Info
This post was originally intended for a Patreon audience.
When I started to make Music
Thanks to a certain patron of mine who is always up to no good, I’ve been digging through some of my old music. It has made me want to repackage all of it for posterity. Besides, it might be fun to see how far I’ve gotten since I’ve started.
A lot of my old music is terrible and awful, but even now I still enjoy some of them a little. This is probably because I’m biased, but they all have a certain charm to them. Anyway, even though it’s bad music, everyone has to start somewhere, right?
So, this is the first in a series of posts about the old music I’ve made. I’ll be going over what I was going through back then, the editing decisions I’ve decided to make when putting everything together again (especially since there tends to be a lot of missing information and such), and what I think of the music now.
This post is about Sample Project, an album from when I first started to make digital music but never released. Enjoy!
Piano
When I was a young child I begrudgingly played the piano. I didn’t really enjoy it that much but eventually I got used to my parents badgering me to practice and dragging me to weekly lessons. My piano teacher was this kindly old man. He had a wrinkly face and white hair and cats (it seems all of my piano teachers had cats) and his home was filled with books. Over time he eventually got a little upset with me. Why? Well, I wasn’t practicing as much as I should. Despite this, he encouraged my interest in composing music. Eventually I ended up spending more time doing that than practicing and… well, he wouldn’t let me be a student of his anymore. He fired me.
So that was my first experience with making music. Eventually my family moved to a new town, and at some point between me being fired and after the move I got a new piano teacher and started Junior High. I’m not really sure how, but in Junior High I got interested in making digital music. It was probably the fact that I thought writing notes on staff paper was a huge pain, especially since I still think so today. Wouldn’t it be easier to use a program?
Magix Music Maker
The first program I ever tried using was Magix Music Maker. I was excited when it arrived, and after tinkering with the program after a while I was very upset. It appeared all there was to the program was a bunch of pre-rendered loops that you could arrange to make a song. This wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to actually have instruments playing the notes I wanted them to play.
Despite not being able to make the program do what I wanted, I ended up making a few songs in an attempt to start liking what I had bought. Eventually I lost interest, defeated, like I had spent money for nothing.
I don’t know what I’ve done with the software since then so all I have now are the files. If the software still works and I end up finding it one day, I’ll have a listen to see what its like. I don’t really have high hopes though.
stelth muxic
Past me had great taste in names.
Fruity Loops Demo
After my disappointment with Magix Music Maker, I was largely uninterested in digital music production for a few years. That is, until I stumbled upon Fruity Loops Studio. At the time, they had a free demo that you could use. The only catch was you couldn’t save your project and the only way you could save your work was to render it to a sound file. So, for about a whole school year (2007-2008), I would only make music in a single sitting.
After an entire year of using the demo, I decided I was finally confident that I liked the program enough to use. I saved up my allowance and… I bought Fruity Loops XXL. How exciting!
Unfortunately, because of the demo’s restrictions, I don’t have the source files for these projects anymore. This means I can’t make lossless audio files and I’m stuck with the 128kbps renderings I made. This is the biggest reason for why I won’t accept any money for Sample Project. It goes against Bandcamp’s recommendations:
You can’t upload MP3s to Bandcamp. So, to avoid potential angry people (since I did in fact just convert my MP3s to lossless and uploaded them), I’ve made the album free and you won’t be able to pay for it.
I’ll be giving this album the release date of January 22, 2008, even though I never actually published this set of music to begin with. Another manufactured element is the album cover, since I never made one at the time. For the album cover, I found a picture I took in 2007 and used that as the base.
Review
Sample Project 1: This track is pretty boring and unmemorable.
Rainbow Cannon: What the hell is that instrument? It’s so… colorful and terrible sounding.
DeStrucTion: The title is very misleading and unStAblE. I think this is the first time I made something on a computer that sounded like I made music.
Bloom Canyon: It’s really hard for me to make these really stupid, happy tunes nowadays.
ImPloSion: I had terrible taste in naming things. I think I wanted to try making something that sounded broken and disoriented, but I wasn’t very successful. I’m still not very good at trying to do that sort of thing.
Iron Gearwork: This is relaxing, probably only because ImPloSion was so noisy. I’m not sure why it’s labeled 5.5.
Sample Project 6: This sounds terrible. What was I trying to do?
A Start: Alright, now we’re starting to get more decent-sounding things. I really like the drum beat at the beginning, but the first instrument I add in after that doesn’t sound that great. The second instrument sounds better, and the next instrument after that sounds pretty good. This track is pretty repetitive though.
Mellodramatic: sic. I don’t even know what’s happening here.
Vampire Coast: Sure is spooky at 0:30. The drums are awful, but it’s not too bad otherwise. I think I started to realize I like working with ambient sounds when I made this track.
Untitled Doorway: I think this is my favorite track in the album. It feels the most coherent. The track is pretty relaxing, especially at 0:58 when the pads kick in. I think they’re too loud though.
Spaztastic: Oh man this is pretty groovy at 0:29, but it all goes to hell at 0:37 because I haven’t learned yet to not clip the audio so badly. This could have been ok, but I didn’t know how to master things back then.
MisPlaced: I think the guitar sounds harsh and terrible. The song is pretty relaxing otherwise. I have no idea what the piano bit at the end is supposed to be though, haha;;;
eRRatic: Short but energetic. I’m not really sure how I feel about it other than noisy.