Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Chasing the Beats, a show dedicated to weeklybeats.com artists, their songs and stories from the 2024 season and beyond. I'm your host, SQF, and our guest today, Disposable Planet.
Speaker: right, welcome to Disposable Planet. Thanks for joining, man. Hey, great to be here. Yeah, so um I you know was digging into your your music and and, of course, being an M8 fan. And ah sorry, everyone, there's going to be lots of M8 content in this episode. lot of M8 content.
Speaker: So if you don't like the M8, tune out now. But I think there's also some really cool just music stuff to be learned in here. And yeah, there's ah some tie-ins with some books and some breakbeats and ah some awesome slidey melodies. So yeah.
Speaker: Kind of to jump into it, you did Weekly Beats 2022 and 2024. yeah And listening to your songs and admiring your composition and just arrangements, I am curious how long you've been making music.
Speaker: So I've been making music about 30 or 31 years. i start I picked up – my dad was a really um amazing blues guitarist, not professionally, just um in his – Yeah.
Speaker: i But um he was he was really great at ah soloing. And he gave me an old guitar of his when I was in seventh grade. And the first song I ever wrote, I was in a –
Speaker: a band called Osmium. We were three, three teenagers with acoustic guitars, but our science teacher, uh, science teacher, Mr. Price said, you guys got to name yourselves after a heavy metal band. So he suggested Osmium, which is the densest metal by volume.
Speaker: Nice. That's very science teacher. So heavy metal. Yeah.
Speaker: and just played that We just played like cheesy, yeah ah like acoustic alternative rock songs. Nice. No drummer. It was just three guitars. ah Just three guitars. Yeah, yeah just three guitars.
Speaker: And we were all very, but well, one what my friend Kyle, um he was he was actually, he yeah he had played for a while. He was very good. But um i was I was pretty bad. i was just starting out. But the first song I wrote was called Applesauce.
Speaker: And it was three chords, and it was about crushing apples under your garage door to make applesauce. Nice. And that was my foray into music. um And it was kind of like a punky song.
Speaker: And um after that, I was in a ah hardcore punk band in high school called Juvenocracy. Nice. We had to change the name because there turned out to be another Juvenocracy out there that was way more famous. so Oh, wow. All right. Yeah. That's a good good band name. It wasn't my idea. this It was ah the front man Eugene's idea of Juvenocracy.
Speaker: And we played like two shows. We were terrible, but we had a lot of fun. Yeah, that's what it's all about, right? And I remember I played bass in that and that band, but with a pick, just ah terrible bass. And I didn't really get into guitar until my senior year high school, where I started listening to a lot more music. Basically, um I was really into punk rock up until about junior year of high school.
Speaker: where after some mescaline and an older brother, my best friend's older brother, showing me the Beatles anthology, I got into like every kind of music ever.
Speaker: That my musical awakening. And I started taking guitar more seriously. And, um, even though your dad had played guitar, you didn't get into it until, I didn't i mean, I'd always like, i I, I grew up around music. Like my mom played the piano really well.
Speaker: And my dad played a phenomenal blues guitar. He would jam with, uh, with all the people in the neighborhood and he'd always get kicked out of bands. Cause he was so good. ah He was, he was really phenomenal. Like, uh,
Speaker: But um I didn't really start taking music seriously until senior year in high school when I started listening to a lot of old 60s rock.
Speaker: And um I just connected with something in the 60s counterculture. um There was kind of like almost at the time like an echo of that. in the 90s counterculture. Yeah.
Speaker: There was like a freedom that was kind of mutually expressed in the 60s and the late 90s. Yeah. In the ninety s it kind of took the form almost as like the rise of the internet.
Speaker: And people thought that the internet was the great technological savior of the time and that it was going to free all information. and Oh, yeah. Yeah. And look how it turned out. Yeah.
Speaker: um We were just bullshitting in chat rooms, random chat rooms, talking with whoever. Exactly. but um So I got really into 60s rock and folk music, and I started teaching myself fingerstyle guitar.
Speaker: Oh, right. Acoustic. And um I went to school in Manhattan for for for video and film. And I met some like-minded people there, including my friend Zevin, who's a phenomenal guitarist.
Speaker: And he... he kind of showed me some finger style tricks and after that i got into ah spanish classical guitar nice man you're really traveling the world yeah yeah i i've never been to spain but ah i kind of travel in your living room and you have yeah exactly Um, and, uh, so I, I, I got into that for a while and I actually got pretty good.
Speaker: Um, I, I had a lot of fun playing. My favorite composer was Francisco. I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, but Francisco Tadega, uh, he, he composed some very famous classical guitar pieces that almost every classical guitar student knows or plays.
Speaker: And, um, I got into, uh, him and, uh, I started listening to Segovia and Bream and all the ah all the great classical guitarists. And then I got to a point where I felt like I oversaturated myself with the repertoire.
Speaker: And I started wanting to make music that was my own, as opposed to just playing other people's songs in my repertoire. Yeah.
Speaker: So, um, that had always been a thing that I'd always made like funny joke music on the side, but I'd never really taken the idea of making music seriously. And this was kind of like a passion of mine that was amazing.
Speaker: on the periphery of what I was going to do for a career because I was in video. So I, i started, uh, uh, working like odd jobs, um, uh, doing a video production and, uh, mostly post-production and production. Uh, I worked as a videographer. I worked as a video editor.
Speaker: I didn't really get good at those things until, many years later, um as it takes in any industry to get your chops up. But video needs audio.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. And um so I started messing around, and I kind of fell off the classical a guitar a bit. um And I never really came back to it. i just It was just like a period of my life that it it kind of served its purpose. And i can still play. I still have my old nylon string.
Speaker: And I can still play. I haven't played guitar in a long time. I kind of fell in love with electronic music in 2017. Which is kind of weird. On the page, I was 35 when started making chiptunes. Nice.
Speaker: on the page i was ah thirty five when i started making chip tunes nice ah which is kind of late in the game, you know, because I had always like dabbled in like ah using computer programs to make like some joke music here and there. But ah um my introduction to chiptune,
Speaker: came in the early 2000s when my friend sent me a link to the 8-Bit People's website, and I was just all over it. I loved the nostalgia. I loved what people were doing. And I tried to recreate that on a four-track with an old Dr. Rhythm Boss drum machine?
Speaker: I have that drum machine. it's like oh it's I want to sample it. It's got the cheesiest samples. It's cheesy, and I remember... So I took guitar lessons in high school, and ah you know back then, there weren't a lot of computer programs. This was like... you know mid nineties, I, my guitar teacher was like, you should get this a drum machine.
Speaker: And I was like, it was always so terrible to program that I never used. Like I just had a different, uh, I guess vision of what programming drum sequences was. So I didn't, didn't really use it, but in a similar vein to you, I also went through this, like, you know, technical guitar phase, um,
Speaker: and a bunch of finger picking stuff and then kind of just like dropped guitar for a while and then realize like, Oh, actually enjoy making music.
Speaker: Uh, and I can make music with all these other, you know, MIDI based toys now. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, it's, uh, I found getting introduced to, cause I listened to chip tune for over 15 years before I actually started making it. What happened was, um,
Speaker: i ah I was looking on eBay for Game Boys, and I saw one with LSDJ 3.something cartridge, like the old blue cartridges. Mm-hmm. And I didn't know it didn't have a very good battery in it, but um I ordered this piece of shit Game Boy with like, it had a ah biverted screen, but it wasn't biverted. Like they didn't flip the polarizer. So it was just like impossible to see.
Speaker: i got it for like a hundred bucks with an LSDJ cartridge and I ordered it in the mail and I was like, you know, whatever, whatever I'm going to try my hand at this. And yeah when it was being shipped, I started messing around in an emulator on my computer.
Speaker: And, um, it arrived and I started screwing around with it. I just fell in love with the, the LSDJ workflow of making music that way. And I, uh, I made my first, uh, chip tune album, which sounds very different from my current stuff.
Speaker: It's very, very, um, ah it's it kind of sucks, but people actually like it better than my my newer stuff. so I mean, I think we all hope to listen back to our older stuff and be like, i have improved.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I made an album in 2017 when was living in town um when i was living in a town called Dumont, um which is a couple of towns away from where I live. I've lived in New Jersey my whole life.
Speaker: Got it. I always commuted to the city for work. um But i I made an album called Apartment 16 because I was living in 16th apartment in mya comp in my it was like these garden apartments. Right.
Speaker: And, um, so I, uh, I made this, this album and it's very energetic. It's a little punky. Um, and, I just fell in love with the LSDJ workflow and, uh, I kind of like put it down cause I got real busy with work shortly in the years before the pandemic.
Speaker: And I, uh, picked it back up in 2000. I mean, I messed around with it for the next couple of years, kind of like, uh, um, dabbling, but I picked it back up. Um,
Speaker: in the fall of 2019 and made my second LSDJ album. Um, and then, um, the pandemic happened and I suddenly had all this time on my hands cause all the stuff at work got canceled. I used to work for production company in Midtown. Oh, right. Yeah. Uh, we did mostly live events and fashion and, uh, sports and stuff. So everything got canceled.
Speaker: So everything became remote. And, um, At the time, my parents both, ah ah they both got diagnosed with cancer. And so I um am went to live with them and take care of them for the next couple of years.
Speaker: And um i had all this free time on my hands. So I was just making LSDJ songs. And my friend, defense mechanism, aaron who um is from Indianapolis, amazing chiptune artist, by the way, ah very melodic and ah an an influence of mine too.
Speaker: he sent me um He sent me a um ah link. He's like, you got to check this this new device out that I'm beta testing or that I got a, not beta testing. He was he actually got a ah pre-beta model. So I guess an alpha unit.
Speaker: um And he's like, you got to check this out. And he sent me a link to the Dirty Wave Discord. And I joined. yeah This was about a week before the beta units went out.
Speaker: And Tim or Trash80 posted us a thing saying, we have a few blemished units. um ah So, you know, first come, first first serve. And I jumped on the chance because I saw it had the same LSDJ workflow.
Speaker: Yeah. basically based on LSDJ only with more possibilities and permutations with all the, uh, the, uh, the, the myriad effects commands. And, um, so I ended up, uh, signing up for the beta testing and getting the beta unit like a week after I joined the discord, they all went out and ah I, just managed out of like complete, a complete accident to that first wave of, uh, the M eight craze.
Speaker: And, um, I, uh, yeah, i I, I was like, this is like, this is what I've been waiting for my whole musical life. yeah That's amazing. Yeah. It was just, uh, it was, was, uh, and it really saved me during the pandemic because those were some dark times. And, uh,
Speaker: I had this outlet that I discovered. And honestly, like, I feel like through the M8, I found my voice in the end, which is amazing, which is like, you know, I guess I'm kind of a late bloomer.
Speaker: Cause that happened when I was like in my thirties, but um yeah, you know, better late than ever. And, Oh, 100%. I mean, i'm in my forties and I'm like, I, I skipped a good chunk of my life where it wasn't really making any music, but I think maybe, you know, like,
Speaker: other hobbies or ah free time pursuits. Sometimes it's got a come back around for you to really appreciate it. Yeah. Things have just changed so much. Like I'm not recording on a four track anymore. And ah the doll opportunities are endless, but I'm still really drawn to the non-computer music making scene.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, meet me too. I haven't played guitar in a long time, and I definitely, it's something I want to get back into when I have some more time. But um it's something I've kind of been putting off because I'm like, oh, I must be absolutely terrible at it now. ah Yeah, i'm i'm trying I'm trying to play more, and i'm I've just sort of resigned to the fact that like I'm never going to be as good as I was, but I also feel like guitar kind of serves a different purpose now. Like it's for me to add some licks or like sample a couple of different things in
Speaker: I'm not really performing. If I needed to perform, I could get ready for performance. Yeah. But, you know, I think, talking more about like the, these like technical guitar pursuits.
Speaker: I think maybe there was some bit of like ego then of like, Oh, look how good I am at this thing. And now I'm like, yeah I don't care. Like, I just want to make music however possible.
Speaker: I hear, i hear that when I, when I was learning classical guitar at first, when I first started out, like I felt like I had to play as fast as possible yeah and kind of like develop. I think that happens with every guitarist in every field.
Speaker: oh Unless you're playing like ambient. And um I think that like once that wears off, you kind of like graduate to this or you level up and you get to this point where you start to appreciate um like ah the ah you start to appreciate a slow song. You know what i mean? Yeah. Like the I don't have to be.
Speaker: completely amazed by your finger skills to enjoy this song. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's like this technical fascination and obsession that I feel like started when I first started out and then it just kind of wore off and I got to yeah where I was just enjoying the music. and Yeah. I used to listen to, you know, Steve Vai and Joe Chattrioni and try to play all those songs and like try to do every Metallica solo.
Speaker: If you've got it, flaunt it. I mean, Jimi Hendrix is a huge influence of mine. Oh, yeah. And I like to put a lot of solos in my music. So I guess um I do it just because it's it's a fun exercise on the M8. Like I find the process of making a solo on the M8 or on on LSDJ because I do that in a little bit.
Speaker: My M8 music is a little more intrepid in sound design than my LSDJ music. I don't really go for like ah like ah like ah like an electronic music sound with my LSDJ music. It's more traditional chiptune.
Speaker: But I definitely incorporate electronic music elements. But with M8, I um ah tend to venture more into like genres like ah drum and bass and jungle and like house. And I'll do jazz stuff. And I'll kind of like rock music. um I made a list of my my biggest influences. Maybe now is a good time. Yeah, go for it. Yeah.
Speaker: ah So I actually don't listen to a lot of electronic music generally. um My biggest electronic influences are probably Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, who I'm constantly floored by listening to there their music, especially their stuff when they were just starting out.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. But ah most of the music I listen to is I listen to a lot of 60s rock. I listen to a lot of folk music. My biggest influence is what I wrote here.
Speaker: ah Nick Drake, who is just phenomenal. I could listen to his music all day. He's probably one of my favorite artists. And Joanna Newsom. who's a harp player with a beautiful voice.
Speaker: She's part of the new weird folk movement that, ah she kind of came on the scene in 2004 with an album called, um, the milk guide mender, which is one of my classic all time favorite albums.
Speaker: And, uh, she's since done longer pieces and she has the capacity to write seven minute songs with like poetic lyrics and memorize. Oh, she's just like a force of nature.
Speaker: And, uh, she, um, I really like folk music, uh, especially newer and like folk folk artists that are timeless. Cause I find like Nick Drake's music to be absolutely timeless. You listen to it and you're like, this was written in the seventies.
Speaker: Yeah. Have like a horn arrangement that blares. This is from the seventies at you. It's just him and his guitar. You're like, wow, this could have been written yesterday, you know? And is that what you like about it? That it's like, yeah, it's like stripped down raw music.
Speaker: Yeah. It's just, I think the most beautiful, um In my opinion, the the music that resonates the most with me is when it's just a single voice and a single instrument.
Speaker: Yeah. like ah Like you're in... um like a minstrels yeah and in the medieval ages or something. A very yeah pure human experience. Yeah, completely raw. And I'm not saying the M8 is like that, but in a way it kind of is because it's just a single instrument with with a single person behind it.
Speaker: Right. um you get um There's something to be said about playing in a band where you have that those multiple voices coming together Everybody contributes a different kind of flavor to the whole.
Speaker: And so the holistic ah picture of the music is informed by many people's different influences and everything. But there's also something to be said about the opposite of that with modern electronic music and DAWs and groove boxes, where one person is responsible for all the elements in the song.
Speaker: That person needs to come up with, ah develop like skills that... kind of It's like they're playing the whole band. and Yeah, it's more like a composer. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like a composer. And um i just find that ah that also has its merits. And that that kind of like is why I love the M8. And it's also why I love folk music, because it's just one person and one idea.
Speaker: And um they're just expressing it in like in in like this kind of like creative solitude or whatever. yeah you know um Another big influence of mine is Phish.
Speaker: I love the band Phish, particularly Trey Anastasios guitar playing. um That like influenced my music a lot.
Speaker: um I actually, i i might I must have seen that band like 20 times between 1990 and 2004. two thousand and four I haven't seen them in a while. I know they're still touring. Oh, yeah.
Speaker: I live in Colorado, so they're always coming through here. yeah Red Rocks, Fish Dicks. Yeah. yeah um Another big influence is Devo. I love their synth. sound that just like post-punk-y synth goodness that like 80s retro future um you know kind of like satire um i'm I'm really into punk music I like ah my favorite punk bands are probably Operation Ivy and the Dead Kennedys Operation Ivy for their raw power
Speaker: and uh the dead kennedys for their political satire and their arrangements i find that the dead kennedys are like a level above your average punk band because they actually were like what would happen if we took a punk song and introduced like actual instrumentation into it you know what i mean like you've got raised guitar playing which is is is like it's they're like composing like pieces you know what i mean and um It's a little different from like a, like a, like a, I'm not saying it's better or worse, but it's just a little different from your average punk band, which is just trying to capture the raw force of performance.
Speaker: It's like, uh, there, those, uh, those, uh, compositions are a little more thought out. I love, uh, uh, Jimi Hendrix's guitar playing. He's probably my favorite. i love I love some Jimi Hendrix.
Speaker: and ah And I don't know if I'm saying his name correctly. Jello Biafra? Yeah, Jello Biafra. He lives in Denver, and he's got another band that I've seen here locally.
Speaker: they're They're good. What are they called? What is the name of that band? Let's see. Yeah, his ah his political satire is great.
Speaker: I developed a good sense of my ah good part of my sense of humor by listening to Dead Kennedy's tapes when I was walking through the corridors of my high school. I'll have to look up that album. I can't find it right off the bat. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, you've got a wide variety of influences, and I can definitely pick out the um you know guitar solo influence and a lot of your M8 stuff.
Speaker: um Like, lots of ah bends, and I don't know, just like, it's got that guitar style to it. Yeah, i um i there's a couple tricks I do to try to recreate, not like explicitly recreate an electric guitar sound, but i to to create to recreate the feel of a solo that's happening on an electric guitar.
Speaker: Because I can solo okay. So I'm like kind of like living my dream. But you know like where to go. Yeah, yeah. I i can solo okay on an actual guitar, like sort of okay.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. I'm like living my dream of being an amazing soloist through my music where I'm not limited by my fingers. Yeah. Like fat and and silly, you know, like, so, um, there's a couple of tricks actually, maybe, uh, uh, so one thing I'll do a lot is, um, I'll, I'll start, I'll, I'll use a table, um,
Speaker: on an instrument on a lead instrument and I'll transpose the first tick to be up an octave and then I'll hop it to the second tick, which is back to the regular note.
Speaker: So it plays one tick of a, of a high see thing at the beginning of every note. And then, um, in phrase I'll have for like a long note run, I'll alternate the instrument triggering, um,
Speaker: so that the instrument triggers every other note and it recreates that feeling of it's actually being flat picked on a guitar. Ah, that is sweet. yeah And another thing you can do is, um, for any and intrepid M8 enthusiasts out there, um, you can pitch bend very slightly or you can drop the pitch of a note at the end of a long drawn out note. And it kind of recreates the feeling of like an instrumentalist, like a violinist or a guitarist, like moving their hand on the floor. Another, another trick is to, um you can, cause when you, sometimes like when I'm doing like,
Speaker: like a pulse width modulated lead sometimes i'll start the vibrato right as the note starts but it helps to kind of like add it gradually and then reduce it so it kind of mimics the feel of like actually like an instrumentalist actually adding vibrato on a string instrument like where their finger will yeah like harder as this note goes on and then stop a little bit In my last episode with Aipagost, she said something that has stuck with me, that it's the sound doesn't have to be perfect, but if you play the sound like a particular instrument, then it's believable.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely. if The violin sound doesn't have to be perfect, but if you play it ah program it essentially like a violin, it's like, oh, that's a violin. So exactly what you're saying of like emulating, interacting with real instruments in these digital realms.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, totally. Um, what was I going to say? ah um, you, you, you, uh, that gave me a thought. Um, I just escaped me. Um, I, I think, uh,
Speaker: Yeah, it's so, it's weird because like in electronic music, you can do things that you can't do with an instrument. But at the same time, and instrument's like expressiveness remains the gold standard yes for like how we expect music to be delivered to us, which you can defy those expectations, absolutely. But it's almost like in um in film and video, um how film is the gold standard for what digital video is supposed to look like.
Speaker: Right. he was Trying to make video look like film. They're not trying to do the opposite unless they're, you know, shooting on a TV or something. Yeah. like It's like, it's, it's, I guess it's kind of similar in that regard. Like the, ah um, it's like the, the imperfections are what we expect.
Speaker: Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. Yeah. Cause like, you're a lot of your mmate stuff does have lots of movement. I was and I was going to ask you about your LFO work because it like the notes, even these long notes that you hold are breathing and moving.
Speaker: and when I listen to that, I'm like, oh, yeah, like I need to do more of that in my M8 stuff to like just give these notes life. And I'd never really considered until recent conversations that this all just comes back to making it feel human. Like, like you said of like moving, you know, uh, making it feel like you're sliding down to a note with your finger.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, um, uh, as far as, uh, as, as far as, um, my LFO work, um, sometimes I'll just add a lot of subtle LFOs.
Speaker: For example, um, It helps on ah on a lead melody um to add a LFO on the M8 that's set to um either sign or or triangle ah in the waveform and then free.
Speaker: And ah sorry, I'm getting notifications. ah you go I forgot to turn those off. um So it it helps to set an LFO to volume and then have it instead of setting up a, um an envelope, you set the LFO to sign or, or, or, or free sign or triangle, and then have it um vary the volume of the lead just ever so slightly.
Speaker: And um ah so it kind of mimics like a guitar solo swelling and volume. Yeah. Seating and volume. And you can kind of play with the frequency of the LFO to get it to trigger at certain points. Or you can even use the commands and phrase to reset the LFO frequency, um especially when it's set to free.
Speaker: And um i'll I'll sometimes do that with pan as well. I'll like reserve two LFOs for pan and volume just to add like a little bit of dynamic, ah like a little dynamic quality to the the stereo spread and to the to the volume of the ah the piece and or the volume of the lead. And um another thing I do when I'm trying to recreate like a lead sound, especially if I'm working with either pulse width modulation, which I use a lot. I kind of abuse it because I'm always going for a demo scene sound, kind of like ah electronic music on the MA.
Speaker: Not like trying to recreate demo scene music, but just kind of like hearkening back to that. The vibe. Yeah, the vibe. Yeah, exactly. And um so something I'll do is I'll add, if I'm using the wave synth to make a, um,
Speaker: To make a ah ah pulse width modulated patch, obviously have one LFO set to warp to create the pulse width modulation. But then I'll add just a little bit of ah the multiplier, the mult parameter.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. add that with very small value because so it sounds like the um it just adds this little bit of like attack to the uh to the lead and it gives it like some character that makes it sound a little more like a electric guitar um although i'm not explicitly trying to recreate the sound of electric guitar so yeah but you're you're trying to bring in those elements that make it sound really cool Yeah, exactly. And um so I'll use a lot of like subtle LFOs.
Speaker: um ah Sometimes I'll ah ah'll put a volume envelope with a very long decay. um I rarely use the the the four setting ah ah envelope. I usually use the attack hold decay.
Speaker: And unless I'm doing an ambient thing where I need to put note offs in to kind of like have these long drawn out pads. But um for leads, I'll um ah often ah have, I'll have them ring out, even though they sound like they're being held.
Speaker: I'll have them ring out ever so slowly. So there's a little bit of volume ah like a little bit of dynamic volume yeah to the note. And ah one of the tricks is kind of like you can you can mix and match um sections of long notes and short notes, especially when I'm working on a solo.
Speaker: like ah Because solos are all about, and this is this is not me. This is straight out of a workshop from Trey Anastasio, the lead guitarist in Fish. He said, the best thing you can do in a solo is build tension and then release the tension.
Speaker: Mm-hmm. or tension, then release the tension again. so it's all about like, building up these plateaus and then kind of like, uh, delivering, ah like some ear candy to the audience and then building up a plateau with some dissonance and delivering more ear candy to the audience. yeah So what you can do is you can, uh, combine like long drawn out notes that hit on the, uh, on the chords with, um, long passages that sometimes even vary out of the step, the steps.
Speaker: And, um You can, uh, you can, uh, one thing, so maybe I should get into how I actually do the melodies on the M8 because yeah I'm kind of curious about just your philosophy when, or, you know, maybe another word for system is, or formula, but I don't necessarily think everything is a complete formula, but we have these,
Speaker: things that we go to, especially on the M8 of like, kind of how I work is I'll, you know, maybe start out with a rhythm or a baseline or something and then just keep like adding experiments to it. And then I have enough experiments where I'm like,
Speaker: okay, I can slap these two together and now it's a cohesive thing. But I'm always curious how other people start and build a song to completion.
Speaker: So I start on M8 at least. I do it a little differently on LSDJ. But on M8, I usually start with the chords. ah One thing I like to do is I used to i like to use Impbox's single channel FM chord trick.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, yeah. Play multiple voices in a single FM pad channel. And I have a ah whole instrument pack you can find in the resources. sweet. and all ah of ah the Dirty Wave Discord that has like, it's got like 400 instruments in it. And some of them are FM chord pads. Some of them are regular FM chords.
Speaker: I mean, some of them are regular FM pads, but a few of them are separated from the rest. And they're pads that are designed to work with the, with Impox's FM, single channel FM chord trick.
Speaker: So I set up the, uh, the modulators and phrase or the, I think it's mod one, mod two, mod three, um, to have, they're all set to pitch in his trick and, or in their trick.
Speaker: Um, and, um, uh, I'll, uh, I'll usually do the chord movement with those commands in phrase. So I'll play the chord on the um first step and then I'll do all my chord changes with the commands. Ah, sweet, sweet. And I'll build like an interesting chord progression. It takes a while, but sometimes I'll just do that. And then once I have a chord progression, I'll add drums and a bass and nice elements one at a time, kind of like what you were saying.
Speaker: And once I have like a decent like backbone to the track, um then that's when like the fun begins. And I'll just like put it on loop on the M8, either with headphones or on my monitors.
Speaker: And I'll just kind of like jam out in my head. Just kind of like, cause I don't, I don't like approach music where I have a fully formed thing in my head beforehand. Oh, me either.
Speaker: Yeah. I wish I could be like, this is what I'm going to create. I wake up from a dream and I'm like, I have this song. like but um I got to really work for this shit. we have me too ah Yeah. ah But so I'll make a backbone and then I'll just jam out ah kind of like in my head and just try to transcribe what I'm hearing in terms of a melody or a harmony or a solo.
Speaker: whatever whatever I'm working on, whatever part of the song, I'll, I'll, I'll be just kind of like trying to get whatever's in my head out onto, uh, into the M8 phrase. And I find that like, I'll make a lot of mistakes, but those mistakes are like these happy mistakes that, Oh, that's not what I intended, but I like that. Exactly. Yeah. And I find like that improvisational method on the M8, like it's like half,
Speaker: from, from you're trying to capture what's in your head and half you're making mistakes and you're kind of improv and on the fly as you're entering the data in, or as you're sequencing into the phrase.
Speaker: And I find like that combination is like, um, it's almost like a kind of meditation for me. Yeah. It's like, uh, like when you meditate, you're trying to like, let the thoughts pass through your head and you're just letting them kind of like form.
Speaker: And, um, you just kind of like grabbing them out of the ether and like the mistakes you make or that I make when I'm and inputting that stuff, uh, that I hear, um, into the M a phrases is basically like that informs the direction of the song.
Speaker: go Those, those mistakes and accidents, like happy accidents, I guess is the term. So how, what do you do for like a B part or a chorus or a bridge or, Um, well, so so rarely I'll make a backbone to the song fully formed. So usually I'll come up with like one section of the song and then that'll inform where to go next. Got it.
Speaker: And sometimes I'll like, uh, I, you know, is it just like another, like, let me build another chord progression and see if it fits with this one. Um, sometimes I'll like change the chord progression. I have a little bit or I'll go to another, key or, uh, I, I switch, I, I kind of abuse this a lot. I switch between major and minor a lot.
Speaker: Um, I like going, I like taking a chain and then just like randomly changing the transpose on what I already have to see it. Like, Oh, like, yeah, I actually like that. And then I, you know, yeah.
Speaker: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. um Well, I do a lot of deep cloning ah with my melodies once they're formed and I'll make variations that way. I'll just play around with different notes, different combinations, ah like introduce like a different passage. Like there's, there's some like basic tricks you can do to keep a melody interesting.
Speaker: For example, ah something I use a lot is I'll repeat something three times and then change it up on the fourth time. I'm working with a four. Yeah. ah if I'm working with a four phrase chain, if I'm working with an eight phrase chain, I, uh, sometimes I'll have something repeat twice and then I'll go in a different direction for the next two phrases and then I'll have it repeat twice and then I'll go into a completely different direction to kind of like bring it to a cadence or cadence.
Speaker: And, uh, so, uh, one of the things that I, I would, um, one of the things that I would do is um after I build like a loop or like a section, like let's say the A section, or maybe it'll become the B section later, yeah you know?
Speaker: um It's right. You never know until you get all the pieces together. Exactly. Exactly. I'll, ah I'll try to make a chord combination that ah compliments it. I heard someone say something really good about making a chorus. I don't know if it was,
Speaker: who's that, uh, music, uh, that really famous music's influencer, um, Andrew Huang. Oh, right. Right. Yeah. He said something like where making a chorus is you're, you're, you're making something the same, but different. It sounds a stupid advice, but it's actually quite, thanks bro suit like it's, uh, you're basically like, um,
Speaker: you're changing some things and then you're leaving some things the same, whether it's the sound design, you could change the sound design from chorus to verse. true And I work a lot in like a verse chorus, verse chorus bridge structure, but sometimes I'll deviate from that. But I find that like traditional songwriting techniques work a lot in the kind of electronic music that I want to make, even though I feel like melody is maybe not the strongest suit of modern electronic music. A lot of it is focused on rhythm, which is totally cool.
Speaker: Like you can do rhythmic things with electronic music that you can't do in real life. Yeah. um I just come at it from more of a melodic perspective.
Speaker: ah perspective and I'm using a lot of traditional songwriting techniques like I'll use like an A part B part C part or a verse chorus verse chorus bridge and sometimes I'll just double that and just have like too many sections in my song but sometimes that takes me to places that i I'm very grateful it took me I'll come up with something like a bass solo that I'll throw in that I'll be like wow where was that hiding yeah yeah And, uh, you know, traditional song structure is a nice thing to, ah use because it's a thing that you don't really have to think about.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly. It's like a guide. Yeah. And I was kind of curious as well, because you mentioned at the top of the show, looking back at your, or listening back, I guess at your earlier LSDJ stuff, what do you notice the most about your music now?
Speaker: um The sound design is way better, first of all. Like, the sound design is... I got... Because ah well I was... I started off making, ah like, ambient music on Logic Pro um in 2016. I was just making ambient music because I... i um I needed something to, I was commuting on the bus to work a lot and I get get a little claustrophobic on the bus.
Speaker: And so I wanted something that was very repetitive and I was listening to like a lot of ambient music at the time. And I was like, maybe I can make some of this. And so I made a ah bunch of ambient albums um and that taught me a lot about harmony because they were more melodic and harmonic,
Speaker: ambient albums, not necessarily like, uh, like field recording type ambient or just like, uh, like, act like ambient sound washes or sound groups or something. They had some kind of structure to them. I find that like, it's, I always put some kind of structure in my music. Um,
Speaker: That's just the way I'm wired. That's not better or worse than any, than any other method. It's just the the way I'm wired. Yeah. And, um, so, uh, I, uh, I, I, I started with just working with everything but beats. And then I basically just introduced the beats. And, uh, I found that like, after I started getting into, um, the M8, I just learned a lot more about sound design, sculpting the, um,
Speaker: and mixing and sculpting all the sounds on the M8 because before we had EQs on the M8, you were limited to the the filter that you had to put on it. um So you could put a high pass, a low pass, and some various other filters.
Speaker: And you basically had to sculpt the sound um unless you were exporting stems, which I i i rarely ever do. No, but I agree with you. The M8 really helped me learn a lot of sound design stuff, and I didn't really think about...
Speaker: the fact that eq not being available maybe helped me learn sound design more because if you want to change the sound outside of the filter you got to start tweaking some other parameters and yeah exactly ah then and i think there's something special about just listening to it on a loop and being able to change the parameters on the fly, ah which I know is not unique to digital music making stuff. But like you mentioned, you kind of get like in the zone and yeah like hearing it on a loop so much, you kind of are are able to like perfect that sound design.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. And um so that taught me a lot about mixing. i think that that that that' like when people come to the M8, it forces you to really ah analyze the bare bones of your music in that regard. Like, are these frequencies working with these? these and it's And it's more approachable mixing, I think, because it's more like...
Speaker: I added this other thing and now I can't hear this melody line that I put. So it's, it's that you can, um, you can put stuff in the same channel and have it not play over each other ru out of, out of sheer trying to save, uh, But if you want them playing together, then you're you're learning about how like to give space to each of these instruments yeah instead of approaching it from a, like, I'm trying to cut these certain frequencies, which I think a lot of people start mixing that way, and it feels way too technical from that direction.
Speaker: Well, you're also limited to eight eight channels. So I think that helps to have it simplified um because in that limitation, um I think it's a great limitation. Yeah, it really is. I think ah S, ah um one of the members of the M8 Discord said, you only need four.
Speaker: Eight is a blessing or something like that. You only need four because you you could do the LSDJ. I mean, eight I'm happy with That's the perfect amount. That's the perfect amount. Yeah. It's the perfect amount.
Speaker: And, uh, every once in a while, if I need more, it's just because I'm like, I need to fold down some drum drum tracks because I wanted some extra percussion.
Speaker: Yeah. When it comes to arrangements, if so someone asked me, um, basically like, I think it was Avro Cadavra. They, uh, they,
Speaker: they they They had an observation about so one arrangement I had made. And they were like, when you listen to each of the tracks separately, they make no sense. But put them together, they make sense.
Speaker: And so if I had to like describe my music, I would probably say a lot of simple things happening congruently. I like that. It's like, um, I, I don't really, with with the exception of maybe some solos or base solos, I don't really get to, I'm not really using more than one or two, uh, effects commands for any given, um, at any given time.
Speaker: i don't have tables chock full of, uh, like dense, dense commands, except for when I'm doing something like a wavetable or trying to like recreate, like the sound of a changing oscillator and I have a table swap to like switch oscillators or something.
Speaker: Um, but like, uh, as far, basically I'll just build it a piece at a time and I'll try to like, let everything have its space in the, in the mix.
Speaker: But, More importantly, i feel like it it just comes down to intuition. i think like – I say this about TV all the time, ah TV and video and film, is that like if you're writing a screenplay or if you're making a short video, just use your intuition because most people have watched so much media in their lifetime that they innately know what works and what doesn't, even if they're filmmakers or not.
Speaker: They have like that – that intuition that'll tell them when something's not working because people can be film critics without being filmmakers they know when a film is not doing its job and something is inherently broken in the edit or in the production or whatever and i feel like it's the same with music like people living and video is tension and release yeah yeah exactly yeah lot of movies really yeah hopefully i guess maybe the news now too but Yeah, well, we don't have to get into that.
Speaker: oh No, no, no. Enough of that. Yeah. Yeah, let's take a drink. No, but um I think ah ah Like a lot of it comes down to just using my intuition. um ah Yeah. What is working in a mix? Sometimes I'll go a little overboard. i know some, some people have described my melodies as jumpy.
Speaker: I kind of like that quality to them. Like I like them being a little unpredictable, but at the same time, still trying to make them sound good without making them like absolutely chaotic. But yeah, I mean, ah one of the songs we' we'll listen to Armitage There's definitely some chaos going on in one. Oh, yeah. that Well, that's about a very chaotic character from Neuroman.
Speaker: your melodies, when you were talking about your um like Trey Anastasio course, i I do notice in your melodies there's like some you know fast sections that move into slow to kind of like let it breathe. And then you do a lot of like hanging ah or like drawn out um decreasing volume, kind of like you're letting a note ring out on a guitar.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, exactly. um i do a lot of, I i try to vary up um how it's being delivered. Just to to echo back to what I said about Trey Anastasio's advice being um with... with so Well, he was talking about solos, but this it can this can work with melodies too. Yeah. um You know, the tension and release. You're kind of like building up and then you're paying up paying the audience back for their patience in the buildup. Yeah. You know, you're kind of like... It's like this exchange you have.
Speaker: And making like a lot of... fat Like one of the songs we'll listen to... um uh is uh emergence which is the last track off the neuromancer album and that um that one has a pretty long um melody of a pulse with modulated lead and i there's a lot of drawn out notes and then they're permeated by these fast note runs and just to move one section to the other.
Speaker: And like, you can use, um, the speed of the notes to kind of transition your sections. Like you can, um, you can, uh, you can like make a flurry of notes to kind of like prepare the listener for a change.
Speaker: ah Yeah. You can draw out a note to get them out of a section. There's a, there's a ton of different techniques. Yeah. yeah And like, um, it, uh, it works to, um,
Speaker: ah You know what? ah ah Bryface, who's also a member of the m MA Discord and a really fantastic chiptune artist, um i gave a talk on, um I think it was Micromusic Italy about LSDJ. And he talked about general composition and in general. And um he showed up brief snippets of a PowerPoint presentation he had where he had actually drawn out the shape of the, um, the, the melody, like he, he drawn it out. Like it was a shape and it had like peaks and valleys.
Speaker: And I thought that was a really cool. That is cool. Yeah. That was a really cool way of like representing your melody. And I guess people could do that before or while they're composing. Yeah. Even if it's just like, if even if it's just's just something you're doing in your head to kind of like prepare you for the next section, like, uh, like a crescendo uh,
Speaker: all those like old music techniques, they, they translate to electronic music. If you're working with melodies and harmonies. Awesome. I mean, I'll have to check that out. Uh, you said that bright face.
Speaker: Uh, yeah, yeah. I, I haven't seen like the full presentation. He just showed a few, uh, but he was talking about, he was talking about drawing out your melodies, which I thought was a cool technique. Nice.
Speaker: Well, should we listen to some music now? Sure. all right We've got a pile of songs here. Should we start with, um let's see, Chiptune?
Speaker: Should we do, ah isn't it Highway 4 Highway 5? Highway 5 is a good place to start. It's chill. Cool. All right, let's start with Highway 5. This 2022 Week we go.
Speaker: highway five right here we go
Speaker: The
Speaker: end of the day is very difficult time to get the same. The end of the day is a very difficult time to get the same.
Speaker: The end of the day is a very difficult time to get the same.
Speaker: you
Speaker: you
Speaker: are are
Speaker: The End
Speaker: All right, that was Highway 5. ah Those lead melodies really stick out to me. Just so much heart and soul in these ah you know digital melodies.
Speaker: Thanks. Yeah, i um I like to use the M8 to make expressive melodies, um like we were talking about before, not to emulate an instrument, but just to like capture the thing. It's alive. Yeah, yeah, to to make it feel like ah like it's like living and breathing. But um I think... ah ah with this this ah I don't know where this song came from um as far as like i was I was very happy with it when it came out. and it's I think it's one of my my brother's favorite songs of mine. He he ah he he really likes it, and um which means a lot to me.
Speaker: um As far as the melodies go, some of the techniques I talked about earlier, one thing I use a lot in this song was I'll stop a melody with a kill command. right before another phrase.
Speaker: So it sounds like the hand lifted or like, like the idea is done and it finalized with like a period. yeah and so And then I'll go into another, um another phrase and it helps to have just that little,
Speaker: like beat of silence between phrases sometimes. And that's used in chip tune a lot. That's not original or anything. and And did these techniques start with chip tune? I mean, i honestly, like for you, you, don't know like where any of them came from.
Speaker: So I'm assuming it's just like tips and tricks I've picked up by looking at tutorials over the years and just messing around on the end and kind of like finding through trial and error.
Speaker: And it's just like um I've accrued a bunch of like techniques that I go back to a lot, but I'm always on the lookout for new ones. Um, one thing I did with this zone is that I, uh, I, I, I have on tracks two so on channels, two, three, and four, I have a pseudo delay happening that I use a lot in my music. I'll do it as like a creative imposition on a track. I'll take up three of the channels with a kind of like, it'll be a ah triplet delayed,
Speaker: um ah with with ah pan commands on the in table to create a ping pong effect. I'm basically, i could just do in one channel and up the delay and set the delay to ping pong, but i i spread it across three channels to kind of like be like, okay, now I only have five channels left.
Speaker: How am I going to fit a song into this? Oh, well because what you do is you here. have my mate right here. Let me just i think I have the song queued up. um So are there are those three channels playing any instruments or?
Speaker: Yeah, they are. OK, this is Highway 5. On channels two, three, and four, I have the same pattern playing, the same phrase, or the same chain playing on all three channels.
Speaker: oh When I start it, I have on the so on channel two, it starts right away. On channel three, there's an extra phrase in the first chain that delays it.
Speaker: Oh, you're like tape doubling, essentially. Yeah. Well, what I do is I decrease the volume of channel three and four, and then I offset it by either six or three um ah ah sixteenth notes.
Speaker: So basically put a hop command in an empty phrase. um So um channel three, it's the second time it plays, it's playing delayed by...
Speaker: by six steps and then in the next one it's delayed by 12 steps. um That's cool. I don't know if I'm reading that right. I'm just kind of- How did you arrive at this technique?
Speaker: um I just, well, I saw some, I saw some pseudo delays in um ah like old demo scene stuff. Like I think format uses it a lot ah in when you had to, because you had no way of delaying, right?
Speaker: You had no way of adding a delay effect. And I just thought it was a cool technique. And so I kind of picked it up and tried doing it. I think this was the first track I actually did it with. And, um,
Speaker: ah it's it's it's great because what you can do is you can play the pattern um back from the top. The only problem is is you can't start the song in the middle, so live mode goes out of the window. Yeah. Because the channels are playing at different times, so the playheads move a little delayed. Yeah. so you get They get out of sync eventually.
Speaker: But if you play it from the top, just isolated by itself, you can change the... um pattern in the first phrase and in the first channel and it'll affect the other channels so you can kind of jam around and come up with cool delayed melodies that way and you can just have it on repeat you can um you can set it to repeat and and it'll just ah you can just keep jamming into you to make a ah really nice um delayed melody and it works as called an accompaniment. Sometimes it works as a melody.
Speaker: Sometimes it can like work almost as as like a counterpoint to another melody that comes in. And, um, it's good because it takes up three channels, which limits the rest of your song.
Speaker: So then I have ah have hats and percussion on the eighth channel. I have ah kick and snare on the seventh channel, bass on the sixth channel, the lead melody on the fifth channel, and then the FM chord trick of imp boxes on the first channel.
Speaker: So I have all the eight channels taken up, but three of them are this pseudo-delay that just kind of like – takes up space and forces you to be creative. So it's like, it's like a, it's like a ah trick I use when I'm having trouble coming up with stuff. I'll just be like, okay, time to use the pseudo delay.
Speaker: And got it it's like ah not a formula, but it's just, it's more like a go-to that I use to kind of like, um, get myself, uh, sometimes I'll either start with the chords and then add a pseudo delay on top of it. Sometimes I'll add, I'll start with the pseudo delay and then build the chords around it.
Speaker: And it's just a, a really fast way to come up with like, to jam out a really cool, um, like echoey ping pong melody for a song. And you can play around with the increments that the hop commands are set to.
Speaker: So it doesn't have to like get different patterns essentially. Yeah. It doesn't have to be delayed by triplets. It can be delayed or by three sixteenth notes. I guess that would make it a, a half note triplet.
Speaker: I don't know. And, and those pseudo delay tracks are playing a version of one of your other five tracks. Um, no, is it it's its own melody.
Speaker: It's like its own independent thing. Okay. got it I think I have, um, on this, let me see, let me check the table on this instrument. So you kind of have like six tracks going, but one of them is this delay across three. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah. So I have, uh, I have, um, it's an FM synth, uh, with some square, waveforms and some sine waveforms and the um i use this table a lot i have uh it goes pen eighty pan 80 pan 7f pan 7f and pan 80 and it's set to tick zero that column and that basically ping pongs it so um or it used to on the older yeah no it still works Um, uh, and that, uh, I just do that to, it's basically like just putting it in one channel and then turning the delay up to like F zero.
Speaker: Yeah. And, uh, and it's setting the ping pong to go in the stereo spread, but it just like, it's, it's, ah it's, it's cool because what you can do, is you can clone the um the other phrases where they're repeating. Instead of having the same phrase in all the channels, you can clone the other ones and change them so that when it echoes, it's a different instrument. Oh, yeah. Or you can have it switch oscillators, like which I use a lot in the Neuromancer album. I'll have these these delays where it's switching oscillators or switching the stereo location per...
Speaker: each time it triggers. And that's something you can't do with the ah with the delay with the global delay effect. right yeah You can actually change the, you can have it repeat, play once in one instrument, play ah the second time in another instrument that's a little tinnier, and then have it play a third time in a another instrument that's maybe high passed.
Speaker: And you can really create like, ah like ah ah you can add like an extra flavor to your- Yeah, yeah. Because that's one of my tricks too is taking the same melody, maybe with some slight changes and just switching the instrument.
Speaker: yeah this is like a way more automated way to make that happen. Yeah, I love to like switch the sound design on an instrument and then maybe vary it a little bit. um I just made a ah ah track for um the Jungle Compo that everyone was talking about the MA Discord. Oh, yeah. i did I did a Jungle Compo myself.
Speaker: Yeah, I'll have to check yours out. I haven't i i haven't even gone to check out everyone's. It's going to be the biggest Jungle album. ah same as but It's awesome. But it was... ah um baby's first jungle compo so uh yeah it was it was fun and fun to hear your a lot of your neuromancer album stuff with these break beats now that i'm like thinking about chopping break beats more yeah yeah yeah ah
Speaker: yeah As far as that goes, I use the loop start the looptar command a lot. I don't use slice as much, although I use it in the and the most recent song I made. I'm more of a loop start person.
Speaker: I just keep my everything divisible by eight in terms of numbers or like steps so that it's – so I can use the loop start command and just – find it's – because if I was to work with – slices, I would just find myself making slices in a way that was divisible by four or eight or two or whatever.
Speaker: I'm just basically, it's like I'm using the the loop start command, except I'm just using it with slice and then I can't pitch down the, I can't play around with the pitch of the track. True. i So I prefer to use this loop start command.
Speaker: That's a good point about the pitch. But, well, should we listen to another one? Yeah, sure. Let's go. see we just did highway four right or did we you did highway five you did highway five there's kind of a story behind that uh should we do highway four now sure this one's lsdj all right so we get to hear your chiptune mastery uh 2022 week 11 highway four and then no more highways right
Speaker: All right. Chip tune goodness. Tell me a little bit more about this one. So this one, um i actually, ah I had done a bunch of M8 songs in weekly beats and I wanted to mix it up.
Speaker: So I ah tried my hand at LSDJ, seeing if I could get a song done in a week. I think it was the first time I had done a song in a week with LSDJ for weekly beats. And um i I started with the with the drums on this one and um just laid down a basic...
Speaker: um like drum and bass like kick snare kick snare and uh added some uh hats in the noise channel i like to add i like to use that old uh lsdj trick of adding a little bit of white noise to your kicks to kind of give them a transient um and uh for snares i usually use Sometimes I'll import samples, um but most of the time i just my go-to is to use the 909 kit snare in LSDJ, the built-in stock kit snare, and then I'll layer it with an enveloped ah piece of ah noise in the noise channel, so I'll have it like a double-layered snare.
Speaker: Nice. and um ah I'm really proud of like the bass work that happens later in this song. The bass gets all like frenetic and and crazy, and the melody came out good.
Speaker: um it's It's not like a crazy pulse-width modulated lead with lots of like waveform commands and table. It's pretty much... i Most of the time when I'm working with LSDJ, I keep the sound design pretty simple.
Speaker: um I've been meaning to like reach beyond my comfort zone with that for maybe my next LSDJ project. But um I tend to keep the sound design a lot more simple when I'm working with LSDJ.
Speaker: And... um yeah Yeah, the song just kind of came together in a couple days, and I was i was really happy with the result. um I'm proud of some of the harmonies in it, too.
Speaker: um And ah I think it's got it's got a good level of energy. It's actually slower than it feels. um I don't remember the exact BPM on it, but it's it's not that fast for a drum and bass song.
Speaker: um I've actually, sometimes when I play it live, I play it back at a faster ah faster. um Yeah, it moves. yeah Yeah. it ah It keeps it going.
Speaker: and Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was about to say my favorite part's the, the ARP section, uh, in the middle of the song where the ARPs get all like tinny and, uh, and like all over the place. And like, uh, I just liked that section where it gets very staccato.
Speaker: I think even the drums and the bass get, uh, staccato and it goes into this, like one staccato section. um I'm, I'm, uh, I'm very happy with that. Uh, what keeps you going back to LSDJ, even though,
Speaker: ah The M8 can do LSDJ stuff and much, much more. Oh, um it's not like ah I don't I don't really see it that way as like.
Speaker: And I say this as being someone that has never used LSDJ. Oh, um well, I don't see M8 as like a souped up LSDJ. I think their own they own they're both their own entities. Yeah, it's just different. Like M8 has a different set of creative restrictions and ah it's got obviously more possibilities in terms of sound design and with the FX commands.
Speaker: But LSDJ is just... um It's just pure Zen for me. It's like, uh, I just, uh, I keep coming back to it cause I love the game boy sound and I, uh, I love LSDJ, uh, LSDJ's workflow. It's where I first like fell in love with making chip tunes.
Speaker: So I, I keep coming back to it over the years, although I've made a lot more M8 music in recent years than I have, uh, LSDJ. Yeah. Cause you mentioned that it takes you longer to make an LSDJ song.
Speaker: Oh no, no, no. Did I say that? Well, construed that out of you saying it's the first one that I've made in a week. Oh, that's just because it was the first time I tried LSD. Okay. i Got it. Yeah. Got it.
Speaker: Um, it actually, uh, I mean, it's, it it would probably take me less time just because there's less channels to work with. Got it. Um, but, um, and like less elements to introduce, but it really makes you think about your bare bones music and what's going into your song.
Speaker: And, um, like just being limited to, to three note polyphony is, uh, it, uh, I have a song called, punk rock astronauts never die where I tried to make chords with the bass and the melody and the accompaniment at the same time, like power chords. It came out pretty good. And um I was, ah there's something about like the crunchiness of the game boy that you can, you can kind of recreate on the M eight, but I find that the M eight's better when you take advantage of the, um the, the, the more,
Speaker: like electronic music centered sound design options, as opposed to trying to recreate the sound of a Game Boy on an M8. Got it, yeah. yeah I have transcribed a few LSDJ songs to M8. I even have a video on my YouTube channel where I compare one of my songs. I have it playing on the M8 and the Game Boy simultaneously, and I like ask the audience, like, which one do you like better? And it was pretty split. Like half of them liked the M8 for its cleaner sound, and half them liked the crunchy goodness of the Game Boy.
Speaker: and and And that's when you're trying to like get as close to the LSDJ sound on the M8? Yeah, that that was one of the few times I've actually tried to like consciously recreate an LSDJ sound on the M8. And that was tricky. The pulse channels are easier.
Speaker: ah You just don't use filters and um and just have them play... ah play as they are with no filter set. And um the pulse channels are a little easier, but like for recreating growls on the wave channel, it's ah it's a little more complicated. I think ah for the particular bass sound, the song was Cheeseburger Avenue.
Speaker: The bass sound I recreated with like some kind of ah ah complicated cutoff automation to just make it sound like it was it was like um like that short little period of looping you're allowed in the wave channel on the LSDJ where you can set it to ping pong and have the with the the ah the wave synth and expand. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: kind of like contract and expand I was trying to recreate that. it It doesn't sound exactly the same. And it it's it doesn't matter if it does or not. But I find that like when you try to recreate the Game Boy sound on an M8, you get kind of like an Uncanny Valley Game Boy.
Speaker: So it's better to just take advantage of the... of the um it's better to take advantage of the m8's capabilities in that respect i at least personally for me yeah i don't try to like okay gonna make a nes song on the m8 i just like oh this is if i feel like making a chiptune song i'll just take advantage of what the m8 has to offer and kind of tailor the chiptune to sound kind of like like like a can on the m8 nowhere else so
Speaker: Every time I've tried to, ah I mean, this is a little different because I'm not trying to like emulate a particular sound, but anytime that I've taken a song on one device and tried to like recreate it on another one, I'm like, it just doesn't hit the same.
Speaker: Or maybe I've just heard the old one too long. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty much experience as well. All right, we're going to keep it rolling. And one more from 2022. This is week 23 nightfall.
Speaker: ah this is week twenty three nightfall here we go
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: The next step is to get the new new new
Speaker: All right, that was Nightfall. It's got that nasty sound and amazing melody work.
Speaker: Thank you. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about how this one came together. So I just called up the... ah I wanted to make something techno-y, so I just called up on my M8 here ah the bass patch.
Speaker: It's a triple square in the macro synth with... a bunch of color, a little timber, and it's got a low pass filter and a lot of chorus.
Speaker: And then it's got a cutoff LFO that's set to exponential. So it's just kind of like growling, i guess, a little bit. It's got like ah like a bite to it. Yeah. numb I use the pseudo delay technique again for this, just as like a starting point.
Speaker: And I think I started with the chords on this one. um I wanted to make like an ambient kind of sounding ethereal ethereal kind of like background pad vibe to it and then introduce like some harder drums over it and uh as for the uh the lead let me check out the lead here um uh that is think it's a yeah it's a pulse width modulated lead with some cutoff automation and some uh
Speaker: warp on it and it's switching oscillators a little bit just to the different puls pulse pulse uh so every time it triggers uh the note it's switching to a different pulse width but then it's also got pulse width modulation on it.
Speaker: So it kind of, I guess, creates like a picked feeling or something like each note is a little more distinct from the other notes than it all blending smoothly together into like a kind of like so Commodore 64 style.
Speaker: Yeah. Pulse width modulation. Um, I was happy with like the ethereal feel of the, the chords and everything with this one.
Speaker: Um, I'm, uh, this was further into weekly beats. So I'd gotten little better. Let me shout out my, my trick to doing weekly beats week after week. Let's hear it. That's what we're here for.
Speaker: Okay. You do it before you go to bed on Monday.
Speaker: That's when you do it. You forget about Sunday. You do it before you go to bed on Monday and you get ready to publish. So you make Monday night before you go to bed your Sunday rush period.
Speaker: And then he'd see you feel compelled to work on it any other time during the week between that Monday and the Sunday that it's due. That's just an added bonus.
Speaker: but got it So you try to finish the entire song on a Monday. Not the whole song. I get like a passable thing. and Okay. If I have time to work on it, it'll become. I'm like a, like every day for like an hour at least.
Speaker: Yeah. it it It can become that if you have the time, you know, like usually before bed, that's all a bonus. If you have some, if you have your minute ready to go yeah on Monday, you're you're you're, you can breathe easy for the rest of the week and everything else is just a bonus. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, this is why I never post on Sunday, because if it's like Friday and I don't have the majority of a song together, I'm like yeah yeah scared to shit.
Speaker: yeah So on on one side, I wish I wasn't so um ah anxious about not finishing a song, but I also like to not have to like rush on Sunday.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. No, I hear what other tricks do you have from doing weekly beats? Um, well, I've only done it two years and one of those years I was, told I've only done it one year. So one of the years I was technically cheating. Uh, orange drink said I would be in weekly beats jail.
Speaker: yeah
Speaker: Because basically what happened was I made the whole Neuromancer album in 10 days, but all according to Weekly Beats rules. um So two of the songs on it were um ah ah from previous works in progress that I kind of unearthed and finished in that frame of time.
Speaker: And then the the remaining 12 songs were were done in a 10-day period, but a week each. And, um, uh, I post, I wanted to post the whole album just one week in weekly beats, but I couldn't because of the file limit sizes. I asked somebody and they're like, just post the first song and link to the rest of the album. So I did that.
Speaker: And then, um, Devious suggested that I just post one of the songs every week for the next 14 weeks. And I was like, it's cheating, but I'll do it. And so I did that and i I tried to make the descriptions interesting with the quotes from the book and everything.
Speaker: And so that that's my ah my 2024. The year that I was active every week was 2022. And um it had to do a lot because it was like, uh,
Speaker: Post-pandemic, everything was remote. It was just like, there was more free time as opposed to trying to struggle to get everything done. You got too busy in 2024. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: yeah ah And kind of segueing into Neuromancer, the next songs we're going to listen to are all going to be from 2024, Neuromancer stuff.
Speaker: so Tell me and everyone else listening out there about Neuromancer, the book, how you got inspired to make music relative to the book.
Speaker: Okay. Uh, so it's my favorite book in the whole world. It just, I read it when I was 15 in 1996. and ninety ninety six I remember just picking it up at a bookstore with a bunch of other books. I think I got rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clark and, uh,
Speaker: Ringworld by Larry Niven. I was starting to get into like the sci-fi canon at the time. um And my sixth grade science and my sixth grade um ah English teacher, Mrs. Bester, had recommended this book to me years before, but I never checked it out.
Speaker: And I just saw it on the shelf, so i was like, I'll take it And, uh, I read it that summer and I, I just, it was it's been my favorite book ever since. I, uh, um, how many times have you read it now?
Speaker: I don't know. I have like six copies of it. and on let show I must've read at least six or seven times. Uh, It's um it's I have a copy of it right here in case we need to check the source material.
Speaker: um um Yeah, I'm crazy about this book. I could talk about it for hours, but it was basically the the book that puts cyberpunk on the map. um Cyberpunk had formed as a genre in the late 70s as a literary genre. I'm talking about literary cyberpunk, not necessarily not cyberpunk the game.
Speaker: No, not Cyberpunk the game. That was funny. i was in a I was in a video game collectible store last year, and I was like, do you have anything cyberpunk related? The genre, not the game. Next, we started cracking up.
Speaker: They're like, that's a good distinction to make. Yeah, it's a good distinction. I love that game. I love that game. But there are there are two two different, a little different things. But um but anyway, ah yeah, so it it was the first, like,
Speaker: book that really puts cyberpunk on the map, as I say in the FAQ to the album. um And I don't want to... spoil the story, but it's basically about a hacker who's down on his luck, who has lost the ability to hack because he screwed over his employers. And then they screwed him over by kind of like burning out his ability to hack in what is called the matrix in the book, which is not related to the film, the matrix. They kind of like took it from Neuromancer and changed into something different.
Speaker: But in the book, the matrix is the future of the internet. It's like a 3d consensus hallucination where you see data as shapes and you navigate a 3d space. And it's kind of like, um, it was like, uh, Gibson basically figured out that the internet was going to be the next big, like connected protocol. And yeah like, like, like, uh, and so he coined the term cyberspace in the book.
Speaker: ah Someone read it in the M8 discord. And they said, wow, I'm five pages in and ready. Gibson has created cyberspace, the matrix and night city. I forget who said that, but someone, someone who had just started reading the book said that. And like, that's true. Like he coined all the, the phrases like Jack in and cyberspace. And and this was written in 1984.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it was written in – finished it in 1983. It was published in 1984. And it won the Holy Trinity of um Science Fiction Awards that year. It won the Philip K. Dick Award, the Hugo Award, which is like the Oscar of Science Fiction, and the Nebula Award.
Speaker: And – He then went on to write two sequels to it. It takes place in a universe called the Sprawl Universe, which is a reference to what the eastern seaboard of the United States has become in the future of the book, ah which is called the Sprawl. It's the Boston-Atlanta metropolitan axis. It's like a huge city that runs from Boston all the way down to Atlanta, like just one endless sprawl of a giant cyberpunk- Wow....in city.
Speaker: And it's... ah Um, so the universe, there's three short stories in the, in the, in the universe that he wrote, um, before the, uh, the, the book. And then he wrote two sequels to the book and it's his first trilogy. Cause Gibson's always writing trilogies. He's got, um, he's got four trilogies. I think he's putting the finishing touches on his, his last trilogy right now.
Speaker: Oh, wow. He's still going with trilogy. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's 77. Um, Wow.
Speaker: his most recent trilogy is the jackpot trilogy which is really cool because it takes place in the near future and the far future and the far future communicates with the near future through this time-traing internet server where it allows them to access the data of the past, but they can't affect any change unless they're doing it through the internet. It's a really fascinating concept.
Speaker: yeah It turned into a TV show, but it unfortunately it got canceled during the writer's strike. um How do you go about making songs? Sorry to get back on track here. I've been talking about cyberpunk for hours.
Speaker: ah How do you adapt a book to song, especially a book that is so near and dear to you? When I think about that, I'm like, would i do this book justice?
Speaker: Or like since you and i are kind of make music in similar ways of not really being able to like plan out a song from the beginning, it kind of goes where it goes.
Speaker: So how do you marry that ah like songwriting process with a book and this like huge fandom that you have for it um Okay, so it was like a passion project that I've always thought about doing. Like I was always like, I want to make a Neuromancer themed like album.
Speaker: But I didn't know how to like articulate that. And the idea came to me when I was driving down to MAGFest in 2024, early 2024. So about four months before I started making the album, I was driving down to MAGFest and I was listening to some chiptune. And I was just like, you know what?
Speaker: it would be cool if I made a song for every main character in the book, because there's more characters than are on the album. There's minor characters too.
Speaker: And i I, it would be too many to make, to make songs for all of them. But, um, I thought, okay, what about every main character? If I made a song for every main character? And I was like, so, um, I, uh, I, uh, I wrote down the list of main characters. Um,
Speaker: And there there were 13 of them, 14 if you count the bartender. And I thought, um how can I structure this album so that it echoes the um the like the dramatic arc of the book?
Speaker: So the book is separated into three into four um sections plus an epilogue. And... um those represent like the different like phases of the heist kind of thing that happens in the book.
Speaker: And um so the first few songs represent like the first section of the book, which is Chiba City Blues, where he's ah the main character is this addict stuck in Japan. And um I don't want to get into yeah every section's title, but um so what I did was ah I tried to
Speaker: I basically took like a period of 10 days, took like a musical vacation um and just was on the M8 constantly. And i would make a song.
Speaker: And when I was like about a third of the way into the song, I'd be like, what character does this sound like? And then I'd pick a character that that song would be about. And then I'd make the rest of the song with that character. That's cool.
Speaker: So you got to a point where you're like, okay, this is ah This sounds like Julius Dean, which was the first one I made. So I didn't start with the main characters. They didn't come till later. Um, and then I had some ideas, like some of the songs were started with a character in mind being like, okay, I want this to be like an emotional song for Molly.
Speaker: Uh, cause she's, uh, she's one of the main characters, one of the main, main characters in the book. Um, uh, uh, and, uh, uh, I, I wanted to make that song. a little more emotional than you would expect.
Speaker: So basically when I started out, I was like, i can't make this like synth wave or modern cyberpunk music. Cause I just feel like I don't have a grasp on those genres. The music that I was listening to in the years after I read the book and in the, like I say in the, in the FAQ and like the, the years of the, the, the year or years of the early two thousands that I was stepping into, ah I was listening to a lot of like,
Speaker: punk and drum and bass. And um so I tried to incorporate those genres into the, into like a mishmash, like some kind of like retro futuristic mishmash.
Speaker: um, to kind of like express like what my idea of the retro future in the book was like. And if you ask me, like if I had to pick personally, and this is not going to be everyone's pick, because some people would pick synth wave as like the music of cyberpunk.
Speaker: But, um, for me it's st drum and bass because that's like, or like jungle drum and bass, like the first electronic music that really got popular, um, was, uh, because the,
Speaker: the the book was written to post-punk music in the early eighties. Gibson says, i think in one interview, he says it was fueled by joy division. So I wanted to incorporate some like post-punk baselines, but, um,
Speaker: the the genre i felt like I had the best grasp of when it comes to cyberpunk was that one. And that's like the quintessential music genre of cyberpunk. Because if you look at all those 90s cyberpunk movies, they all have like jungle playing and drum and bass going. Yeah, like that's what you hack to. like Yeah, exactly exactly. Everybody knows you hack to drum and bass. Yeah.
Speaker: And there's numbers flying on the screen. Yeah, exactly. And you're projecting an image on you. Yeah. Yeah. but But so it just that that felt like it fit. So I went with that and go I just made each song. And a lot of the times I would start the song um being like, what does this feel like it's going to be about after I got a little ways into it?
Speaker: And then I would introduce like some Easter eggs or details from the book into the song. um There's a lot of like little stuff. in Even in like the waveforms, there's some Easter eggs.
Speaker: um Well, should we i think we should kick it off with Miss Linda Lee, and then i want to hear more about these like Easter eggs. Oh, okay. Cool. let's Let's play this one.
Speaker: Week 21, Miss Linda Lee. I'm not sure exactly what track this is on the album, but we'll maybe say that. Track three. Track three. All right.
Speaker: Lindbergh, welcome to Wizard's Castle.
Speaker: Linda, Linda, Linda, Linda.
Speaker: o
Speaker: ah that was Miss Linda Lee from the Neuromancer album in year 2024. ah So let's hear about it. So that character is, in my opinion, um the most tragic character in all of Neuromancer, even though there are characters that that that are on on screen, as it were, longer.
Speaker: um But ah she's the girlfriend of the main character, Case, at the start of the book, and she kind of backstabs him. And she ends up, uh, meeting an untimely end from another character in, in the, in the book and also on the album.
Speaker: Um, but, uh, she's, uh, she's kind of like, uh, a ah lost soul in the streets of, uh, night city. And, uh, she's addicted to a lot of drugs like cases and they kind of have, um, a tumultuous relationship, but, um,
Speaker: that ah That sample you hear, Welcome to Wizard's Castle, I wanted to incorporate the two. Since I figured I was doing a chiptune-inspired jungle album about Neuromancer, I wanted to incorporate the video game elements in Neuromancer. And there are two video games that appear in arcades in the book.
Speaker: And that's Tank War Europa, which is kind of like a tank war simulator with nuclear weapons that you that Case plays in the early part of the book, or he hears someone playing it.
Speaker: So I have that in his song. And in her song, she played a game called Wizard's Castle, which I'm assuming is some kind of RPG, like gauntlet style game, kind of arcade game. So I wanted to incorporate just like a slight nod to that as part of the book.
Speaker: um At the end of the song, you hear her getting shot, unfortunately. um yeah Next character who appears in or the henchman of the next character who appears on the album. ah which is Julius Dean.
Speaker: And um any other Easter eggs in this one? i'm ah I mean, i guess the, I wanted to make it high energy because I knew she was, she had, ah ah she was on a lot of like drugs.
Speaker: She's tweaking. Yeah. yeah but um So I, and I wanted it to be kind of happy because to kind of like, make it feel like it was something that could have been that was crashing.
Speaker: um i don't want to get too much into spoilers of the book here. i but um Yeah. ah There's a... this This is the third song on the album. It comes right after the first... The two main characters are Case and Molly Millions.
Speaker: um And ah Molly's song also has some kind of like emotion and hope in it. um Even though her character... that I wanted to show there was more to the behind the mirror shades than meets the eye for these characters. And also wanted to start the album out on a very high energy kick.
Speaker: Yeah. the song, Case's song, is very demo scene-y and like computery and like chiptune influenced. And then you get Molly and Miss Linda Lee's song. um which are kind of happy almost and like, or maybe with a little bit of melancholy.
Speaker: And then I get into more of the seedier characters of the book, like um the wheelers and dealers and, um that brings us to the next one, Armitage.
Speaker: Yeah, so this is a very tragic character in the book too. And this is the one ah that I was talking about, like has some like very like chaotic moments that I want to talk about when we come back, where, you know, just giving you a heads up before you listen, there's like,
Speaker: transitions, I guess you'd call them between certain sections that like they almost don't fit together. And then you're in like a new transition. don't know, it it works.
Speaker: And it's awesome. right, here we go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Let's get it. Let's get it. Let's get it.
Speaker: gets me
Speaker: What is weird?
Speaker: right, that was Armitage. And the stuff, I guess, as ah you you mentioned when we were listening to it, that we chop out of this, ah the part that I was talking about is almost like kind of like an alarm sound that comes in that's like kind of jarring at first. And it's almost like doesn't work. And then it's like, oh, yeah, this is meant to be. It's part of the song.
Speaker: Thanks. um So this character is the guy who um is seemingly at the beginning of the book in charge of the caper that the main character gets hired to be a part of.
Speaker: And he's a very, he's a mysterious man with a dark past at the beginning of the book. And then you later find out who he was in a previous life, not a previous like reincarnation life, but like before he became Armitage, he was general Willis Corto.
Speaker: who was a um ah a um a military guy that took part in this um like glider raid on Russia.
Speaker: And um his glider went down, and he I guess he was taken prisoner, or eventually he was really he was ah he recuperated in a military hospital where one of the AI characters in the book secretly infiltrated to kind of... um possess like to kind of brainwash him through the computer he interacted with um and like guide his rehabilitation so it could do so he could do the AI's bidding.
Speaker: And that's that's what you hear in the, there's a lot of Easter eggs and like little details from the book in this song. um For example, you hear that like military alarm that like kind of clacks on sound in the early part of the track.
Speaker: Then it starts saying, what is reality over and over? That's supposed to be the voice of Wintermute, the AI kind of talking to him ah when he's in the hospital recovering. And um then later you hear his glider going down um over Russia, even though it sounds more like a prop plane. I'm taking a little poetic license there. It's kind of hard to make the sound of a glider.
Speaker: so Yeah. um So it sounds like a prop plane going down, but it keeps repeating over and over again because the character it's implied that he's got like a kind of like post-traumatic stress disorder.
Speaker: And that causes him to create this entirely alternate identity of Armitage. And, um, It later ends up crumbling in the book, but I won't get into too many spoilers.
Speaker: but Does this book mention ChatGPT or Sora 2? Because I feel like... let All those people who are like having like psychosis from AI interactions because it's both smoke up their ass. And the video stuff just like recently, I swear, that's like, you can't watch anything anymore because none of it's real.
Speaker: Yeah, I know. It's very scary. Yeah. But I mean, kind this guy is insane that he's written all this stuff that's like kind of happening now. Yeah. yeah actually he He predicted ai generated music, which the next song, Malcolm, is it's actually interesting. um that we're coming to that next and that you brought this up right now, because, uh, in the book they go to a place called Zion cluster, which is a Rastafarian enclave in space.
Speaker: Um, and it's like, uh, it's like a haven for the, uh, the, the, the, the people who are, uh, in, in the caper in the book and they go there and, um,
Speaker: the elders there describe how Wintermute, that AII mentioned, played them a righteous dub. And so there's this music playing during the um ah the time they're in Zion Cluster, and it's referred to as the Zion dub. It's one of the few times they actually mentioned music in the book, and I had to include that.
Speaker: So this isn't straight like dub music. I didn't feel like qualified making that. So i kind of took like I kind of mixed it with a little bit of like lo-fi hip-hop and just tried to like, um, make a kind of like idea of what a future, ah artificially intelligent created like,
Speaker: And so I used a lot of bass and a little bit of a reggae pluck in a chiptune manner and um to kind of like simulate the uptick on like a reggae guitar. And i ah added um some, ah I added Casey's instrument, which is the pulse with modulated lead that plays at several points throughout the ah the album.
Speaker: And because the character Malcolm is, ah he he lives in Zion cluster and he helps them in their caper. And um he ends up piloting a tug ah in space.
Speaker: And... uh, case the, the main character of the book, the hacker, uh, ends up, um, deploying a virus into cyberspace, uh, in the middle, uh, while he's in the tug.
Speaker: And, um, so there's the sound of that virus slowly unfolding in the matrix, uh, in, in the, in the song. and that's, that's represented by the lazy, uh, notes of his, uh, his pulse, pulse with modulated lead.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, Yeah, I just tried to recreate what I thought the Zion dub might sound like, that righteous dub played by the elders of the Zion. this is, I really like this one. I almost said was my favorite, but i it's hard to pick favorites. But it's in my my top three from this album.
Speaker: um Let's listen to it. Malcolm.
Speaker: you
Speaker: right. That was Malcolm chill. The base just really hits. And there's just some like just got a groove to it. Maybe I am into AI space music.
Speaker: Yeah. So, um, so that song, uh, I spoke a lot about it before we listened to it, but, um, that, that song, uh, is the, like I said, is one of the few times in the book that they actually mentioned the type of music being played.
Speaker: And, uh, It's mentioned in the book. I don't know. I should have bookmarked where he mentions it. But it I think if I'm remembering correctly, he says it's like an amalgamation of different types of music. So it's not like a straight dub. I don't even know if dub music existed in the form we know of it now at the time. Yeah, that is interesting to think about.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. But um so I didn't want to make a straight dub song. I just wanted to like combine a bunch of different styles and kind of create what I felt would be like if this AI had created this dub music to like this this like mishmash of styles to um to win over the favor of the Zion elders ah before they learned his true identity.
Speaker: And, um yeah, ah I tried to make a pot leaf in the waveforms, but it ended up looking like a maple leaf.
Speaker: you look Those damn Canadians. No, no, no. William Gibson is from Canada, so ah he lives in Canada. He was born in the United States and moved to Canada. So I guess that works out.
Speaker: i yeah I tried to put a pot leaf in there, but I couldn't get it. I couldn't, like... There's no like really articulated way to make something bend under something in the M8 waveforms.
Speaker: but It looks more like an like a nable leaf shifted to an M, so maybe it's M for Malcolm or something. There you go. Yeah, there we go. That works. That'll do.
Speaker: ah And was this one of those that... ah you kind of picked the character after you got the song going or you this was the last song I made. So I ok only one character left at that point.
Speaker: And it was the one I had kind of put off while I was making the album because i didn't know because you what knew you needed to make this like du Yeah, i needed and I needed to make it special and I needed to stand apart from the rest of the songs on the album because not only is it the only instance of music really being mentioned in like great book, but it's also the only song on the album that's not part of a drum and bass or jungle song.
Speaker: Yeah. ah The other exception being the winter mute song, which is straight ambient, but that's part of a triptych of songs and ends up replaying later. I'll explain that when we get to that song.
Speaker: ah ah Which song was that? That was ah that ah the Wintermute song. Oh, i I don't have that on my ah my list play. So maybe I should talk about this now then. Because the last one I've got is the Emergence Rats mix.
Speaker: Yeah, so that song is the third of a triptych of songs. Oh, okay. Got it. I understand. yeah, Rats is the main character that is featured on this song.
Speaker: He's the bartender at the beginning of the book, and he also makes an appearance at the end of the book. Um, I needed to include him, even though he might not be as main of a character as some of the other characters in the book, in the, in the album, on the album.
Speaker: Uh, but, um, this is, this song is actually not about him. He's just, I always pictured him as kind of like the DJ of the song. Cause he's got a, he's got a prosthetic, uh, like a pink prosthetic, prosthetic military arm in the book.
Speaker: And, uh, like kind of like Johnny Silverhand's fake arm. And, um, Uh, although that came, you know, decades later, uh, and it's highly derivative, but, um, so, uh, this song is the third of like a, a trio of songs, which is the, so the first 12, the first, uh, 11 songs on the album are the human characters.
Speaker: And then the two AI characters show up at the end of the album. And that's winter mutant neuromancer. And I don't want to, this is kind of a spoiler, but I'm not going to say it in a way that spoils very much.
Speaker: The two AIs merge in the book. So what I did with the last three songs is I have um
Speaker: Wintermute play first, and it's all ambient and so synthetic. And then I have Neuromancer play right after that. It kind of bleeds from one song right into the other. And that one's all drum samples with a little bit of bass.
Speaker: And then both songs are actually in the same project file on M8. And they play over each other. Wintermute the first four channels and Neuromancer is the second four channels. And then all eight channels play simultaneously for the last song.
Speaker: So that's like the AIs merging. in the oh okay. That is really cool. I did not notice that when listening to them. um Yeah. So what I did was I also added Casey's instrument from the ah other parts of the album.
Speaker: into the last song to give it a kind of like an extra quality, like a, like a guiding, uh, um, uh, melody that, that is not found in uh, in the sum of its parts.
Speaker: Um, and that's why it's called emergence because, um, I don't want give away too much of the book. could, I, I, I don't want to. mean, I feel like I've read it already. You've given away so much, but, uh, yeah, but it's a crucial plot point in the book, what happens. And I tried to that in, and I do want to read this songs. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: It's not, it's not too long of a book. It's about 280 pages. it's so it's ah It's just like ah so like a regular length novel. And it's when i was in parts but it's it's a great, great read.
Speaker: and When I was researching, some people said that, oh, the terminology is kind of hard to get past. But I feel like I read Dune, and there's all sorts of just weird terms in Dune, and I made it through.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. it's ah Gibson, a lot of his writing, he'll throw you into a world without a hand to hold you. Got it. You have to kind of like climb your way to a point of understanding. He does that probably most notably in the peripheral, which is his – one of his more recent books um that he just throws you right into the futures in that book. And you have to kind of like come up with, you have to figure out for yourself what's going on.
Speaker: I know ah Herbert does that in doom, but like ah it's worth it It's, it's, it's definitely worth trying to figure it out. And, you know, um it's just ah the terminology, like he, he invents an entire like language in the book. Not like actual language, like Elvish and Tolkien, but like he invents like a, a kind of like a futuristic technical vibe that um would only be experienced by like hackers in a three dimension internet.
Speaker: And so people at the time didn't know what to think of that because they had no frame of reference. But nowadays we know this is a retro future. So we're a little better prepared to, to take that plunge.
Speaker: That's cool. Yeah. But yeah. Well, we are at the end of our episode. It's super cool to dig deeper into your process and listen to your music and hear about your love for the Neuromancer album. and I'm still just blown away that you made all of these songs in 10 days. And I can understand why ah you didn't want to participate in all of 2024, because I feel like I would just be wiped out.
Speaker: I kind of burned myself out making this. I haven't made another song until recently after about a year of not making music. so Yeah, yeah. i like I burnt my so my brain out as far as music was concerned working on this. But it was it was definitely worth it. i'm I'm super proud of it. Yeah.
Speaker: you're back in the game making music yeah yeah i made a track for that jungle compo and uh yeah yeah need to check that one out i'm gonna try to do weekly beats uh 2026 too i would love i would love to hear it yeah and uh i know you haven't listened a ton to the show but some stuff that's been coming up recently
Speaker: the idea that it's okay to skip a week here and there if you need to for the the term that was coined in the last episode was making healthy bangers.
Speaker: ah So like, ah ah and I've been practicing this with this show and taking a break every now and then when life demands it. So I hope to hear more of your creations in 2026. Likewise.
Speaker: likewise yeah and um thanks again for giving us a tour of all of your tips and tricks i feel like we could talk another hour about inmate tips and tricks and yeah yeah thank you for having me on it was a blast yeah yeah um yeah everyone go check out disposable planet check out the album i think it's even, ah even better to hear all these stories and then go listen to the full album. Now that we know all the context is I'm going to go back and listen to it now knowing all of this.
Speaker: Yeah. If, um, just a note to the people who want to listen to the album, it's called the color of television, which comes from the first line in neuromancer. Uh, and, uh, if the best way to listen to it would be to go to my band camp page where it's free, it's a completely free album.
Speaker: And ah the download comes with all the M8 bundles as well. Oh, awesome. An instrument pack of like 400 instrument patches. Hell yeah. You get a lot of M8 goodies, including an old school ah FAQ written in the M8 tracker font.
Speaker: So yeah, you get all the goodies that way and you can listen to uncompressed, uh, versions of it. Awesome. I'm totally going to check that out. And that's one thing that I love about the M8 is being able to share bundle files like and see how people put stuff together.
Speaker: ah awesome. Uh, well, yeah, I think that's it. Thanks again, everyone for continuing to listen and interact on the discord and, listen to everyone's music and comment on it.
Speaker: Uh, it's always good, good to get a ah comment in 2025 on a song from 2024. So go out there and support all of your other weekly beat community people.
Speaker: Cool. Well, have a good one. Thank you. You too.
Speaker: I'll call Molly again.
