A song requested for a website that never came to be. I wanted a wide-sounding, minimal synth track that wouldn't be too imposing on the listener.

An electro-poppish song that finally received vocals, a rarety. I usually want to add vocals to a track but laziness prevents me from sitting down and writing some. This song has sat for several months without until I finally tried to salvage the core elements within the song.

A song composed as a backing for a Half-Life 2 video showing copious crossbow "abuse". I programmed a beat using a standard Battery patch, then switched patches and rearranged to get a less standard-issue sound. The beat studders a few times giving it a double-time feel. I was going for loud and violent. The inspiration was from a glitch in Half-Life 2 where you could use the crossbow to twist and distort characters in the game to the point where they would twitch and flail about on their own. I made a couple videos out of this by taking screenshots as quickly as I could then combining the non-standard framerate pictures into a 30fps clip. It gave the video a real "tool-esque" claymation look and it was kind of disturbing. Hence the music.

A cute little synth based song, composed entirely using reFX's Vanguard and LinPlug's RMIV. I mostly used Vanguard's built-in arpeggiator, and layered the melodies. The drums are using the cool "synth-drum" aspects of RMIV that allows you more control over the tone and timbre of the individual drum sounds. I later discovered MicroTonic by Sonic Charge, and now use that primarily for my synth drums, but RMIV, though not as expressive, is still fun to play with every now and then.

A short guitar-doubling test without vocals. Hard then soft. I wanted to turn this song into a full rock tune with vocals and verses and bridges, but once again laziness keeps me away. As you work on projects and upgrade your gear you can't always go back to the old songs and bring them back from the dead. I still like the result of the experiment.

A heavy guitar/synth mix, with my favorite style of heavy drums. Never received vocals. I thought this one had a lot of potential, because of the change-ups and instrumentation, but who knows if the versions of Amplitube I using at the time will still work now that I've upgraded to version 2. The logistics of software-based music making really gets you down sometimes.

FarSide was a test in layering and I wanted to make sure that the parts that I stacked onto of the main drums worked together. The original mix was way too thin sounding, most likely due to ear fatigue and having listened to the same track over and over again. Ozone3 by iZotope was used for mastering.

I think that I was getting closer to a blog-standard 4x4 house beat that would mix well with other tracks, should someone mix with this, but I don't think I added enough variation and personality into the track for fear of jumping of the tracks. I tend to do that a lot.

I originally built this song to work out to. I knew what BPM I was shooting for and wanted a little harder sort of tone to everything. I mixed in a guitar part that was doubled that received mixed reviews, but since I was the one working out to it, I left it in. Similar to some of my modal tracks the drums in this song are assumed using the sequence, swap, rearrange technique to get a different feel without having to resequence. I was going to roll it into a softer feel at the end for a cool down, but didn't want to work in an extra 30 minutes or so of content that would work with a work out session. Nice idea though.

Everytime I stop writing for a while I put together a house song because I find not having to think about the beats as much to be liberating. Since I've started and stopped so many times, I've accumulated a lot of four on the floor, if you know what I mean. TEC is very traditional.

An old track of mine back when I was using a Soundblaster Gold AWE 64. Ugh :( This was my first relization that if I slightly move notes and offset them (what would be later built into everything as "Groove quantization") that I could make my lifeless house beats fit in the pocket a little better and give them a pushing feel. I almost had a full vocal track in place for this one, but it was later sampled and only portions exist.

This is an old 90's track that was assembled in CoolEdit Pro, using an external time code generator made by MOTU. I would sync my Cakewalk session with the timecode, and slave Cooledit as well. All of the audio layers had to be hand-adjusted for timing issues, since the timecode sync wasn't that great. This is one of those tracks that I couldn't do anything to if I wanted to. To many programs and synths to keep track of. I really liked the sound of this one but I didn't pay attention to song structure, so it doesn't progress in a predictable, listener friendly way.

I made this song with full vocals right out of the box. The main synth was my favorite part. It was a hand sequenced Super Jupiter track that was programmed to be a soft as possible. The patch most likely no longer exists. I kept the drums very simplistic because I wanted the vocals and the synth to be the main attraction. Unfortunately this was well before I cared or understood how to master, so it's a little quiet and a bit noisy.

Newlife is an extremely old song. I call it the magnetics mix because the only copy I had of it was on a cassette tape. I made the song from the perspective of moving backwards it time and technology. The song starts simple and builds adding older and older technology as it moves along. The whole song and all sequenced assets fit onto my soundblaster at the time. I was very new at MIDI sequencing, having switched from ImpulseTracker a few months before, but I still enjoy it.

This is an old track that I started before I went to the Recording Workshop school in Ohio. I started it, but then was away from all my gear (even my guitar) for 2 months. I had a lot of ideas by the time I got home, so I unloaded it all on this 10 minute track. The song was assembled in CoolEdit Pro and was a real pain in the ass to correct for timing, since I was using the timecode box. I have no idea was the original MIDI file looks like because I believe most of the sequencing was via soundclip cutting and pasting. Many of the synths were built using the DS404 (I believe it was called) softsynth which was freeware. You sequenced the synth then exported a loop at a set tempo. These clips were moved throughout the song. Most of the effects were right off the SoundBlaster AWE card, but I obviously dropped a lot of CoolEdit effects on those tracks. It took days or straight WORK to put that together. That's what you get when you figure things out for yourself. :(

The Cycle was a silent (as in, no lines) movie that my friends and I made together for a film contest. We were disqualified as we didn't have any live audio, but that didn't stop me from making a 16 minute sound track. I made an effort to make it a hiphopera style scratch fest. Unlike my usual tracks I used nearly all drum loops, every drum loop that I have amassed, actually. It's fun and kind of goofy to listen to now. The vinyl samples were from an old "sound-page" from Keyboard magazine back in the 80's. It was a commercial for the Aphex Systems Aural Exciter. I added samples from a record radio broadcast of a car race staged in London. No idea what the race was called, I just liked some of the sounds on it. I did all the scratching, but obviously cut and paste quite a bit. The intro with cowbell/woodbox beat was difficult to match up with the heavy beat behind it. That was the only sequenced chunk in the song. The rest was assembled, clip by clip, in ACID (now owned by Sony).

Heavy V2 is the end result of an iterative tech-step track built primarily in CoolEdit, using the MOTU time code generator. The individual drum parts were sequenced in Calkwalk then laid down in CoolEdit for processing. I don't remember how many effects or even what effects were placed on these tracks because back with CoolEdit everything was destructive. I had one chance to undo something otherwise it would be lost in the undo history behind other things I probably wouldn't want to redo. As with Pauli, timing was an issue, and a lot of the recordings had to be manually aligned to keep the beat. I think I was using a PIII 500Mhz at the time so rendering effects was very tedious. The baseline was recorded from my crap-ass purple pawn shop Lyon brand bass. It has ratty strings on it that have never been changed, but it's a bass and it sounds well enough, though you can tell that the sample of it that I used in this track was time stretched to fit.

Don't bother trying to read into the name, it's pure laziness and bullshit. I wanted to manually (without quanitzation) create a lazy beat out of synth drums, and after a lot of painstaking effort I created the main drum track you hear in this song. I had to fatten it up with another cut up drum patch. A majority of my drum samples all came from this drum loop CD I found at Border Bookstore. It was a clean recording of a lot of the more famous loops from the early hip-hop days. It was all live drums and very clean. I broke up the loops into drum sounds and mapped them using Vienna Soundfont Studio. It is perhaps the shittiest piece of software I have ever had to use for anything at any time. RIP. Anyways, the main synths, like most of my earlier songs, are from the Super Jupiter, and the bass line from my ratty, purplely bass. The vocals in the track were recorded while listening to the track in headphones, then cut up and mapped into Vienna. I broke it down into phrases and triggered them in sequence, instead of trying to do multi-track recording on my old PC.

This was one of the first songs I made using Logic Express 6. Before that time I was using Cakewalk 9 and a Soundblaster live for sampling and sequencing, the Jupiter and a 604e (Sonnet g3 400 upgraded) Mac running Retro AS-1 (and sometimes Absynth) for synths. Logic was way less complicated (logistically, at the time). This track is built using, for the most part, Logic Express' built-in instruments, but I think I'm using Ritmo for the drums, since it was a cheap way of mapping samples. That plug-in's dead as hell right now. They never updated it to work with Logic 7. Money well spent, I guess. :(

This was the first track in a set created for a videogame that never was completed. I was asked to make about 40 minutes of content for the game, which was going to be a simple top-down shooter. I made this intro by playing the one of the Super Jupiter's fatter patches live, multitracking the whole thing in CoolEdit. I love the Super Jupiter. I has been kind to me.

Score select is exactly that. It's music for the main menu and selection screen for the game. I made it kind of creepy, and maybe should have lightened it up a bit, but here it is.

Part 1 sets the tone for the rest of the main level tracks. I wanted them all to be frantic and rapidfire. It was sequenced in Calkwalk without using CoolEdit. I believe all the synth tracks were multitracked in the sequencer.

Part 2 was a remnant from an earlier work. I had tried to collaborate with a local DJ to make some drum and bass tracks but he would spend more time playing video games at my house instead of helping me with ideas. The higher, creepier synth was part of that work as well as the main beat. I salvaged what I could into what you hear.

Part 3 follows the flow of Part 1. Just a hectic track, sequenced in Calkwalk, layered the multitracked Jupiter synths.

Part 4, as in Part 3, focuses on repetition and a driving, forceful beat. I tried to keep the pressure on to make sure that there wouldn't be many pockets in the action.

Part 5 contains my favorite beat sequence and synth combination. I was so excited about that sound that I completely hosed the rest of the track. lol The mid and last halfs, as well as the main bass synth, are jagged and prolonged. I should have made a proper, building track using the good materials, but alas...

Part 6 was mixed live using a Fostex VM200 digital mixed and an Alesis Wedge reverb box. I maually jumped the verbs and delays around while recording to 2 track (standalone CD-R). I think this is the cleanest sounding IRE main track and in retrospect, I should have made more, shorter tracks so that I wasn't deliberately elongating the tracks to the fit the required 40 minutes.