A Time Travel Experiment (Week 2)

2001 I really started getting into all things art.  not just music but image editing, drawing, and writing have always been off-and-on interests of mine. So throughout 2002 here's what I was getting into.

Paint shop pro had a free version available so I started using it.  I loved music not just for the sound, but for the album artwork some of my favorite bands had.  I would mess around with Paint Shop Pro and try to design my own stuff; inspired by the previous years of early high-school when my friends would try to jam together with me.  We would spend a lot of time writing as well, mostly lyrics.  As I began my audio journey throughout high-school it became increasingly more solitary.  I still have copies of all my old album covers which were really just ripped off images from my favorite video games at the time. 

To get into the mindset of how a teenager viewed the world especially in an era where the internet was still so free and open and unexplored (and social sites didn't rule the web), I'm going to expand for a bit on the other areas I started taking interest in.

My friends and I decided to go by the name of Virus for our band (silly, but I digress).


 
I loved the game System Shock 2 and Quake 3 Arena, so much of my free time when I wasn't playing videogames I was exploring imaging and audio software.


My own personal alias that sprung out of the band at the time was Little Red Soldiers iNC. which was my first Acidplanet.com profile as well.

The Virus alias stuck around mostly as an excuse for me to play with the visceral game images I'd find online like the one above from Nocturne.

And this one, I don't remember what it came from but I want to say Volition (game developer) at the time Free Space 2 was around.

And then there was a classic game and the first multi-player I remember creating little LAN parties with some friends: Abomination.

DnB as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

My journey with sound was starting to fork.  I was enamored with the ambiances and soundscapes that could be made.  On this track I had played around a bit with recording the audio from an external keyboard (I believe I still had my old Casio around this time).
I took that recorded audio I played along inside of Acid Pro and opened up Buzzmachines and played around with filter and delay modules, and rendered out the sound as a new wave file, imported it in to Acid again and thus had just experimented with the early notions of external processing.  The drum and bass were the typical loops of Futurist Drum and Bass library which I had become quite fond of.

It Has Begun as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

This particular track I used a lot of loops from various libraries, notably Noize Loops, Sony's Liquid Planet, and Orchestral classical series.  Behind the scenes I had been playing around with and discovering FFT audio combing and filtering tools in a program called SoundProbe by HiSoft (though I had no notion of or basic understanding of these tools at the time).  I would layer the original loop and fade in and out between it and the effected versions I had made.  Unfortunately, a lot of the files have been lost over the years trying to go back and open this project.
Unfortunately the original project file for this one is corrupt, but I can tell it was mostly Futurist Drum and Bass loop library. Not much I remember on this one other than just trying to experiment with the soundscapes.
Some of my random excursions with guitar were really just playing around with dark ambient moods and I'd end up with things like the track below.

Thy Flesh Consumed as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

My earliest experiments with really trying to dial in on soundscapes on guitar and playing around with the sonic possibilities of my Vetta combo amp had at the time, became a time sink.  This track also featured the use of Futurist Drum and Bass samples as well as some of the kick samples in Noize Loops (which I reference a lot).  I wasn't so focused on music structure more just listening and discovering what sounded good to me at the time.

Day of Defeat as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

I would take apart drum samples and beats from other people's "mod files" which were shared freely in tracker community sites, and make my own drum loops to bring into Acid Pro.  I'd spend hours just playing around making all kinds of nonsense.  This one also contained a "vocal splat" sample loop from a Sony sample library I have no clue which it belongs to.  I just grabbed the sample loop from a small selection of previews from Sony's website as free demo files from whatever sample library I was browsing through.
All I had as a means to record was my guitar and amp: a Line6 Vetta combo which had direct outs to feed another cabinet.  I used those in both 8 ohm and 16 ohm when double tracking which is why the left and right side sound so vastly different. I was still an infant in terms of recording arts, but experience is experience!  Back then it felt like this was the sound of bands like Fear Factory.
There was so much great music in the tracker communities especially with Metal that I would just strip away the music and render out various little bits, I spent quite a bit of time learning the art of the tracker as a way of composing, but in the end I still ended up taking beats from other people's tracker mods. This one in particular I loved the drum work from a particular track titled "Me Against The World" by Fixxxer.
In a sense, I was doing back then what has become such a big and common thing now with online contests and remix competitions especially with Dance and Pop.  I wasn't doing it for money or notoriety, however; simply to learn. I still had no education on the history of sampling or all the legal statutes growing in the industry.

War With A Beat as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

This one came about as a series of mistakes. In Modplug you can assign samples from ANY file. I accidentally selected a text file from something random and loaded it into a sample slot in the tracker and when I pressed a key to trigger a musical note, noise played back - really cool random noise. I also had been experimenting with the wonderful sounds from one of the few loop libraries I owned at the time - Noize Loops (which interestingly enough was made by Sonic Mayhem; see my previous post).
I had only just been playing around with external audio editors like SoundProbe to filter and create effects, like sections of this song below where the guitars sound "filtered" or band-passed.

Max Payne as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

It wouldn't occur to me until much later, especially as computers and software continued to grow in power and capabilities the power of plugins that things could be done inside of Acid as well as effect audio in real-time or "online" versus "offline".  I managed to recover most of the tracks except for the 2 recordings of bass guitar.  The Explosion sample was randomly found online way back when, and the drums I chopped up and looped from a modplug track called "The One Before Me" by Deceiver, another prominent artist in the modplug community at the time.

Track for EP as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

And an alternate version I made as sort of an outtro for an EP idea.I really wanted to make my own "EP" of sorts but was still discovering so much.  The Background SFX noise is from Pandora's Toolbox I believe.

Alternate version as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

I remember stumbling upon Korn's revamped website which featured some really dark and moody flash animation with music that kind of came across like this, shortly after I was introduced to Korn's Issues album.  It was definitely inspiring to hear and see something so unique, (I believe it was the next day I heard they had released a new album: Untouchables). I was really intrigued by all the dark moody noise Korn was putting out.
This track sprung about from playing around with a ton of drum loops from various sample libraries and then playing my NJ Supreme through my Vetta combo cab with different amp settings.  The bass recorded is an Ibanez SDGR bass direct in.
Aside from a few select tracks from 2001 and earlier, I had no microphone or audio gear, so I had to rely on the Soundblaster audio cards I had at the time to directly plug in the audio outputs from my amps and instruments and record them directly into the computer.
On a quick sidebar. There are a few albums that have had a profound impact on my life, sonically, musically or otherwise.

1. Korn - Issues: the extremely dull and dark mood combined with the angst and the unique vocal style made such an emotional impact that I connected with.  The darker side of humanity was definitely something that attracted me as I'm sure it did a great many of other angsty teens back then.  There was something about the combination of the trashy drums, the huge wall of guitars and clicky bass, and the unorthodox and quirky noises I found really creative, that would seem to just splash together with Jonathan's angry, upset, and even devious voice.
2. Sevendust - Animosity: Out of all the albums even to date, this was the first album I came across from them.  It grew on me so quickly and so deeply it's inspired a lot of the deep melody and sense of hardcore sound about metal that I've come to love.  The particular way they wrote everything from the explosive beats, harsh aggressive guitars, and Lajon's booming voice with just the right amount of emotion only called upon where it counts.  Sonically, the album is another favorite even though extreme opposite to Korn's Issues.
3. Sonic Mayhem - Quake 2 soundtracks.  What's to say? These are just plain awesome.  Instrumental music that was all about aggression with solid drum-work, riffs that are still inspirational, and a sonic signature (no pun intended) that I still look back on and reference.

Onto the techno!

The Hate as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

Lots of playing around with interesting mod files from various trackers across the community led me to a track with the title "propulsion" in it somewhere (I can't find the original mod), which I used as a basis for the beat in this one.  On top of that I had been playing around with Buzzmachines creating synthesizer lines with various modules and ended up coming up with the catchy little synth riff on here.  Futurist Drum and Bass sample library filled in the gaps.

Loner as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

Loner was just a random experiment with the Noize Loops library and practicing cutting up loops from rendering out drum stems from modplug track.  I believe the drums I took from M8, a mod track I took out of Unreal Tournament. I really loved the industrial sound Noize Loops offered and other bands I was discovering at the time like Nine Inch Nails were taking me on another frontier in the audio world especially for the sonic landscapes industrial had to offer.

Futurist as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

Futurist was a pretty quick experiment with the drum and bass libraries.  I mostly wanted to play with the cool bass line and effected it in SoundProbe and Buzzmachines.

The New Reality as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

Mandolin loops I had taken from a Buzzmachines track I forget who by.  There are more ambient noises from Noize Loops I used as well as playing around with them in SoundProbe again, as well as some drum loops.
This was also the year I started writing.  During ROP class, instead of joining the other students on a local Counter-Strike game after the day's assignments were finished, I was busy writing a particularly dark side-project I took up in the form of this collection of odd dreams as inspiration actually fueled my art side to start drawing as well.  Keep in mind I'm still in high-school at this point and these are just sketches.

A lot of these were done toward the end of the year.  I tried to just capture as best I could the particular moments from various scenes in those dreams.

 

Sound Factory as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

Again mostly Noize Loops filled in the beat section, but with more soundscape exploration on guitar. My NJ Supreme guitar has a Floyd Rose Tremolo bridge which allowed me to use the whammy bar for dive bombs and other effects and I think this was the first time I'd ever actually tried it. Same setup with my Vetta Amp, exploring different effects modules.

Hell March as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

Hell March started as a jam session I had with friends earlier in the week and discovered the riffs and we jammed to it for a bit, then later on I came back to the idea and just recorded it and looped it up.  Still discovering arrangement methods for rock music.  Drum samples were taken from the Fixxxer's "Me Against The World" mod track (I loved the drum beat).
 

The Ring as viewed in Acid Pro 7.

The Ring is probably one of my favorite tracks I did in 2002 as I spent so much time creating these new sounds from loops or recordings and other sources.  Noize Loops is used in here again, but I focused more on chopping up, re-sampling and morphing the sounds into my own versions to serve this really random dark ambiance.
By November I had been lucky enough to save up my allowance for doing chores and mowing lawns etc and with the help of my parents, bought my first legal copy of the latest version of Acid Pro 3.0.
My first project in Acid 3.0 was literally titled "1st acid 3 song", but later gave it the name Exodus.  Unfortunately the project file is corrupt so I couldn't get a screengrab of it but I do remember using a few samples from Twine (I don't think it was the same "Intelligent Dance Music" library by sony but another one with the same name).  and a few loops that I had found and cut up and put together with orchestra sounds in them.
Between Metal, Orchestral and melodic stuff like this, industrial, and just plain odd random soundscapes I was making, I was trying to develop a signature if you will.  All these different genres of audio fascinated me.
I was really having fun with this track, trying to blend ambience (Noize Loops) and guitar, with those drum and bass samples.  I haven't found the project file for this one yet.
This track is really wierd because I randomly put together the beat with beatbox samples from some random hip hop library, and then layered in the drum loops in the later half.  This was the first time I had attempted to record guitars with a microphone in a long time and all I had was a cheap knock off of an SM58, running straight into my soundcard.  I also had a friend's Marshall half-stack to play through so the guitar setup is vastly different to what I had been using.
My biggest focus was on the changes in the arrangement with the breakdowns like at :57 seconds.  Noize Loops had some drones I used throughout the track and those were the focus of the arrangement changes.  My only dislike looking back at the arrangement now is the shuffled hip-hop beat, the hip-hop vibe just really throws off the track but created contrast at the time I thought sounded cool.  Moving on.
Still playing around with soundscapes, and exploring what I could do with guitar to create interesting ambiances.  I started with the buzzing in the beginning and took it and made a loop, and that created the various breathing and rhythmic ebb and flow, by resampling and different frequencies it got progressively more lo-fi as I ran it through filters in Buzzmachines modules.  Accompanied by more Noize Loops, and then several guitar layers, and bass which I recorded last.  The last step was playing around with the drum loops from various sample libraries and effecting them to make them sound like they were being played on a trash can set.
The inspiration from this track had also been coming from a story Idea I had been working on at the time in which the sketches above are related to.
Again I can't seem to locate the original project file but I do know some of the sound effects were a loop I chopped up from Futurist Drum and Bass, and the rest was a clean guitar track I recorded, as well as distorted guitar track.  The ambient orchestral stuff was actually some orchestral samples I had chopped up and effected inside of Buzzmachines and rendered back out.
This track I remember wanting to capture an emotion much the way Nine Inch Nails would have. It was towards the end of the year and I had grown to love the entire The Fragile album which just felt like Trent's masterpiece. The comment I received on this track via Acidplanet back when I had posted it: 

I like what you've done here. It totally reminded me of a NIN instrumental tune. I can see where you're saying for letting all the industrial noise fly or keep it a really low key ambience. I think it could work either way really... when I listened to it, I mentally pictured what it would be like if the guitars just went off the handle and started going mental. All depends upon the mood you're in when you're sitting down and creating I suppose.  

This track I made I can't even find the project or the original recordings for but I do remember it fondly.  This was the last track I had done just before christmas and I had switched back to some earlier Korn inspiration: Follow The Leader.  The track was really pretty simple with just a few guitar recordings and the drum samples from various libraries.  I really loved the mood and emotion the particular effect the rotary and phaser effects had on guitar for a laid back riff like in this track.
Keep in mind this is a time travel experiment.  I haven't updated, changed or altered the material in any way.  These are just as they were left in 2002.  The recording quality and production value speaks for itself, but I'd like to dive in a bit on the context of the material.  It's fairly obvious when I've looped a recording and when the guitar recording just plays straight through.  I also still hadn't discovered any of the built in effects Acid would provide especially come version 3.  Direct-X had started to offer some basic effects that would later be replaced by VST plugins as the industry is so prominent with now.
If anyone would like to share their thoughts on the piece I welcome all criticism!  Next stop, 2003...

DISCLAIMER: 

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!