Music Hacker: Aversion of Trial and Error

I literally spent years doing this wrong before I figured it out. The point of this episode is to help other beginners spend less time in annoyed trial and error before they figure it out.


I have a special surprise planned for next week...

Also, this post gets five points for conciseness... conciseness is a very unwieldy word.

     -LazerBlade

New album and new track

I am officially making it official. I am producing a new album with a working title of "Glamtastic". The plan is to make a bunch of hot pink glam tracks infused with LazerBlade synth work. What is probably going to be the main track of the album was just released today.


This track is the first of mine in years to be produced with FL Studio. I really could have made this exactly as it is with LMMS, but with FL Studio is was much easier and quicker.

Music Hacker - The Chippity Whippities

A lot of people asked for  Chiptune tuts, and I happen to like making Chiptune. So here's to an episode that I hope is good.



Tune in next week for my first FL Studio track in quite awhile.

    --LazerBlade

Music Hacker - I've Always Wanted to Do This

Today's episode of Music Hacker is one that I've been wanting to do since about halfway through season 2. Now that it's here, I hope it's up to snuff.

I've been able to keep up my bi-weekly schedule so far, but it's no easy task and I will have to put some effort in to make sure I don't fall behind. Things seem to be manageable though, so I'm optimistic about it.

    --LazerBlade

Music Hacker Season 3 Debut

Here is the moment you've all been waiting for, the season 3 kickoff episode! Yay!



It's been challenging but fun to get this season going. I'm not sure I'll be able to keep up a bi-weekly release schedule, but I'll give it a shot.

For those of you wondering, no there isn't any overdubbing, hidden jump cutting, or anything in this or future episodes. I don't use a script either. So what you hear is basically just me making stuff I think will amuse you up on the spot and then executing it in a voice that I think will amuse you.

I hope you're amused.

    --LazerBlade

More Commissioned Work

It's taking ages to get the next season of Music Hacker into place. In the mean time, I've been finishing up another track that was commissioned by the same peeps who commissioned the Brahms Lullaby remix. They called for a technology alphabet song.



I've also been eyeing other DAWs and scoping out a new area to move my studio into, so there is a lot of cool stuff going on behind the scenes while I work on the next season of Music Hacker.

    --LazerBlade

Beep Boop Released

Today I uploaded the last part of my newest EP, Beep Boop, to YouTube. You can check the page for it out here, wherein there are links to the YouTube playlist and a download containing the EP. I know I'm running behind in work on Music Hacker, but it's super hard to keep up with school and music and webshow all at once. It's coming, but I can't promise when.

    --LazerBlade

Music Hacker Season 3

I am officially planning on running a third Music Hacker season. I don't have any promises on when it will launch, or what schedule it will be released on when it does. My current estimate however, is that it will launch a fortnight from today, releasing new episodes biweekly.

I am working on the soundtrack, intro/outro titles, style, episode/topic schedule, topic research, and production pipeline efficiency. Here is a little chip of all of that.



    --LazerBlade

Project Good Robot

So Shamus Young, author, videogame pundit, and programmer, has been working on a pretty groovy game project for the past month-ish. It's called Good Robot, and I've really been enjoying following it. Recently, an open call was extended to anyone wanting to offer music tracks to be used in the game. Naturally, I followed up by producing these two tracks.

It looks like they are good material for the game, and will probably be incorporated therein....

*this is me fan squeeling*

    --LazerBlade

Random Music Content

Ya'll know that I've been busy with arson school, but I have put out some music content you'll probably find interesting.



This here is my first track with a guest vocalist. When I write synthpop songs, I usually have a female voice in my head, but end up rewriting to match my voice. It was creepy and awesome to have the voice in my head manifested IRL, and I enjoy the resulting track.



I decided to enter a contest 24 hours before the submission deadline for what was two weeks for everyone else. The result is a very formulaic but fairly enjoyable track that didn't win.

I've got some more concrete ideas for both video and text article content, but they aren't quite set in stone yet. So keep your eyes open, 'cause I'm hoping to revive this baby.

    --LazerBlade

Chiptune EP Update

After a bit of deliberation within myself, I decided that my Chiptune EP would be stylistically modeled after the Commodore 64. This was partially due to the discovery of  bleep, an excellent VSTi that models the SID pretty well and has replaced Synth1 as my go-to Chpitune synth. All of the tracks on this EP will be recorded directly from bleep output, except for The Adventure Is Over, which is pure Synth1 output.

As you can see, I've got some nifty preliminary cover art. I've also come up with a rather fitting name for this EP, Beep Boop. The art was meticulously hand pixelled in GIMP by yours truly, including the 3D text, which was enjoyable.

I'm not sure how many tracks this EP will have or when it will be finished, but I know that 5 tracks is my upper limit and that I've got at least 1.5 of them done. Of course, I will keep everyone posted with any further progress.

    --LazerBlade

Plans And Possible Projects Of The Future

Now that I'm a college student, I need to carefully plan what other projects I'll be working on. I don't have all of this figured out yet, but I thought you all might like to know what I do so that you can at least guess how much longer this relative dry spell is going to last.

First, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to get back to work on my Chiptune EP. Second, I've got a new album idea I'm thinking about. I'm not sure if I'll be able to work it into my schedule or how long it would be before it became officiated, but know that it's on the table. Third, I'm hoping that my webcomic creative juices keep flowing so that Cognitive Observation can become regular again. Fourth, Infiltrator will probably be going on hiatus. Infiltrator was a project that was mainly there for me to have fun trying to code and experiment with game development for the majority of its incarnations, so I kind of saw this as a likely ending for it from quite near the beginning. Fifth, I'm pondering the possibility of choosing 15 topics and doing a third Music Hacker season. This depends in part on my getting a better grip on my schedule, and in part on finding 15 topics I know I can do a good episode about. And last but not least, I'm not really not sure I'll be able to continue being a game analyst. Sure, I still love the medium, but since I don't have time to play games or spend enough time thinking about them to keep interesting content going, I just don't see a wealth of game design articles as a likely part of the content for the next while.

So yea, things are a bit up in the air right now. Thank you for bearing with me while I try to get this stuff sorted out.

    --LazerBlade

College Get!

I started my college classes this week. I'm sure all of you are all dying to bug me with questions about what college is like, so here is something to save you all some time:

It was school. There were classes. With teachers, who taught things. There was homework.

With that out of the way, I can safely apologize for a lack of aricle content today without needed further excuse context. In accordance with the ritual I have formed around such occasions, here is a peace offering, consisting of another track from the Music Hacker OST:

    --LazerBlade

Cybernetic Epix Released

The new LazerBlade EP you've all been waiting for is now fully released! Cybernetic Epix is available for free listening on YouTube and for free download here. You can also go read about it on the page I put together for it.

Now that this project is concluded, I shall direct my music production efforts towards a new Chiptune EP. Because making Chiptune is fun.


    --LazerBlade

Music Hacker - "Hello Children!"

This episode was fun as well as challenging. I've been wanting to start an episode this way for awhile, so hopefully the ensuing audience amusement was notable. Hereafter, I shall focus Music Hacker on a new topic.

    --LazerBlade

Cybernetic Epix Update

My new EP, Cybernetic Epix, is coming along quite nicely. All but the first and fourth tracks are complete, and even the first is in its final post-production stage. As you can see, I've also got some cover art going. Unfortunately, I'm not confident enough to set a release date at the moment, but I'm hoping everything will be done in a month or so.

All of the tracks were made with some kind of videogame or movie in mind. There are two remixes here, but those are the only tracks that took inspiration from a specific movie or game. The rest try to take epic space opera movie music and splash it with synthpop, retro, and whatever struck the LazerBlade fancy of the moment.

This is fun stuff to make, and I'd be sad to move on to other projects if I didn't know they were going to be greater than or equally fun. Read: Chiptune.

Now I have to say that I'll keep everyone up to date so that I don't get lazy finishing this. ;)

    --LazerBlade

EP's

I'm not dead! Really, I'm not!

The reason there weren't any updates last week is that I've been super busy studying for a big test I have coming up. I had time to do a little though, including making a bit of headway with Infiltrator and producing this track.

Those of you who don't know or haven't guessed: I'm working on a Chiptune EP. This will be interesting, because I'm also working on another EP titled "Epic Cyberfunk," AND starting a new album. I'm hoping to finish Epic Cyberfunk soon, and then work on the new album while doing chiptunes in my wiggle time.

I've played me several games I want to discuss as well, so I should be able to get together some content for you guys for/during the next few weeks.

    --LazerBlade

OMF 2097 Remix

You may have noticed that I haven't had a large music output recently. This is partially because I've been working on another track I'm planning on submitting to OCRemix. The OMF 2097 theme was really influenceial to me and to this day stands as one of my favorite tracks of all time, so I'm doing another remix of it. See, I remixed this track way back when I was doing Transmusical Distortion, but I've improved a ton since then. So here is the latest WIP of what I'm hoping will be an enjoyable tribute that would make the original proud:

Also, I hope it will make the LMMS and free software community proud, because an LMMS OCRemix would be really cool.

--LazerBlade

Offline

I'm going offline for a few days(actually, I already am), so here is an automatically posted chiptune ditty I made while building some instrumentats.

      --LazerBlade

Music Hacker - Synth Programming Time

I've had people asking me to do this episode for quite awhile now, so hopefully this will be a boon for some people somewhere. I don't have much else to say, so shut up and either watch the episode or wait for my next game design article.


        --LazerBlade