Trance And Chillout Mix 2012

Trance And Chillout Mix 2012

So my new project over the past few months (check it out in the link above) has been trying to teach myself how to use a music programming software. I encountered Fruity Loops back when it was still called that almost a decade ago, and never really could make anything of it. I didn't know anyone who was producing at the time and that was right before i had had any musical education with the exception of the recorder they try and teach you in third grade or whatever. And obviously that wasn't enough.

So having given up i moved on to other things, i played in classical orchestras, then small jazz bands, all the while learning music theory and all that. At the beginning my amazement with music and EDM pushed me to try and do that myself, but without anywhere to start i failed and ended up just exploring the genres and really getting myself familiar with all types of music and their similarities and differences. That obsession with listening to music and collecting and discovering continues to this day.

In high school i met a few people who knew how to use their program of choice, be it logic, ableton, or FL studio and i passed it off as something i thought was a cool talent. Like finding out someone can juggle really well, but it didn't make me want to force them to teach me.

So, here i am back at trying my hand at figuring out FL studio. This time around I've found a bunch of resources to refer to, and tools to use to teach myself how to produce or mix music. I'm surprised to say that i can actually build chords and use the keyboard piano with some idea of what i'm trying to do. I chose this program because its always been user friendly and really helps me learn all the components clearly without a whole pile of technical jargon being thrown at me. I have a few others i may go back to and see if i understand them more but FL is enough for me right now. And seeing as Naden creates some of my favorite music with this program at least i know its capable of that and that's enough for me.

The name I've kind of chose for now has been The Vulgar Vagrant. Intentionally a more darker name since that's what i wanted to do more of initially. For the lighter stuff tend to think of it as "V2"'s work in my head. The nickname doesn't come with the image the full name brings with it, so the name works both ways. I didn't run this by anyone but i couldn't really think of who to ask that i wanted knowing i was starting this project. I tend to be pretty secretive of stuff until I've been doing it for a while. I didn't even tell anyone i was writing this blog for like two months. I don't know why writing to the abyss was satisfying enough to me, but sometimes it is. Kind of goes with my quieter personality i guess.

On to this first mix, which was wrought with troubles. For one, the playlist of music i wanted to use wasn't adding in. About 50% of the songs wouldn't decode and just turned up blank. It seemed to be happening to 9 minute plus tracks and that really cut out my choices with trance. Once that happened, the order i put them in went out the window, and the hunt for clips was not helping, more on that later.

Because i couldn't use the order i wanted all my transitions were sloppy to non existent  I feel as if i'm trying to emulate what i hear when i listen to a track, but the musician who made that playlist intentionally hid a bunch of things from the audience to make it sound smooth so i can't use them on my end. Since then I've pulled off approximately two transitions with any sort of dignity. Its definitely something i wish someone would just sit me down and teach me in an afternoon. But oh well, its a process.

Now, at first i thought this was due to not being able to use the songs i wanted, but I've now learned i'm completely incapable of cleanly doing this yet. So this is probably one of my first goals i'd like to learn.

One thing i tried to do with this first mix was add in clips of whatever i thought was fitting. In this endeavor i came across some really freaky shit on YouTube. I was looking for some audio clips of someone talking about relaxing which led me straight to ASMR. This is some weird bottom of the barrel fringe shit right here. you're supposed to sit and listen to this person talk with a directional 3-D microphone about weird shit and tap tap tap on glass or scratch things in their house. The quality of the microphone makes it wicked realistic but the problem is, the closer you get to something being realistic the more you drop into the uncanny valley. This is the feeling you get from things that are too real, but off in a way that makes you feel uneasy. After listening to a bunch of these videos i was audibly screaming into my computer screen and yelling out how weird whatever i was watching was. It really did not sit well with me.

Although the first clip in the mix did work out pretty well, as did the others. I put in a clip of hunter s thompson at 10:45, A Cheech and Chong quote from Up In Smoke that i had a really hard time finding at 20 mins even, and wanted to add in something at the end of some chick saying "isn't that better" or something along those lines but i was too afraid to go back to that ASMR hell hole i was in an hour or two before so i left it how it was.

Its a pretty good list of songs, not completely what i wanted, but its a start.