Musical "personas"

The Studio
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I know it’s pretty common to have a few monikers / personas / names that you operate under, and I want to pick your brains about this.

For clarity, I’m not talking about like “I can’t decide on a name to use so i have changed it one or more times”

This is more like “I actively write music as various personas for intentional/specific reasons”

Some “food for thought” questions

  • Do you release music under different artist names or have multiple monikers you operate under?
  • If so, how many do you have?
  • What makes something a “persona1” project vs a “persona2” project? How do you decide?
  • Do you intentionally write something knowing ahead of time which persona it is for?
  • Where did these other names come from aka. why do you use them? (Why not just release everything under one name?)

Those are just some questions to get the brain ticking. Please share whatever you think is relevant.

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I absolutely have different personas for music.
Most of my energetic tracks go under Mecha_Twitchy and the slightly more ambient or “gentle” tracks go to HYPERGON (even though some of those ambient dnb tracks can be pretty crazy). I’m even considering making a third persona for other music, but I can’t decide a name - I think I’ll use it for furry-core :moai:

I know a lot of people like to write down their plan for a track first, but I kinda just open up FL studio and throw shit at a wall until something sticks, or I start from a single sample. If it ends up being agressive, it’s a Mecha track, if it’s more vibey then it’s a Hypergon track.

Because if somebody expects an agressive, ear-bleed track and I give them a waft of ambience then they’ll be pretty confused.

I don’t think it’s that tricky to manage multiple aliases… Maybe in the future though..!

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I know i have rough ideas sometimes of what i want a track to be/sound like / capture, but the idea that someone can like “plan out” their track ahead of time and have it come out the way they planned makes absolutely zero sense to my brain. haha

Yeah, i’m sure this is likely one of the most common reasons to do something like this.

Nor I. I have a few that I operate under and the lines between them do blur a bit. They’re not quite as clear cut from a musicality / genre standpoint the way it sounds like yours may be, but I still typically know what persona a track falls into. Not always though, sometimes it’s a bit ambiguous, even to me, but I always figure it out.

I guess iI can participate in the thread i created aside from just asking other people, haha!

I have 3 "personas. 1 of them is more a “collab” between myself and my sister. I still do all of the music and writing, she does the vocals. That’s Make Us Whole

Most of my music now is under just my name. It’s kinda freeing because I feel like even if a few of my works are different, they are still a true representation of myself because my interests and tastes do vary quite a bit as is. It frees me a bit from having to feel like i need names for each style I might do

Digital Ghost was my first artist name, from what feels like a lifetime ago. It tends to show up only in certain times, only when I need it. That probably sounds weird, but in some ways it really does feel like a completely different being, and a reactive one, not something I can just summon or decide to write for or bring out intentionally. It’s been over a decade since i’ve released music under that name. In some ways, thats a good thing. It means things are going well.

I don’t really have genre constraints for any of these, just some kind of feeling i have i guess. It’s less about the genre and more about what the work means to me.

There is one other, but it is not relevant to this place.

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I’m in this boat. Maybe it’s arrogant, but I think I have a consistent style to a degree that carries across everything I do. Even if some is ambient and some is hard DNB, all of it is MY take on said genre and I think almost everyone who listens to my music (all 8 of them) listens because it’s me and not because of the product.

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I know, right??? I never understood that, but I guess it is good to make some basic idea before you go into making music. I just find inspiration hard to find sometimes… And I hardly have any capacity to just record my ideas when I don’t have my laptop - it really irritates me…

Also I tend to switch moods around a lot in real life, and sometimes I just ain’t feeling the “fuck it, we ball” attitude.

Oh, that’s so cool!

That’s a sick name, I’m jealous.

:face_with_raised_eyebrow:
Just kidding, your privacy is personal :slight_smile:

Hm? I don’t think it’s arrogant at all! It’s about keeping it true to yourself.

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Not arrogant.

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I’ll make another persona if I ever want to make something that’s not EDM, but that hasn’t happened. I’ll keep using aftermath81 (or its successor, if needed) until then.

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I actually just had a thought…
Who the fuck cares if you change your name a billion times, or create a ton of aliases? It’s about the music, right?

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the name doesn’t matter as much, but the association of a name can be destroyed if you use them too generously

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Yeah, how are your fans supposed to follow you, or even remember who you are if you are always changing your name or using a different name.

I have a hard enough of a time cultivating a following using 1 name, let along many. Although, i really don’t try that hard. haha

I agree, it is about the music. I think ultimately, the person that may end up caring the most is yourself, just because of the trouble with finding and maintaining an audience. But aside from that, I think you’re right, it doesn’t really matter.

That’s the beauty of making art, you are literally free to do whatever you want to do.

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I have three-ish, and they’re all based in practical reasons.

One is the moniker I’ve been releasing solo music under since the early 90s. I decided about a decade ago to stop releasing any solo music, so the first one has become something of an ‘in-house’ label/band. I’m still prolific, but it’s just for me.

One is a pseudonym I’ve used for contributions to scores for other media (a couple of indie movies, a video game, some web stuff). It came about when an old acquaintance wanted to use a track of mine for a movie he was involved with, and remix another track. I was fine with it, but didn’t really want to use the original moniker or my actual name for it, so I came up with something else. That movie did better than I thought it would and generated a little bit of interest and work (most of which I turned down for reasons), but I continued to use that name for similar output.

The last is a semi-defunct/half-alive/occasional collaboration with a long-time writing partner. We were pretty prolific in the early 00s, but life happened, things got busy, our music tastes diverged a bit and we’ve only started batting ideas back and forth since Covid. I don’t know if anything will come of it again and whether we’d use the old name, but I’ve made it clear I won’t be involved in anything past the mastering stage so I won’t have a say in what it’s called. Maybe I’ll wind up with four personas, who knows.

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Honestly different musical personas is like id get it if you have commercial obligations to make music under a specific alias and want to venture into different areas under a seperate alias…or if you dont want to alienate your original following… or if you level up your skills…

But the whole different musical personas just
for the sake of having different personas…is sort of absurd…in my opinion.

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That’s super tight.

I also can’t lie, I’m so jealous. Haha!

I don’t think i’ve ever wanted to do anything more in my entire life than do scores for movies.

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True dat bro

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I’m assuming you’re talking about like “I’m gonna use a new name for no reason other than shits and giggles”? haha

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Yes i am.

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Yeah, that would certainly be something. I feel like it you’d have to be extremely “extra” to do something like that.

Honestly, It seems like something that RDJ would do, just because he can. haha

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Ive used different monikers…but it sort of reflected the various stages of my skill level at different times.

But i make experimental crap…in general. So

One moniker i still use for serious efforts that either fail or succeed musically.

The other is just to preserve experiment in the bunghole of the internet.

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It’s a neat process, but it’s really fucking tough for me. I’m not a particularly visually stimulated person and I mostly don’t enjoy cinema, so it feels a bit like work to even get going. Watching a scene over and over trying to imagine what theme or timbre captures the mood and then wondering if what my horrible brain imagines at all lines up with what these nice and normal people making the movie are wanting.

It’s also a remarkably time constrained process that I’m not really suited to creatively. I tend to work in fits and spurts, sometimes wandering between projects over months or years, or spending a month cutting and welding a new contraption to bang on just to get a sample I end up not using. The time crunch and expectations of a frantic (and usually overextended and over budget) film project don’t really jive with the way I make music. It’s a very cool thing to do but fuck it really makes music feel like work at points.

Probably my high point of music scoring was a response I got from a music director that went something like “I don’t know what I just listened to. Were those goats? I don’t know if a movie can get an NC-17 rating just from the score, but this might do it. Not really what we were imagining for that scene…”

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I’m positive I’ve racked up hundreds of them at this point. I really don’t think that’s an exaggeration :smiley:. I try to come up with good reasons, but I’m just a little insane. That’s all I’ve got.

Some of them went a little further than I thought they would, too. Nothing too crazy or cool, but being played on college radio somewhere far away, having a handful of physical releases, or the rare times when they suddenly make a ‘full disco’ sale and help fuel some upgrades really inspire me to maybe make better music one day. Or, just keep pumping out horseshit at a steady pace.

I keep telling myself I’m going to stop making music, too. What irony and bullshittery that is

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