"featuring Captain Jean-Luc Picard"

This is the first electronic track I ever made, back when I was a teenager in high school.  I downloaded a program called FruityLoops (which is still around, btw) and used the built-in samples and synthesizers, along with a vocal sample of Patrick Stewart from Star Trek: The Next Generation, to put it all together.

Notable praise: a friend of mine at the time told me it was "pretty cool."

Piece of Trash

After downloading FruityLoops, I tried out a different program called Sonic Foundry Acid, which I believe is also still around, but now owned by Sony.  The program was aimed at loop-based music production, and was pretty easy to use, so I spent some time hunting down samples that I could use to put some music together.

I eventually came across this phat trove of funk guitar licks, which I used to create the background texture for this track, then added a bunch of drum loops and other filler on top.  The bassline was more-or-less ripped off from the track "Magic Fly" by Trance Atlantic Airwaves, which was an interesting but little-known side project by the main dude behind the group Enigma, Michael Cretu.  (You can check the original track here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj2RtZYkO0A)

I played this track for another friend of mine, and her comment was, "it sounds like background music for a video game that never existed."  Not sure if that was meant to be a compliment or a major diss, but either way, I couldn't disagree.

Funky Persuasion

Not contented with the four-on-the-floor dance groove, I later tried putting together a slower track, also using Acid.  I remember driving my brother crazy while working on this because he thought the cranky-sounding synth loop in the background was repetitive and annoying.  After rediscovering this track on my hard drive when I got into college, I realized he was maybe onto something there.

I added a bunch of stupid vocal samples thrown onto this track for what I assumed at the time was good measure.  Years later, me and a friend of mine with a lot more talent for this kind of music production got to talking, and one of the things he told me was, "I don't understand why people put vocal samples into music for no good reason.  They don't add any meaning to the track if they don't relate to it somehow."  This is a pretty good example of that!

Ambient Track

The same friend that taught me about his disdain for meaningless vocal samples also used to run an informal association of electronic music artists back in the late 90s and 2000s.  While I had somehow become a part of that group with my meager offering of tracks, most of the members were actually quite talented and put together a large number of high-quality tunes over the years, many of which I still have saved and listen to from time to time when I'm feeling a bit nostalgic.

Fast forward a few years, and the group's membership is dwindling, there's less activity, and the whole thing is starting to peter out.   As a way to stoke the flames a bit, my friend organizes a "contest" for the members to see who can put together the best remix of C + C Music Factory's "Everybody Dance Now."  I had never tried remixing anything, but I had the samples and the software, so I gave it a shot.  This was the result.  It's a good example of the "breaks" style of electronic music, where breakbeats are layered with elements of techno, house and other traditional styles.

I didn't win the contest, but man, check out those awesome outfits.

Dancenow Remix

As a young teenager, I had grown up listening mostly to oldies, classic rock, pop, hip hop and whatever else was popular on the radio at the time, and it wasn't really until I got into high school that I started getting interested in electronic music.  I spent a decent amount of time exploring artists and genres that fell under that umbrella, and one area of electronica that I found particularly interesting was the so-called "Ninja Tune" style, popularized by the label of the same name, and notable for its use of dark, mysterious and minimalist drum & bass rhythms.  Perhaps one of the most clichéd examples of this style is Photek's "Ni Ten Ichi Ryu," which is almost comical in its inclusion of Kurosawa-era soundtrack clips and stereotypical Buddhist instrument samples, but gets the point across fairly well (hear it here: http://youtu.be/9qJKxaWb0_A).

"Sattaday" was my attempt at a similar track, and in my opinion, was a moderate success.  It suffers from the "unnecessary vocal sample" issue, but maybe less so than other tracks I put together at the time.  There's not a whole lot of meaning behind the title, other than the fact that I'm pretty sure I put the track together in one go on a Saturday afternoon, and spelling things incorrectly automatically makes them cool on the internet.

Sattaday

"THE TRACK THAT MADE ME FAMOUS"

...well, for a few months, at least, it did... somewhat.  Back in the late 90s, a new online service called mp3.com had sprung up, and became a sort of mecca for independent artists that wanted to get their music out to people online.  This particular track was the first I had uploaded to the site, and it quickly rose to the top of the drum & bass chart within its first week of being listed.  At the time, mp3.com had just started paying artists per listen, and about a month later, I received a check from them for a few hundred dollars, along with a snazzy shoulder bag embroidered with the site's logo.  They apparently liked what I was doing!

I had made it big!  Finally, someone took the time to notice the herculean effort I put forth on idle weekdays after school, and decided that my contributions to society were worthy of compensation.  I dreamed big -- I'd keep raking in the dough, quit my part-time job as a 7-11 cashier, and use my new-found stream of income to finance a studio and work full-time on producing electronic music -- but as with most windfalls in my life, it was simply too good to be true.  Within two or three months of putting my tracks onto the website, the service was bought by international media conglomerate Vivendi Universal, who wasted little time in kicking out the independent artists from the site, and attempted to turn it into a hub for commercial music.  It failed miserably, and in 2001, the site was sold to CNET for $5 a share, $23 below its IPO price of $28 per share just a few years prior.  My internet fame, as a result, was similarly short-lived, and my own interest in trying to produce this kind of music dwindled out shortly thereafter.

The track itself is really nothing special: a bunch of breakbeats chopped up over a simple bassline, a few jungle-ish sounding instrumental samples to go with it, and of course, the ever-present, unnecessary vocal samples.  The reason I called the track Thirteen was because the background radio transmission samples, swathed in juicy, wet reverb, were taken from the Apollo 13 flight.   didn't have any particular affinity for this small slice of history, but I did think the samples were kinda cool, and just creepy enough to add an eery feeling to the track.  I told people it was my "inspiration" for the tune, though, and it apparently worked!

Thirteen

BONUS: some drum & bass crap I never finished!  Kinda liked where this one was going, but as you can hear, it needed a little work to really come up to snuff.

Just like everything else I made back in those days!

Unfinished D&B Tune

Assignment for coursera jazz improvisation class.  My favorite take, but the recorder ran out of memory and the audio is cut off a little bit.

Short improvisation over 'What Is This Thing Called Love?'

Assignment for coursera jazz improvisation class.  Full take but not as good as the shorter take

Longer improvisation over 'What Is This Thing Called Love?'

I am a big, green lizard. 我輩はトカゲである。

biggreenlzrd