Ok, so I usually foul up thread creations but I do it with good intentions and a bit of alcohol.
In the spirit of the community, new and old members alike, I’d like to throw out an idea.
The idea is, we as a community post our favorite tracks we’ve done from our individual musical journeys to world domination or just things we’ve done that still surprise ourselves to this day.
In addition to linking the song, preferably with a streaming link and a site link(just in case), give some back story.
Now there aren’t really any rules but since I know a lot of us have been making music, to some degree for quite a while, I’d like to make just three rules/guidelines.
RULES
Please don’t post anything recent. A throwback is something reminiscing Prefer they be released tracks. Even if that means you did the release yourself. Or even if you’re someone who sits on stuff like a hermit, finished. No WIPs
**Whether you link a SC or other streaming link to said track, link the release if applicable(ie - Band Camp).
This isn’t a Throwback Thursday thread, post whenver you want. I’m very interested in hearing stuff from plenty of members here, people I’ve grown up(musically) seeing post, give their experiences, release things in one form or another, post things that…to this day, mean shit tons to them.
EDIT - I should also mention that I’m actually very much more interested in your responses than my own. I just had the track in mind when I came up with this idea. Plus Ben Steed is such an awesome dude. We talked about it at one point during the Yggdrasil project. I had changed names at that point though.
I’ll start for formatting and I have a particular track in mind.
Shit…EDIT - and to add…Ben Steed, whereever you are…He’s such a cool dude.
I believe this or another track was my first track ever released track, at some level. But I can’t find the bandcamp for it anymore…Ben Steed where are you?!
Ok, so I think I had submitted once or twice for stuff at this point. I really wanted to make it on an IDMF release and Ben came through and offered up a remix project for community members. I actually believe there were other artists in the release, that were associated more closely with Ben, than IDMFers. So it was non-exclusive to IDMF. But, I gravitated to the song I remixed.
I remember thinking it might be easier to remix if it was a chill song, minimal to no drums. Then I could add in my own stuff. Mind you I think I was fresh to making tunes, at any level, at this point. But I really really thought a few weeks in I had stumbled into something neat. I layered my distortedy bass over it, played some poor piano, and kept the same structure as the original. And did some glitchy stuff(well my attempt anyway).
I had so much fun working on it even if the drums needed some more work. The mix wasn’t quite there, etc. I was just so ecstatic to be apart of a release at that point. It really built up my own personal self thought about me enjoying being creative. I’m actually glad I uploaded, since I can’t seem to find it anymore. It is definitely one thing I go back to to hear. I remember how much throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck I did. And it sort of ended up in a good place, for me at least.
I did this one under my old moniker Bx3. And I was actually lucky enough to be a member for another release of Ben’s. The Altered Echo Project - AEP 4.1 Yggdrasil Ragnarøk - 01 Yggdrasil Revisualization - Cyber X. I won’t go into it at all but it was a great experience as well. And wonderful music to remix, be apart of in some form.
Oh where are you Ben.
Anyway, I hope to see much much more experiences, tracks and individual experiences added. I wish you all a good night!
So in short - What is something you made a while back that really surprised you or gave you, yourself some confidence to keep pushing yourself to make more stuff?
I’ve only recently gotten way into electronic music. Basically, I was always the guy in the band, mainly a singer, who wanted to add in synths and mostly other band mates were not as into it.
Here it a throwback to 2017… getting some synthy elements into rock. Using a Boss SY300 guitar synth, and a minilogue into some pedals. Both prominent on the intro. Then you have the organy sound. That is the other guitar player on an EHX POG2. Song is about a friend with benefits situation I had. I had trouble with that, too attached.
Again, a little synth, UltraNova here and there mostly rock though. This song is from the point of view of a ghost from an asylum in Ohio. We shot on location there. 483 was a a random grave stone number. People that died at this asylum, if they couldn’t afford a headstone, just got a number. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6yguJ5hE9o
Different kind of throwback. This was 2016. I live in Washington, D.C. now, but I’m from Tennessee. A few high school mates live nearby and we had this idea to have a high school bands’ reunion in TN. 20+ years after high school. It was so fun! I had not played bass in like a decade, and guitar player here, ha he had switched to bass, so we borrowed some each other’s gear. But that bass, I’ve had that 30 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPd0J7pZjhY
Thanks. I’m glad you think they have a live sound. I work hard at that, but except for the live show, which yes is 100% live, mostly studio fakery. Using multiple reverb busses to similar but slightly different versions of presets with different panning, eq, and pre-delay to fake a subtle room in most cases.
Like a Clock — bass and drums were recorded live. That’s it.
483 – The drums there are not even real. I mean they were played by a real drummer, but via an ekit into BFD3 sampler. I was living in a condo at the time.
Center of the World – okay this is half-way live. Accordion, drums, and bass were tracked live iirc.
I don’t recall any stock footage in those. The bands filmed all of them.
It’s not the earliest track I made (judging by the upload date I had been at it about 2 years by this point), but it’s the oldest thing I still have on my soundcloud, I’d have to go digging for anything older. So this was made as a submission for IDMf 047 in the reign of Benwaa, and the first thing I submitted to the label. I didn’t make the cut, I think more for the tone of the album than anything.
As far as the song itself goes, I’m a summer dude. Solar powered, even. I live in sunny socal, if I don’t see the sun for more than 2 days it starts to mess with my mind. This song was made over the winter and into the spring of that year and it was sort of my musical greeting to spring and summer. Lots of woody nymph sounds and such. I’ve tried to revisit this sound a few times because it still has the most plays (I think) of any song I’ve done and I did next to no promo for it compared to everything that came after this. So people keep coming back to this, and I think it’s one of the songs I knocked out of the park in my earlier, more experimental years.
That like a clock track is real cool!
With a bit better drums and vocal production it could be super good, like a melancholic screaming trees type thing.
Theos is the oldest thing I have, stretching back to 2001 or 2002, and the first time something electronic entered my arsenal. My DAW at this time was literally a Playstation 1 running an “video game” software back in the day called, “MTV Music Generator” (in Europe, originally released as Music 2000 - American release marketed via MTV, ergo the branding).
I was still very much into playing loud guitar at the time, so to me, the PS1 Music Generator was just a means to write a bunch of music without having to rely on other people so much (and the lack of a bunch of instruments no one had, or couldn’t play), and not have so much to worry about with recording logistics.
Theos was me attempting something “Epic”. Another guitarist, who is a certified badass at the damn thing, was heavily into black metal so I gave my take on making fast and epic music a swing. It’s not what I’d call black metal, nor really metal per say…It’s some weird hybrid of electronica, film scores, punk rock, metal, and folk music sort of stirred up into a pot that makes for a very strange dish served up in a cheap Tupperware dish.
The better quality song from just about a year later is my first step into “full DAW”. One of the cool things about your DAW being a PS1 in the early 2000’s was how portable it was. So when I would travel around, my PS went with me, and I would make music wherever I landed. This forced me to not use a guitar, and to make songs that were completely capable of standing on their own two feet with only just the music app in the playstation. This isn’t dance music, or anything fitting under any possible stretch of the hundreds of various genre iterations of EDM. I wasn’t quite there yet in my head of being into the idea of writing that way. Instead, I saw the DAW as a means to write music and not have to sit around with sheet music trying to imagine everything I was thinking and what it would sound like.
It also forced me to brush up on my music education and stop slacking like I was when I played in punk rock bands, so I kept pushing to make more and more complex songs with more and more orchestration and melodic and harmonic articulation.
The zenith, I think, of this stage was Nightmare - so titled because I made it while my wife (then girlfriend) was napping and she subconsciously heard it while sleeping and said that it gave her a nightmare and was playing as the theme track to her nightmare. lol.
And then there’s 2013 or 2014. Roughly a decade later, I’d say.
That’s when I was introduced to Ableton. I had tried several other DAWs over the years, and I found all of them very clumsy to work in compared to the music generator on my little old playstation. Just not smooth workflows at all. Ableton changed everything.
It was every bit as smooth as the music app on the playstation, but with all of the better quality samples that I had been wanting (the PS was very limited in quality capability…still surprising for what it was, though).
The person who introduced me to Ableton was into EDM, and thought I was (I wasn’t…I mean, I probably would have been, but I didn’t know jack all of anything about EDM at that point. I knew I liked synthesizer 80’s music that didn’t have words, but those were always hard to find for me growing up because where I lived…no one knew what EDM was; it wasn’t on the radar anywhere and the internet was a very young baby still).
He showed me some EDM stuff … mostly Deadmoa5zse5s5 whatever spelling, and I was amazed at the production quality. It was just simply HUGE and way better and far more crisp than anything I had ever heard. No BAND sounded like that on their best of the best days. Not even the ever-so-polished-rich-beyond-all-measure Metallica, or the most polished sounding band in history, Boston, had that caliber of clear, crisp, exacting sound production. I didn’t like what the songs were, but I was immediately hooked on the possibilities.
I dove in and gave my first swing in Ableton at trying to mold myself into an EDM form. I failed, of course, but here it is.
This is the first thing I made in Ableton, full of sound quality problems all over the place and poor sample choices for things. I had so far to go back then.
So that’s probably the oldest collection (aside from a couple other MTV Generator songs that I have laying around).
Oh, and the first two were released on a music distribution site that’s not around anymore that was called “Garageband.com”. This was before there was Apple’s “Garageband”.
Garageband.com was a site for artists to upload their music and get it reviewed by other artists.
You had to review (and they had a really interesting way to ensure real reviews) randomly delivered music to earn upload points (typically 2 to 1 ratio), and reviews also got counter-reviewed by the artists who received your review, so there was a check and balance. Your artist score was based on the reviews of your music, and your reviewer score was based on artists scoring your reviews. Every artist had what basically looked like a Bandcamp fused with Facebook style of page, but this predated either of those, and you could talk back and forth with other artists whom you randomly found through doing reviews.
Sadly, nothing lasts forever, and the original creators sold to another company; that company was iLike.
Well, iLike completely shifted everything into the predecessor of what would eventually become Soundcloud, though iLike itself sold to MySpace.
That’s actually how I ended up on Soundcloud - my account was just migrated from Garageband to iLike to Soundcloud, at which point I cancelled my account because Soundcloud was so far away from what Garageband was (though I’m back to SC these days periodically because…well…eh). It was something like you had a choice between this new start up and MySpace if you were a legacy account on iLike, and I knew I didn’t like MySpace because it was too much like GeoCities polished up and vomited on with more glitter than GeoCities did, so I went with the startup - which became SC.
Damn, 8-9 years ago when I used to do remixes/mashups of songs I really liked from a japanese music rhythm game called Beatmania IIDX that I was a major player of.
