A Time Travel Experiment (Week 1)

Welcome to the time travel experiment.  First, a few ground rules: I am sharing my personal projects that have never been released.  They've never been released for a reason: they have no purpose nor is the quality "professional".  I am revealing my processes about how things were made and what I used, and there will be a lot of sample libraries and other people's work's cited.  However, I cannot possibly cite every little thing so if I can't find or forget to mention where I got a particular resource from I'm sorry; and I am in no way trying to take credit for their work. 

Please keep in mind this is an opportunity to share my personal growth.  I'd like to share that with people, so don't just listen to the tracks being posted without reading the context.  I do however welcome all comments, criticism, etc.  You can flame all you like, it's not going to change the fact that what happened, happened.  It exists, for better or worse, so at least keep your comments purposeful! 

Without getting too nostalgic, I think I'll start back as early as my saved projects go.  The year is 2001, and having barely started playing the guitar for a year I was extremely interested in starting to record sounds.  Armed with a computer, windows, and a Creative Sound-blaster audio card I set about with a pirated version of Acid Pro 2.0 (then owned by Sonic Foundry).  The genius software was centered around looping which to me was "the bees knees". Especially for a kid in high-school with no prior or formal background in the industry.

My Acidplanet profile is still up, and the earliest project posts date back to 2001.  I was fresh on my audio journey and a large portion of my free time (outside of school) was spent on PC games.  Quake 2, Quake 3: Arena, and Starcraft were where I started developing relationships with online communities.  The only other real friend of mine interested in having lan parties and playing these games together was also hugely competitive and thus a lot of my time centered around gaming, starting modding projects like making custom maps, and music.

I remember tinkering around with sample libraries and this pirated version of Acid Pro and just going bonkers making all kinds of nonsense.  I would even take apart games for their sound files and try to make something with them in the D.A.W. 

Out of that year, only 3 real projects made it onto my Acidplanet.  Unfortunately a lot of my other stuff back then wasn't labelled, saved together, or just plain got lost to time as files would get migrated over the years from computer to new computer.  Hard Drives would die, files would become corrupt, etc.

Acid Planet was a huge community at the time and I remember wanting to find my spot in there, but without any real sense or scope of the music industry under my belt I was happy just to share my creations (even if they were mostly sample library driven and ripping sound bytes from some of my favorites at the time).

Note the opening sound is used quite extensively throughout the track. I had ripped a sample from Rob Zombie's Hellbilly Deluxe album: Track #12 - Return of the Phantom Stranger, and proceeded to just mangle it up.  From 2:20 forward the guitar was pretty much the only original material I had to contribute, recording my first guitar (a Fender Stratocaster knockoff) through a cheap mini 5" amp combo, with an SM57 microphone directly into my sound-card.

I had no concept or understanding of copyright law back then or anything, so to me grabbing sounds I wanted to use - stuff that sounded cool, was open game.  The next track below you can hear the opening to Hellbilly Deluxe Track #13: The Beginning of the End used quite extensively as well.


I was enamored with the sonic style that the album had and this was one of the first albums that really got my attention with the metal genre.  The symphonic attempt was a direct output from an old Casio keyboard I used to own that I recorded and tried a few times to get what I was trying to hear.


Acidplanet has always held lots of remix competitions (and still does).  The artists featured used to be both professional and ones from the community all meshed together, and I would always grab these remix assets and play around with them.  This track was by far the longest thing I've ever attempted to make mostly because I had an idea that I wanted to have a certain number of changes but I ended up getting sucked into the sound-scapes that each segment allowed me to create that I lost track of the timing in general.

Unfortunately there isn't much I can cite on these as I don't have the Acid project files anymore and I could never remember what sample libraries I used, but you can be sure a lot of the drums were pulled from modplug communities, and Sony's sample libraries.  The synths I would often run through Buzzmachines, another type of modular tracker that I had found in the sea of the internet.

The rest of the year was filled with enjoying all kinds of new hobbies, like modding PC games, Team Fortress and Counter-Strike.  Lots, and lots of Counter-Strike.  However toward the end of the year I started to shift toward playing guitar more (just listening with headphones through a Line6 Pod 2.0) and playing video games less.

Come Christmas my parents were super generous when I discovered my most expensive Christmas gifts ever: A Line6 Vetta combo amp (I still have to this day) and a B.C. Rich NJ Supreme guitar

Old photo I took long ago.

The next year would be a very busy one...

I'm hoping to post a new time travel experiment each week.  So, that gives me time to start rouding up my resources and rediscover my old projects.  Until then, feel free to leave comments and feedback.  If you simply want to share your journey, I encourage it! Please be sure to link me to your similar blogs or wherever you want to share!  Thanks for reading, and until next time...