got the acoustic guitar sorted and the main vocals. So we have the bones of the songs together which is great.

You might be wondering… 5 songs? You haven’t heard of the all as of yet. However today you will now.

At number 1 we have ‘Battle Field’. A song about the mental battle with your own negative thoughts and mental health.

At number 2 we have ‘Fighting Grounds’. A song about loss, cancer, the unfair world when tragedy or the negative unexpected happens.

At number 3 we have ‘Thin Ice’. If you follow my Instagram you will see a sneak peak of it today and earlier this week in my posts. I’ll go more in depth with this song as you haven’t heard it mentioned before.

Thin Ice is a song about my darkest time mental health wise. I was super super low. I was depressed and hopeless and feeling unsupported and like I couldn’t/didn’t deserve to ask for support. This song expresses all that and is about feeling suicidal. This is because I did have a time where I felt that way. I did get better and get support soon after I felt like this and presently I’m doing pretty good. (Apart from stressing over my short amount of time to finish this EP 👀)

I would like Thin Ice’ to reach those who may need a realisation that they aren’t the only ones who have felt this low and if they need help expressing it maybe play it in front of a loved one to help start the communication for support. Support will help and if anyone feels this way please reach out to others or support services ❤️

Moving onto number 4. This one is called ‘Smile’. A song about the society we live in and how it can be toxic on only showing the good happy parts of yourself and not being able to show the not so good parts. How you could be happy with friends, particularly in school, but as soon as you’re struggling most of your “friends” are not interested. I speak from experience. So I wanted this song to be my way of saying my opinion on that awful part of our society. I don’t like it one bit and hope my song emphasises how illogical it is.

Song number 5. The last one! Is called ‘safe with me’ I mentioned it in my last post and how I was independently recording the vocals. I’ve continued to do this with all of the songs now. It’s a lot of fun. However I do have to ask for tech support at times due to I/O issues 😂.

‘safe with me’ is about being happy and safe with yourself again and healing your inner child. As you can guess, it’s the only happy song in the EP. This is on purpose to show at the very end things do get better and I myself survived and healed. I’m still healing however I’ve made a lot of progress and I wish that for everyone else who reads, follows or listens to my songs or who just is in a low place and never even knows of my existence. I hope you all never give up on your healing journeys.

That’s what my EP is all about. Getting through and surviving when you hit an all time low. And then healing and feeling happy again. Life can be crappy but it’s not always crappy. I hope my EP can help others express themselves or comfort them or maybe you’ll just enjoy the songs and the meanings.

With that in mind, I think it’s time I told you the title of this EP….

This 5 song EP is called ‘Survived’. Pretty obvious reasoning why if you’ve read this far 😂. I hope you will enjoy it once it’s released and follow to hear more updates and a soon coming release date and EP cover reveal. Be sure to follow my Instagram too for more frequent updates and look into my recording sessions. As for now I will leave you with a look into ‘Thin Ice’….

Clip of ‘thin ice’ and some images of my EP journey so far

Independent recording ✨

Hello, as you know I’ve been working on recording a new song ‘Safe with me’. I’ve made some progress I want to share with you…

First up, I send thanks to a friend of mine who did the guitar for me at the beginning of this song being recorded. I seriously was struggling to record it myself. Simple chords. However, I could not stick to the click track. I definitely need more practice in this skill so I’m very grateful they were available to help so I could use the recording to focus on the vocals.

Moving on, I have added and re-recorded the vocals a lot. I’ve added layered backing vocals to some areas and re-recorded the main vocals multiple times. And now I’m satisfied with the result. It still needs work on the levels and the guitar needs to be re-recorded by my guitarist. But overall it is nearly there.

I am very pleased with the outcome so far and can’t wait to show you. So down below I’ve attached a little look into what I’ve done vocal wise. As for other instruments or parts I am unsure yet but we’ll find out soon I’m sure.

Be sure to follow my Instagram as well as this website for regular updates and to find the release date of my EP which will be disclosed soon. Thanks for reading 👋☺️

Safe with me clip

Fighting Grounds is complete!!

You heard me I finished one of my songs at last! ☺️

Yesterday I had a great session with my sound engineer working on ‘Fighting Grounds’. Adding a few effects, mixing levels and adding a clock part which I love.

I still have a way to go for this EP to be completed but it is so satisfying to have a song completed. 1 out of 5, 4 to go!

I’ve had quite a few recording sessions with my sound engineer and guitarist to get this song completed which you can see on my Instagram account. I want to send a big thanks to both of them because, even though I wrote the song, I wouldn’t have got this song recorded without them. It’s the same for the other songs in this EP. They’re my originals but I wouldn’t be creating this EP without their talents and hard work. (I will keep them anonymous here though for their privacy)

I’m also very happy that such a significant song is now complete. As you might remember from a previous post, it’s about my aunt when she was diagnosed with cancer. So having this song completed means a lot to me. And I hope it helps others dealing with similar situations whether helping them express emotions or feeling like they have someone to relate to and not feel so alone.

Down below I’ve attached a sneak peak into the finished version of the song. I hope you enjoy it and thanks for reading 👋

Fighting Grounds sneak peak

New song!

I am now working on the next song in my EP. It’s called ‘Safe with me’.

This chill happy tune is about finally feeling safe with yourself again after struggling for so long. I focused on the idea of your inner child going through the struggles with you and now being safe to live again.

It’s linked to my current mental state. I’m not perfectly fine all the time of course but I’m finally at the stage where I am happy again and i wanted this song to highlight this and show those still struggling that there’s light at the end of the tunnel and you can be safe with yourself again. It takes a lot of work and tears but it’s very possible to achieve.

I had a lot of fun writing this song as it felt very freeing and uplifting to actually create a happier song compared to the ones I wrote about my struggles. One thing about my music is that I can’t fake a feeling to write a song about it. If I want a happy song I need to feel happy etc. This song also made me realise and actually appreciate how far I’ve come and I hope listeners who are maybe at similar stages to me in healing recognise the hard work they’ve put in and how much they’ve achieved because it can easily be overlooked.

I am really excited for this song and the EP that is coming together nicely ☺️. Here’s a small clip into ‘Safe with me’ to give you an idea of how it sounds. Hope you enjoy and follow for more updates which are going to get more frequent ✨

The beginnings of Safe with me

Recording in the studio✨

Monday morning, 6th of March, I had a good recording session with my sound engineer and my guitarist, who just so happens to be my loving boyfriend ☺️. We recorded the acoustic guitar parts to one of my original songs called ‘Fighting Grounds’.

This is one of my songs that is going to be in my EP that’s being released this year!!

We also previously recorded my other song ‘Battle Field’ before I started this blog. It’s still a working progress but we got the whole song recorded in a day and now additional parts need to be worked out such as harmonies or maybe additional instrument parts. I’ll keep you updated on that in future posts.

Back to the focus of this post. I wanted to tell you a little about ‘Fighting Grounds’. I wrote the lyrics to this song a while back in 2022. Around August time. This is very significant as I wrote the lyrics right after being informed my aunt had cancer. I won’t go into details about it but it was very serious and a scary, stressful time in my life. Music has always been the way I process emotions or events. Especially the negative ones. So it was only natural I went to my room later that day, picked up my guitar and just freestyled for a while. I ended up, using a very basic chord progression, writing a full song all about how I felt but also focusing on the fact I needed to accept the high possibility of losing my aunt.

After I had written this song down I did feel a lot better. This is what I mean by music being like therapy to me. I was still incredibly upset and worried but I was a lot calmer and could think straight again. I recently developed ‘Fighting Grounds’ so I could record it for this EP because it is such a significant event in my life and cancer and loss are things that affect so many of us. So I felt that this song had a definite place in this EP and could hopefully show listeners that they are not alone in these battles with health.

To put minds at ease, my aunt did recover and is still with me and my family today. I am so grateful to this and though I’m not religious I do thank whatever forces that might be out there that my aunt recovered. She’s such an important person in my life and I would dearly miss her if she was lost to us.

Going back to the recording studio. We had a few difficulties at first. The main one being we needed to transition between fingerstyle and strummed guitar chords throughout the song. My sound engineer gave a great suggestion of doing separate tracks. One for the fingerstyle parts and one for the strummed chords parts. We did this eventually. I have to admit my timing is not the best so it took a while for me to time the guide lyrics correctly when we did the takes where we transitioned from verse to chorus. 😂

It was all good though, as we got all the guitar parts recorded by the end of the session. Here are some clips of the session below…

Recording the guitar, guitarist is my boyfriend and sound engineer is my friend by the desk

Me singing along to the recorded tracks to check the timing

As you can see I haven’t disclosed the names of my sound engineer or other friends/colleagues. This is because I wouldn’t want to disclose names and them be uncomfortable about it. I’m going to ask what they prefer. Whether to stay nameless here or to be named. But either way they do deserve a big thank you for the work they put into this song for me so far. So a big thanks to them and we’ll see how they prefer to be referred to as in the next post. Thanks for reading! ☺️

Introductions…

As you will have seen on my home page, my name is Katie Dibben. I’m a singer/songwriter from the UK. Currently I am a student at Bournemouth and Poole college studying music to develop my career as a musician.

As well as this, I am working on my very first EP!! I am going to release this at the end of March/start of April onto Spotify and other streaming platforms to be later determined.

As I begin my adult life, and hopefully my music career, I’ve decided I wanted to share my journey as I learn and progress towards my dreams. What are they you may ask? Well my dream is to perform and release my own songs and slowly that is becoming a reality. I wish for my music to reach others and bring them comfort or help them express how they feel. My music is based on my life and any struggles, emotions or events that have occurred.

I’ve had my fair share of struggling with mental health, love life, social life and just growing up in general. I want others to feel that they are not alone and as my music tells my story and my experiences I hope it can make others realise they are not alone and that it does get better. I will clarify I am not perfect in the slightest and not always at 100% even now. But you can rise up from rock bottom a thousand times and still reach the light again. My music focuses on different aspects of mental health, healing, love, self-love and life events good and bad. Style wise, I don’t define my music by a single style as I love to be free with it and find multiple music styles enjoyable and inspiring. Some of them include: pop, rock, country, indie and kpop.

If my music sounds interesting to you I’d advise you to give it a listen and I hope you enjoy it or it can help you in some way. I have an Instagram account for my music @katiedibbenmusic . Where I will post clips of my songs as well as other things.

One very important thing to me about my music is keeping it true to me. I don’t write songs that don’t connect to me in some way shape or form. This is because I then don’t feel like it’s me or my music and it feels very odd if I’m honest. The way it can connect is my emotions, beliefs or expresses one of my experiences of something. Music has always helped me in need and been my way to express myself and be myself completely. It is quite nerve-wracking to think that now I’m actually going to release music and show my journey to the world. But I am also so incredibly happy and excited for it. I am also so so grateful for all the talented people who have and are helping me with this EP and who have helped my journey so far. You will learn who these people are in future posts as I show my music journey to you.

With that note, I’ll finish this post. We have been officially introduced and if you read future posts you’ll learn more about me. Thank you for reading and welcome to my music journey!