TL;DR - Dis gon be a long thred. U can scroll if u want, is ok.
It was the year 1987 and a young man was born in lol jk, but there will be a bit of backstory here since I've uploaded to NG since 2007, deleted a bunch of content in a hypomanic fit (representing the diversity of NG with some mental illness), reuploaded some of it again... Uhh, I've had a fun ride here so far I suppose and some of it is even relevant to my music.
So just to sum up how I make music, I started in 1998 at age 11. I had an Amiga 600 with ProTracker on it so I basically just made embarrassingly terrible nonsense on it. My first song literally was just a bunch of soundless notes mashed into a channel because I didn't know how to load an instrument due to a severe case of dumb. I used to load up a finished song and save it as a new one so I had instruments to work with, then try to make something remotely coherent. It usually devolved into Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or Deep Purple's "Smoke On The Water" because those two I had at least figured out how to reproduce melodically.
I moved on to FastTracker 2 on my family PC, made quite a few songs with it though still quite limited in terms of how original I was. My goal was making metal but try doing that if you don't play instruments yourself and are dependent on soundfonts rarely made by other metaltrackers out there. Eventually I found metal .xm files that I could harvest usable instruments from but they were often limited to perhaps a very short span of notes (less than an octave sometimes) and few playstyles (open powerchord, palm mute power, and not much more).
I actually had to upgrade to ModPlugTracker when I moved from Win98SE to WinXP. No native DOS, no FastTracker 2. Here's where a ton of work happens. Most of it is not available online anymore but I will see about getting it re-upped for posterity so anyone interested can listen to what early stuff sounded like. Ultimately in 2007, I started using Renoise a bit for making VST stuff and in 2008 i fully transitioned.
I'll begin by just sampling (huhu) some of the early stuff that NG users really enjoyed and gave me positive feedback on which greatly boosted my confidence creatively. Btw, I made my account in 2005 because (no joke) I thought an account was subscription based or something when I was young back in like 2000 during the assassin days, etc. You called it Newgrounds Gold, Tom! Gold is expensive! Twelve year olds are not fiscally competent individuals! :c
So let's start with...
These tracks are all songs from "Antidestiny", an album I made over 2006 and 2007 (I'm like 20 at this point). At that point I had already made a LOT of music though. Albums like Dawn, Reanimation, Chapter Nine, Tears of the Blind and thats just the stuff I released to the public. I think the Antidestiny songs were spread out over the 300-400 count of my ModPlug projects I had started at the time, though that count includes all the unfinished stuff that definitely outweighs the finished amount of projects. Note that I was very lacking in any sort of mixing skills beyond just adjusting the volume of any given channel or cloning it for DOUBLE VOLUME!) but I managed to do OK enough that NG approved at least. I was genuinely nervous about getting negative feedback when I uploaded my first tracks. Moving on...
So here's where life got flipped turned upside down. 2008. I wrote this specific track (and its now replaced Part II counter-part) in the peak of a manic psychosis. There's a ton of backstory as to why my brain had gone full tilt which spans back to 2003 with a bunch of family tragedy happening like a carpet-bombing over those teen years, 15 and onward, of my life. The song to this day still mystifies me as it was a gigantic quantum leap of performance compared to what I've ever done before it. I dunno how many people create a piece of art and then observe their creation go "wait, how the fuck...?" but that's definitely my experience with this. You can hear the full thing here on NG, on my youtube page, or over on bandcamp. (It's free, just pay 0 whatever-coins and pick lossless like a champ.)
Again, my mixing and mastering sucks. It's a different flavor of suck, but suck nonetheless. The Youtube and Bandcamp versions are the "Ultimate Edition" that... uuuh, kinda needs a new edition, tbh. This is where I learned that I need proper speakers and headphones if I'm gonna do this. Some entertainment 2.0 speakers from Creative get chucked right out and in goes a pair of M-Audio BX8 D2 studio monitors. And after that...
Well, I still sucked at mixing and mastering. Turns out you need to actually figure out the why and how of it, not just slap a wallet on the table. I did however start to explore more genres like the EDM Hardcore/Gabber scene, Psytrance (which I have a very long romance with since it's got tons of roots in the music tracking scene.) :c
Anyway, Given some more time and some pretty laser accurate feedback from OCR judges when I uploaded my first project there, I was eventually able to sharpen my mixing and mastering enough that there was again a big lift in quality.
So aside from Mihai Sorohan's splendid trumped talents in that hiphop beat I made, if you've listened to my posted tracks here up until this point you'll notice that "Across The Sea Of Sand" is a remake of "Ocean". Also, "Ocean" is actually a remake of "Swashbuckler" from my EP "Reanimation" so we are establishing a pattern of dire laziness. This is something of a thing with me creatively though. I've gone back to old favorite tracks whenever I had significantly new technical skill, higher quality resources, or simply just got the idea to "reimagine" the song in a new light. Which leads us to the most insane level of repetition in my career, of which I am STILL retreading old ground: Ultima Eternus, as featured a few paragraphs up!
The full chain of this starts with a song I wrote at age 14 called "Evighetens Palats" (swedish for The Palace of Eternity). This was the first song I had ever made that got positive feedback from my friends so being the little shit I am I figured "Oh ok, I'll just do this song again with slightly better instruments and get even more positive feedback!" but actually, it turns out people kinda stopped caring about me and my music because of how often I would tackle any given friend within eyesight into a corner and "ask" if they wanted to hear my latest song.
The chain is as follows: Evighetens Palats (2001), The Palace of Eternity (2003), Frihetens Kall (2004), Eternity's End (2007), Eternity's End (2007, Unreleased draft version), and THEN Ultima Eternus Part 1 and 2 in that manic episode. As you can no doubt surmise, I was very... very single most of my young life. I've since made a sequel album to Ultima Eternus called Mater Infinitum as well as having a new one planned that I'm current training myself for with video game remix projects. I am still single.
Moving on from the 2011 tracks above and into 2012 in...
THE NEXT POST!
