mostly made of bandlez samples, ran out of bass shots on the second drop, so I started combing through barely alive's essential pack as well.
weed haha.
out on Audius before RZRKT's version blew up so i'm not calling it a remix. 
now on soundcloud because it's just sat here in private for like a year and isn't on HERE FFS.

LCKDWN - Back To The Madness

it's been a minute, but here's a new one.

oddprophet did this video about square 4 and put this wavetable that wasn't actually "absolutely free" up for people to download. I dropped that into serum and phaseplant, made a few drops, then added chords and arps with kepler exo and sylenth for the melodic sections. drums are from the graphyt/ecraze collab pack + a cymatics hat loop. somewhere in there a serum patch from au5's lazerpack got modded with the square 4 table and some other tweaking but most of it was pieced together in phaseplant more or less from scratch.

on the mixdown level i've started using waves idx and cytomic the glue along with better gain staging. there's an ott on the master now, a lot of notching things out at appx 250hz, heavy use of these plugins FL24 introduced called low lifter and spreader... different 808s... generally it all seems to be making a decent amount of difference as far as i can tell.

LCKDWN - Square 4 Anthem

This is a free bonus track that has been replaced by "The 2nd Elixir" on here FFS. I had been including it on the album to fill space previously and "The 2nd elixir" turned out better to the point repurposing this one started making sense. The project was started in late September 2020 and has taken until now to be ready for release. Everything arrangement-wise was assembled pre-serum2, and the low patch count also contributed to why it's been relegated to the B-side group. Mixing and mastering-wise it's a lot of the same chains from the other more recent uploads with waves idx, cytomic the glue, image-line spreader/low lifter, and ott being the main plugins of note there. more 250hz notching and also some bell curve boosts on the hats at 10khz and bass-type sounds at 90hz EQ-wise. i'm also making sure everything rolls off at either 33hz or 100hz depending on how much lowend's supposed to be there. i'm also getting builds & fx to work differently so leads sit on top better than before.

LCKDWN - Misalignment

Because everything's going to shit in north america faster than you can say "signal group chat", here's a "new and improved" version of #canuckedup featuring new soundbytes from the trade war, improved mixing and mastering, way better sidechaining, and a small sound design change in drop 2.

one thing i had to do with this project is route 17 tracks to a single bus channel, then sidechain the instrumental track to that bus channel so all the soundbytes sat on top of the mix properly. a few clips also needed extra OTT to cut through properly.

sampled politicians are justin trudeau, trump, doug ford, elizabeth may, pp, jagmeet singh and mark carney. there's also an autogen'd female british voice in a few places and a news anchor who's definitely around in canadian media... their name currently escapes me.

Instrumental version to follow, which should allow the improvements to the mix and master to be heard more clearly. The instrumental will be included on here FFS but this version is for free download.

Please excuse the delay as i usually try to make sure the april drop occurs on 420. Tbh the album was supposed to be out then more seriously than any other release date i've attempted but i'm still a few more months out from having it ready. Time to work on it with speakers on the way i need is limited and sporadic in my current living situation unfortunately. Progress is being made though, and we're closer to the release than the start, even though this thing's been in development hell for almost a decade now.

LCKDWN - #canuckedup 2025 ("tariff edition" vocal mix)

Festival Trap written in the Phrygian mode with a start note of A#5, the lead's pitch changes were achieved by automating a serum macro in 2 different directions.
The first drop is influenced by festival trap and the 2nd by the music of peekaboo.

This track is meant to score the cover art for "Here! FFS!",
I used pirhana plant chops from yoshi's island to simulate the sounds of cyborg pirhana, and a sequence of royalty free sfx to simulate an explosive cd being tossed into a large fishtank, frying the cyborgs. at the end, some of them re-activate.

1. LCKDWN - Stun Grenade (Album Mix)

Technically Lydian with a C3 Start Note, the general idea with this was to parody a really monotonous style of Riddim where barely any notes are used and even the sound design in the drops is really monotone and static. This is meant to contrast stun grenade's developed Phrygian mode melody and extreme pitch changes on the drops. 
The result is a hypnotic, yet somewhat haunted sounding loop that maintains its repetition as the drums progress through their evolutionary cycle. Sylenth layers are added and subtracted in order to help maintain the progression. 
The first drop is styled with a similar "classic riddim" feel to "as requested", but Akai Fire knob automation was not used, resulting in a more refined flow.  i added a couple of extra sounds about halfway through drop 1 to switch it up a bit then for drop 2 i linked like 12 parameters to a serum macro then automated that resulting in some very squnto-esque textures. this thing can put you to sleep then wake you right back up or something like that XD 
For the 2nd drop, a serum macro linked to several different parameters made use of drawn automation to create some squnto-esque sounds, with a prominent sub-bass layer adding some interesting textures underneath. 

The drops of this project will be studied closely as we proceed onward from "Here FFS", as the techniques applied here will likely prove useful for quite some time. I'll try to keep most of my future melodies a bit more complex than this though, the simplicity of those sections is intentional. Feel free to Skip around. 
The vocal sample is my voice pitched down several octaves. 
The phrase, "Time to smoke a giant cloud", is a reference to the cloud shaped bags used by Volcano and Extreme Q vaporizer units.

3. LCKDWN - Giant Cloud (Album Mix)

Another Festival Trap Written in the Locrian mode with E3 as the Start Note. In all honesty a lot more of the album was supposed to be beats like this with only like 5-7 tracks and more of an EP type thing happening and significantly more primitive production happening. What has instead manifested is a far more developed album than originally planned where i got a lot more experimental about a lot more things and stood on business with it to a greater degree than planned. now that that's out of the way, the first drop of this track specifically was produced with similar methods to stun grenade while the 2nd drop used a preset that somehow or other came from psychic type's 789ten content (I think a tutorial vid?) that gave the right kind of hard trap type vibe. the kind of thing guys like saymyname, thugli, and even in a few cases flosstradamus did back in the day. I also went for a more house-type arrangement structure with a few of these tracks adding intros and outros of a type of nature you definitely do not often see in bass music. like i said, a lot more boundaries got pushed with this whole thing here than i originally thought would be the case from 2015 right up to covid. covid changed a lot about how this project has been approached tbh, as did various things about mixing and mastering i've learned since releasing earlier versions of some of these tracks.

7. LCKDWN - General Consensus (Album Mix)

This was my first solo track released, and the first single from "HERE! FFS!". Hard dance in nature with a few trappy sections thrown in for good measure. Hard Drop with trap leads for the first drop, and hardstyle with dubstep sounds on the 2nd. this could be considered a forerunner to my "hybrid trapstyle" concept, which will be explored in greater detail over the course of time.Not Modal With an F3 Start note and a sylenth rev bass, this track technically is called both Atomic Riot and #canuckedup and there have been a few other versions with a few different politicians' voices but for the album we're going full instrumental and mostly just fixing the unmuted normal kick during the hardstyle sections. I would define this track as half Hard House and half hardstyle with the infusion of various dubstep elements throughout. unlike most of this album which was made during covid, this track started with slightly older projects made around 2018 which were then combined with newer covid era additions. I sort of ragequit with it around 2020 after discovering how far the bad laptop could get me, got it far enough with the v1 thinkpad to release the earlier versions, then discovered later the sidechains were not even remotely adequate having been done with lfotool at that time rather than the far more effective cytomic the glue-powered method now being used. i legit bought cytomic the glue to get the ableton slappage in fl because fruity limiter still just wasn't doing it and technically you're not supposed to use limiters for sidechaining anyway. going forward i'm hoping to move toward waves c6 for my sidechaining followed by fabfilter pro mb. 
and now just for a minute: this track is indeed a score for a canadian riot (and i mean a real one) 7 or 8 times the size of the convoy and about 18 times angrier. but this mob of smashing canadians is not motivated by something as stupid as masks and needles in the middle of a pandemic. no sir. this shit is about Canada's EXTREMELY PRESSING need to sign and ratify the UN Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons as soon as humanly possible. as is the liberals seem to believe that the NPT, a treaty from 1968, is sufficient to cover canada's ass in the event of a modern conflict and i am sorry but that is thoroughly and completely false. the TPNW, Est 2017, is far more effective, providing additional protections against use of the weapons that the NPT objectively does not have.  More on this in other descriptions, not enough characters allowed here to get into Mark Carney and his role in all this, but he has one and it isn't good. at all.

8. LCKDWN - #Canuckedup (Atomic Riot Album Mix)

Non-Modal with a combination of sylenth and a sample handling a bass cycling between C3 and C4 and a minor scale/chord structure, this is my attempt at making handz up, an earlier style of edm popularized between about 2005 and 2007 and made by such artists as cascada, manian, tune up, rob mayth, dan winter, the real booty babes, jorg schmid, ced tecknoboy, dj tht, scooter, italobrothers, deepforces, and several others. i procrastinated for way too long on writing the melody for this track and still am not 100% convinced it's my best work but i'm leaving it as is for the sake of actually getting this album out. i've continued with the multi sound drop theme and i hope that doesn't offend a bunch of german people or something. also went on for quite a while with a fairly repetitive melody but the drums are evolving the whole time underneath and i've done my best to make sure the sidechain brings as much of that as possible to the forefront. for the most part i think i've captured the handz up sound pretty well with most of the elements in this one. it's also worth noting that this is the only track on the album that makes use of a hardware synthesizer with 4 layers of the chord stack and 4 layers of the lead stack coming from my roland gaia sh-01 on different supersaw wave variation settings. i reverse my saw waves so technically they're "superramps" but yeah. there are also about 8 sylenth layers on the lead and at least 2 on the chords. i prefer sylenth over nexus because i think it gives more of a real synthesizer feel but eventually nexus probably will be purchased. it hasn't been used anywhere on this album though. mostly sylenth, serum, phaseplant and vital with a lot of the samples coming from cymatics. also air hybrid in a few places but not on this track.

14. LCKDWN - Raised Palms (Album Mix)

Tearout written in the Neopolitan mode with an F#4 Start Note, takara essentially details the current canon for what happened to my old alias DJ Cataract. in real world terms though i really would appreciate not being cancelled further for anything that happened there. I was in an atrocious state of mental health when certain posts were made on what was then still twitter and these matters contribute to my willingness now to take meds such as paliparidone and fluvoxamine. can we leave it at that or do people have to be even more bullshit than they've already been? like fuck man.

11. LCKDWN - Takara (Album Mix)

Melodic Dubstep written in the Blues Scale with minor 9th chords and an F#5 Start Note. For the last track on the album i attempted to break down my production process in the style of "how to produce a club track today" by DJs from mars and Dubba Johnny's "how to make dubstep" series. production-wise i've aimed for something resembling a wonkier version of supernova with several patches from that project being utilized and other sounds being added in a manner i'd hoped to include in supernova before i straight up ran out of time. one of those sounds turned out to be something i was able to make a pretty good second drop off of. the voice came from www.voicemaker.in's "kendra" preset which i hope won't lead to legal trouble later.

15. LCKDWN - Greenleaf (Explicit Album Mix)

Leftfield written in the Dorian mode with an A4 Start Note, this was one where i went for more laidback wakaan/deadbeats style sounds and drums, employing extra melodic leads and house-style intro/outro arrangement structures. the title was what it was before facebook decided this was the name of their parent company but if it has hilarious effects on them fantastic. the "space bongos" in the intro & outro also are helpful as a followup to the end quip in takara about the aliens' presence on earth being to film their equivalent of a nature documentary, with a vibe very much like being deep in the jungle established from the getgo. this in my humble opinion is one of the better melodic works i'm showcasing here but the opinions of others may differ on that.

12. LCKDWN - Meta Switch (Album Mix)

Mixolydian Tearout with a D#3 Start Note, the idea was basically to create as bombastic a dubstep track as possible. Credit to Graphyt for the samples from his heavyweight pack WHICH I BOUGHT and used for drop 2.

2. LCKDWN - Oxidizer (Explicit Album Mix)

This is the first arrangement I built all the way out in FL studio, exported, and privately distributed to a limited group under this name, it has intentionally been released on 420 in keeping with the themes of the track. The first drop has leftfield flavours, while the 2nd drop is riddim. There were itunes-centered issues with ditto in regard to the cover art, so on platforms powered by that distributor, the cover is different. Non-Modal with a B5 Start Note. Drop 1 uses a sylenth patch i copied from an old youtube tutorial that was meant to emulate "cthulhu sleeps" by deadmau5.

4. LCKDWN - Blaze Up (Explicit Album Mix)

Every non-percussive sound in this track was made using serum 2. The melodic sections use a horn patch i'm very glad was included with the upgrade while the drops have a more brosteppy sound, it isn't modal and its start note is C6. some have said the melodic sections feel like walking in the woods, i sort of think they sound like hogwarts. a fully deep dub vip has also been released on audius as a LCH-NSS remix. The pre-release version uses a "fuck off" sample that it turns out had been used in a datsik track, so i replaced that with the clip from "rock and roll will take you to the mountain" by skrillex that i'd been mainly thinking of in the first place. tbh there have been quite a few tracks over the course of dubstep history that used british guys going "and fuck you"/"and fuck off", but the skrillex one was what i mainly had in mind. drop 1 is mostly from the serum 2 factory bank, then with drop 2 i started messing with LFOs on a bunch of parameters with 3 oscillators, each loaded with either square 4, the virtual riot growl table, or random cymatics wavetables plus 2 filters set to crazy formant or phaseflange settings. drums & fx are from the deadmau5 xfer pack, sounds of kshmr vol2, and various cymatics packs.

5. LCKDWN - The 2nd Elixer (Explicit Album Mix)

Once again non-modal with a start note of F#4, this track was made to celebrate getting production capabilities back after having to spend about 2 years with a severely underpowered machine that could barely handle exporting things if at all and also crapped out even harder under heavy stressloads. the old machine could objectively never have handled what this one has barely managed but this one does seem to have finally done it, if just barely. I went brostep with the drops but also played in the melody with my alesis v25 doing heavy editing of the take in the daw after the fact to give it the complex flare it in the end has. some have described the melody as japanese sounding while i think i accidently got a bit too close to using the melodic lead from #canuckedup/atomic riot again. they're from 2 different plugins though, like native instruments vs image-line sytrus. i'm finding fl's new chord generator also seems to be ok at generating acceptable sequences if you feed it a riff first and don't just totally slot machine it. Between all the editing, the initial length of the take, and the various experimental flippings of it we wound up with unusually long melodic sections while the drops are fairly short taking us to 7 minutes in length just with the drops that long. Given how long this album in the end wound up being i think i'm glad i cut them off where i did tbh

for those who don't know, the LOIC (low orbit ion cannon) is a hacker-type tool that allows an ordinary citizen to either start a ddos attack or participate in an existing one. a favourite of groups like anonymous. i've been thinking about giant space lasers writing this one too though.

some of the idea with this one was to get good growl wubs happening in serum. stuff like they used to have back in the brostep era, which apparently only certain people now remember. then there was some messing around with this jaw harp patch in vital, various other sound design experiments in serum and vital, drums from a tearout pack this youtube tutorial reccommended, some cymatics stuff, there was a virtual riot wavetable from somewhere other than splice that helped a lot... yeah. kepler exo and sylenth1 for the melodic stacks because that seems to be lower CPU drainage. trying to do it with serum is like... instant maxout on a 4.4ghz quadcore. glad i'm at least working with that now instead of 1.1ghz now though. if anyone's wondering why i didn't drop in forever that's like 7/10ths of it. the asus couldn't even render anything.

at the mix & master level it's a lot of mid-side eq to fix the mono problems, better gain staging, bunch of notching at 250hz, cytomic the glue sidechains, waves idx, ott on the master, lots of low lifter and spreader... things like that.

6. LCKDWN - LOIC (Album Mix)

Not Modal with D5 as the Start Note, production-wise we're in very similar territory to #canuckedup/atomic riot but in this case, we went for drops with more sounds (some of which were a serious headache to even kind of properly balance) and a theme more in the vein of scoring an airshow than a riot. the hardstyle kick also took a while to balance right with this with there being a very thin line between too loud and too quiet. the quack lead also took some serious boosting to get so it was properly audible, kind of like with the melodic lead in general consensus. some rules from algonquin music industry arts about peaking meters at -6 and not boosting above 5.8db on EQs had to be broken to properly mix some of these drops but for the most part i've followed the rules from that time period to the best of my ability in making this album.

9. LCKDWN - Airborne Antics (Album Mix)

Non-Modal with a C#4 Start Note, Hard Drop type production with some elements of breaks and a continuation of the multi-sound drop themes not usually found in most hard dance tracks. there is a longer version with more rick and morty samples floating around that was made earlier, but i've been told something about samples 15 seconds or less in length being ok to use so hopefully using a couple of rick & morty phrases doesn't get me sued by adult swin or something. There was an era when this project was called skyrun but i decided that was too similar to airborne antics so now this version is the skyrun vip. at one point the vital patches weren't loading properly but this seems to have now been fixed by various updates to the different pieces of software.

13. LCKDWN - Tree People (Skyrun VIP Album Mix)

This track was created with the posthumous help of a very good friend who sadly passed away in 2018 after a long battle with Sarcoma.

I reworked a pre-existing backing track that her family was unhappy with into the future bass-inspired instrumental heard here using FL Studio. Sytrus and Serum were both used extensively to create this track, along with cymatics samples, Xfer OTT, and various waves plugins. This was the first track I ever worked on to be formally released.

This current version has so far amassed 267 plays on Youtube, and an unknown number on Spotify. With permission from Kait's Comfort Kits, it has now been uploaded here as well, along with Audius(a similar, lesser-known alternative to soundcloud).

An updated edit that will be created using newly acquired outboard synthesizers will likely be released in future years, but the exact timeline of this project is currently unknown...

Angeline Shannon - Supernova (Prod. By LCKDWN)

Bookings & Inquiries: djlckdwn@proton.me

I'm a hard dance & dubstep producer from this weird island-type thing sticking out in the middle of lake ontario on the Canadian side between toronto and kingston. democratic socialist done af with what's happening to the south of me and what's happening here at home too. hardcore stoner who regularly smokes delta-9 distillate and owns a volcano. who i am and am not aligned with is on substack to pretty decent extent at this point. it's like that though. there are people i am and am not down with in this thing and i also don't think much of my regional industry's current incarnation (as in... eastern canada dubstep/dnb promoters) in a lot of areas. Primarily FL Studio based but also have varying degrees of experience with ableton, bitwig, pro tools, maschine, cubase, logic, studio one, audition, etc. Own 9 hardware synths but that's more for the next album. Bought cytomic the glue to get the ableton sidechain in fl but probably moving toward waves c6 and pro mb long-term. upcoming genres to be attempted include jump up, hard techno, more dubstep, bass house, and more hardstyle fusion stuff. next album somewhere between 2028 & 2032.

DJ LCKDWN

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