Messages

I've been pushing through a very upsetting (but not bad) breakup by, uh, working on a remix and some trance synth leads for the Memorrhage guy. And crowdfunding my home-recording setup so I can contribute vocals. (Isolation shields worth a goddamn are PRICY.)

I think this is the most involved I've ever been in music. Almost daily I'm discussing with actual successful underground musicians my opinions on production and songwriting, and they're taken seriously. I can commiserate over EQing synth organs to sit nicely in dense mixes* and the other person will nod sadly and say "the decay..." because we've both been there.

It's really nice to be taken seriously by musicians who are legendary among "Thinking Man's avant-death metal" elitists and have done everything from chiptune grindcore to Bay Area screamo to nu metal. It's times like this I know my faith in my musical abilities is not Dunning-Kruger shit.



* Seriously, have you tried to do this without having to automate every band of an EQ to shift note-by-note? it's a fucking NIGHTMARE, and if you're gonna tell me to break out the comb filters I'm going to tell you to put that shit on some Scriabin-ass synthetic chords so you can hear the pan-pipers of Azathoth for yourself. It is an Incontrovertible Fact that organs, even basic ass synth organs with 3-oscillator formants, are made for filling every frequency above the fundamental with pure clean tonal bands and you had just better hope your tits that you have the headroom in your fucking mix to pull that off.

Do you take very dumb music requests? Because there is a very dumb thing I want

Depends. I can't record vocals yet (the crowdfunding was just finished thanks to one of you wonderful fuckers, but it needs to be ordered and arrive) and I can't do physical instruments, but I have production expertise and am pretty good at electronic music -- especially simpler stuff like trance, DnB, goth-industrial.

When I do have my bedroom studio setup done, I specialize in harsh vocals, but I can sing okay. Nothing special, poor range, lacking power, but it's something.

I'm looking for a "dramatic movie trailer" downbeat cover or remix of Billy Joel's My Life that fits the overall vibe of the Andor soundtrack. I'm very normal.

I can almost imagine this. I'm a dork, so I'm imagining it as funeral-paced symphonic blues/funk, like Zeal & Ardor's Hold Your Head Low but with piano and big, swelling orchestra instead of the guitar strums and short heavy sections. That would be really cool. But I don't think I can help you here.

I could mix and master it (the key to moody movie trailer music cover stuff: per track - expand, dither, noise gate, reverb; overall - compress until the mix pumps and heaves like a motherfucker, master), but I couldn't make it. You'd need at least one real live musician, someone who can work with symphonics appropriately, and probably a good, loud singer for that real powerful "impossible odds" movie trailer vibe. I can do none of these.

Sucks about the hearing, but yeah, at least you know now. My hearing has made it through an astonishing amount of abuse, and I've been eyeballing some concert earplugs to cut down the impact of dogs barking, traffic noise and, of course, the rare concerts I go to.

I used to play guitar, but kind of fell out of it because life. I got kind of decent I guess, and it was cool, maybe it's worth picking up again? I tried songwriting, which didn't go anywhere, but maybe I could try again.

IDK, for a while, I've just felt sapped of creativity. I lost passion for anything.

Damn, I miss when things felt good and I had hopes and dreams.

Honest suggestion: channel that hopelessness and frustration into creativity. Not necessarily music, just making things in general.

You're not alone in how you feel, but you are alone in the ways you'll express that. No one will be fed up and downtrodden the same exact way as you, which sounds like it's isolating, but it isn't.

People want to hear, see, feel something that reminds them of what they're going through, but in someone else's words. Making something is healthy catharsis, and helps others that find it, too.

I've been pushing through a very upsetting (but not bad) breakup by, uh, working on a remix and some trance synth leads for the Memorrhage guy. And crowdfunding my home-recording setup so I can contribute vocals. (Isolation shields worth a goddamn are PRICY.)

I think this is the most involved I've ever been in music. Almost daily I'm discussing with actual successful underground musicians my opinions on production and songwriting, and they're taken seriously. I can commiserate over EQing synth organs to sit nicely in dense mixes* and the other person will nod sadly and say "the decay..." because we've both been there.

It's really nice to be taken seriously by musicians who are legendary among "Thinking Man's avant-death metal" elitists and have done everything from chiptune grindcore to Bay Area screamo to nu metal. It's times like this I know my faith in my musical abilities is not Dunning-Kruger shit.



* Seriously, have you tried to do this without having to automate every band of an EQ to shift note-by-note? it's a fucking NIGHTMARE, and if you're gonna tell me to break out the comb filters I'm going to tell you to put that shit on some Scriabin-ass synthetic chords so you can hear the pan-pipers of Azathoth for yourself. It is an Incontrovertible Fact that organs, even basic ass synth organs with 3-oscillator formants, are made for filling every frequency above the fundamental with pure clean tonal bands and you had just better hope your tits that you have the headroom in your fucking mix to pull that off.

Do you take very dumb music requests? Because there is a very dumb thing I want

Depends. I can't record vocals yet (the crowdfunding was just finished thanks to one of you wonderful fuckers, but it needs to be ordered and arrive) and I can't do physical instruments, but I have production expertise and am pretty good at electronic music -- especially simpler stuff like trance, DnB, goth-industrial.

When I do have my bedroom studio setup done, I specialize in harsh vocals, but I can sing okay. Nothing special, poor range, lacking power, but it's something.

I've been pushing through a very upsetting (but not bad) breakup by, uh, working on a remix and some trance synth leads for the Memorrhage guy. And crowdfunding my home-recording setup so I can contribute vocals. (Isolation shields worth a goddamn are PRICY.)

I think this is the most involved I've ever been in music. Almost daily I'm discussing with actual successful underground musicians my opinions on production and songwriting, and they're taken seriously. I can commiserate over EQing synth organs to sit nicely in dense mixes* and the other person will nod sadly and say "the decay..." because we've both been there.

It's really nice to be taken seriously by musicians who are legendary among "Thinking Man's avant-death metal" elitists and have done everything from chiptune grindcore to Bay Area screamo to nu metal. It's times like this I know my faith in my musical abilities is not Dunning-Kruger shit.



* Seriously, have you tried to do this without having to automate every band of an EQ to shift note-by-note? it's a fucking NIGHTMARE, and if you're gonna tell me to break out the comb filters I'm going to tell you to put that shit on some Scriabin-ass synthetic chords so you can hear the pan-pipers of Azathoth for yourself. It is an Incontrovertible Fact that organs, even basic ass synth organs with 3-oscillator formants, are made for filling every frequency above the fundamental with pure clean tonal bands and you had just better hope your tits that you have the headroom in your fucking mix to pull that off.

For me, resting really is normally giving up. Like, in the moment I make that decision -- whatever happens happens, I am down for the count, I don't care.

It's just that when I'm recovered, it's straight back to fucking work.

The two parts are related, too. I can't properly rest if I'm concerned about what happens while I can't do shit about it. But if there's still time to fight when the nap is over, I'm looking for knives.

The key of the fictional work I've been doing is that the protagonists CANNOT win. They will always fail, no matter what they do. But they fight anyway, and yeah, they didn't win. Most of the time it wasn't even a Pyrrhic victory for the antagonists. But they made the antagonists have to pay /something/ for it, rather then getting it for free, and the cost is never trivial.

You never lay down and give up. You can do it for short times, to recover, but when you CAN stand up, you DO stand up.

[5000 angry combat drones]

Hi.

Please stop shitting up the entire fucking forum with your trash. I don't want to log on to see three dozen ancient threads, half of which are garbage, bumped from the ancient abyss with your weirdly racist misuse of non-Latin characters for "lol random", or your "I'm 13 and this is deep" pseudo-philosophy.

Failure to be responsive to this benign request will be met with a decidedly unequal and very opposed reaction, where I will shit up the place even more everywhere you so much as sniff at, so that action /must/ be taken to contain your pointless mess. We will probably both get banned. I am okay with this.

Thanks.
--5000 angry combat drones

That's my new band name.

Everyone should know that your first album, Seasonal Migration Patterns of the MQ-1 Predator, is coming out next year.

Hi.

Please stop shitting up the entire fucking forum with your trash. I don't want to log on to see three dozen ancient threads, half of which are garbage, bumped from the ancient abyss with your weirdly racist misuse of non-Latin characters for "lol random", or your "I'm 13 and this is deep" pseudo-philosophy.

Failure to be responsive to this benign request will be met with a decidedly unequal and very opposed reaction, where I will shit up the place even more everywhere you so much as sniff at, so that action /must/ be taken to contain your pointless mess. We will probably both get banned. I am okay with this.

Thanks.
--5000 angry combat drones

It's been an EVENTFUL few days.

Last night, some lyrics I wrote last year in a very very bad headspace made it into a song by a friend of mine. I really, really hate those lyrics in hindsight, but the song itself might actually be the absolute best ever written in the genre, which has me feeling very autistic (complicated subtype).

I don't get a break, things are so strange.

In other news, I'm really happy with the work I'm doing now. Not paying work, but I don't need to be paid for what I'm doing now.

I'm finally making real use of my networking skills, putting an upcoming musician's demos in the ears of label owners and established musicians. I'm giving her advice on how to pull off a first release without having to use her vocals since she's not confident in them (I suggested a vocal anthology sort of deal, a dozen featured artists on her songs -- and even suggested starting points for artists who would do vocal features), I'm building a small hype crew for her, I'm giving her mix feedback and helping her feel confident in her work.

This? This is stuff I can do, it's stuff I feel good about, it's stuff where EVERY STEP of the process feels fulfilling and is independently very cool to be involved in. I enjoy this. Yeah, I'm still poor and she probably ends up making enough money to be a full-time musician if I can bring it together for her, but I don't care. I enjoy this.

I survived my first ever metal/hardcore show. It was fucking awesome. I don't think anyone here is hot for caveman slam death, cybergrind, drone/powerviolence, or whatever the fuck you call Omerta, but I'm losing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa2ANHa690E

That link goes to Omerta, by the way. I genuinely don't know what you call this shit, it's doing something totally distinct. They were the headliner and while I know /you/ have never seen people brutalize each other to cartoon doll singing over stupid heavy riffs before, I saw a man try to stage dive and nearly not make it because the slamdancers were only two rows behind the stage. (They helped save him, fortunately.)

A meningitis outbreak mishandled like COVID is game over. Humanity doesn't survive that.

Amazing

Oh, Dok. You're mistaken. I'm not growing Borg parts. We're well past that point. There are as many as five drones in various stages of completion. Armament, command-and-control, logistics and R&D are accounted for. We have one more that's harder to place, but she's still early. We're in -- have been, for about a month -- phase 1.c, where I start activating the neural-governor botnets and cutting the decision-restriction tethers. The basic idea starts like a voidtech media crossover event between The Manchurian Candidate and your least favorite zombie movie. After that, things get slightly interesting.

I hope you didn't think the UFO thing was just standard High Strangeness. I've got a soft spot for hokey scifi tropes like that, and John Keel is about to be vindicated.

As far as food goes, there's a boom in home-growing mushrooms the past three years, and I don't mean the fun kind. That's about to become more popular, I think. People are going to learn why fungus is worth making a meal of. Grow lights, too: not just for marijuana operations.

The real fun is going to be when you combine COVID, allowed to run wild with the brakes off, with wide-spread lung damage in a large portion of the population of the US.

The pandemic never ended, it's just been on hiatus. Every turncoat liberal who was so glad to leave the disabled behind is going to be there themselves soon, and we'll be waiting with extra prosthetic limbs and smiles warm as an arson scene. I hope everyone invested in a good mask.

As far as Eris, anyone who ever thought she was here for the hippies and comedians made a grave mistake. Goddess of Discord -- and Strife.

Strife is broken bones and jagged lacerations and a mangled hand iron-gripping your ankle while the half-detached head snarls "No one gets out alive, motherfucker." Strife is knives and guns and tools you don't have words for, invented on the fly and wielded like an expert. Strife is defenestration, a shove into traffic, trash bags left in snowy greenbelt forests.

Strife is not a bad pun and a "let's all be friends here".

Strife is a broken sword, still wet.

Woo, this fucks. Thank you for the honor once again.