It's been a hot minute. I haven't posted anything here for a while, not since my lamentation of SG days past that I hardly knew. I haven't even given my personal website any love since the new year.
Truth is I've been pretty preoccupied. The last couple of weeks in December and the first week in January had me eyeball deep in music. You see, I've been wanting to get into music since I was a teenager. Be in a band, produce, something. I didn't know what exactly, and at different times it was a different role. For the longest time I wanted to produce electronic music. Then I wanted to be a rapper (no joke). Then I wanted to front a metal/deathcore band as a vocalist. I even had a slight taste of that dream having joined Eddie Hermida (former front man of All Shall Perish) on stage... twice... to close out their set with Wage Slaves with him. But recently I've turned back to my roots and found myself more interested in electronic music production.
That's a project I've had sitting on the shelf for a little while. One of the first I cobbled together when I finally decided to take this music thing seriously. It's nothing fancy, nothing complex, and it needs a ton of work still. But getting there wasn't easy. It starts last year.
I went to OmniCon in McAllen, TX, a convention that was a sort of cobbled together mixture of media: music, video games, comics, anime. John DiMaggio, the famous voice actor, was there and drew the most attention. However I was there to see one person in particular: VEELA.
This gorgeous young woman is a vocalist on a lot of electronic music tracks for several up and coming electronic artists, and was the single greatest source of love and help when I was dealing with my wife leaving me towards the end of my deployment to Afghanistan in 2012. We had talked quite a bit, via e-mail, even some letters, and after getting back to the States on Skype a few times. With her being from Canada it was difficult to ever see her in person, even though at the time I lived not far away from her at all in Washington state. But last year I moved to Texas for work, and OmniCon was in Texas, and she was going to be at OmniCon. I made all the necessary arrangements to get there so I could finally hug the person who meant more to me than most anyone else.
Meeting her was incredible. It was an awesome moment, and we had some very touching, and extremely personal conversation. But past that I met some good people. Her fiancé (rapper None Like Joshua), and some other friends of theirs that they had also known online and finally met in person. NLJ and some of those friends got really excited when I told them about how I wanted to get into music production. They were so eager to share their knowledge with me that it was almost overwhelming. I could hardly keep up. I learned a lot of valuable basics, and I made sure to keep in touch with them. And it paid off.
One of those friends has been instrumental in helping me with production. He helped me complete my first track, a sort of synthwave type track inspired by Kavinsky and Lazerhawk, that I called Miami Connection. Check it out for yourself.
It's nothing to fawn over, but it was a start for me. It isn't properly mastered, but it's a basically completed track, and it's my first. However, music production is not my full time job. I have to make time with the already little free time I have available to not only work on music, but to do so feeling motivated and inspired. Any artist knows that trying to create art when you're feeling uninspired is detrimental to the process, and it's better to do just about anything else. Needless to say, it was a long time before I had a good combination of motivation, inspiration, and free time to honestly work on music in a meaningful way. It wasn't until late December last year that time came.
Electronic music broadly covers an almost infinite number of sub-genres that range from super mellow downtempo to wildly aggressive hardstyle/happy hardcore. In the past few years in the U.S. dubstep has grown in popularity, making it really the first type of electronic music I've seen adopted into the mainstream. Dubstep gave birth to a number of new styles as well, and a duo in California called Captain Panic! produces what they simply call "alien bass." It's an acquired taste for many, but I fell in love with them immediately.
Fun Fact: the first track I ever heard by them is called Offering... and features none other than VEELA herself. ^_^
On December 7th, 2013 they announced that they were going to have a remix competition for one of the songs off of their new album Accelerated Evolution called Annihilation. They uploaded the stems, and I immediately downloaded them with the intention of giving it my best shot. After a month of hard work, this is what I ended up with.
That may not look like much, but it's more than you might imagine. It was my remix for the competition. I even sent the mix off to get professionally mastered, and was so unhappy with the result I stayed up all night the night before the contest was over learning how to self-master and finally created a mostly perfect version of my song. (I wound up tweaking it just a little after submitting it to create my perfect version).
So listen below to the original Annihilation, and my Hyronillaiton Remix (a million bonus points if you know the reference). It may not be your cup of tea musically, but honest feedback would be greatly appreciated. :)
That's what's kept me away from most other things for a while. And unbeknownst to me it helped pull me out of a terrible slump of depression (thanks for pointing it out to me @arroia).
I'm back in a moment of having no time to focus on music the way I want to, but I know that I'm not finished. My New Year's resolution was to complete an EP. It may happen, it may not, but I'm going to try. And even if it's crap, it's a start.
I'll let you guys know how the remix contest plays out. Wish me luck!
