ANOTHER NEW SONG SHIFTING PLANS AAAAGGHHH

Ok so. I know I had already planned on using StEllllsS for the music video BUT I came back to a song I did a few months ago called my adorable galloping cowboy blue butterfly (awesome name imo, gonna change it for the project however) and did some remastering / rearranging etc. And now I think I'm going to use this for the video instead. The other songs I actually did fully during the project will still be included on the full release / digipak but this song specifically will be used for the video and released only within the digipak instead of as a single like I did with the other songs if that makes sense.

There's a lot of stuff in FL that I haven't explored yet but this seems like a huge feature that I didn't notice at ALL until today and blew my mind because I always wondered how people automated pitch shifts for an entire song. Apparently there's a 'Master Pitch' knob next to the Master Volume !! which is really awesome because I was able to shift the song up and down a couple hundred semitones until I found something that had the right eerie weird quality I've been trying to find for so long. The bass came out soooo good in this remaster, and I also took out the CRIM3S-inspired choir chants I originally had because I just didn't think they fit that well in hindsight LOL. Really pleased with everything and I knowwww I need to actually start the video soon which I will do this weekend it's my number one mental note  blaaaarrggghhhh Been trying to scrape together motivation for the past few weeks and I think I can pull it off now *prayer hands*

WEBSITE AND OTHER INTERNET THINGS

I've made a website !!! fun

I love web design and I haven't worked on any coding in a while so this was cool. It gave me a chance to mess around with visuals more, reflecting the music with an aesthetic. I also have an official logo I guess; it's the main thing on the website and I think it looks cool having a huge logo and then super basic text and links. I was debating between this kind of minimalist look or something super maximalist that taps fully into 90s ghost-hunting / supernatural / metaphysical type websites, and honestly I think I might add that as a feature on the website that leads into the main page with the links? That would be a cool form of promotion. Also using the artist name (VPVVVPV) to represent some type of occult witchy thing which directly taps into witch house's themes while staying in a more specific niche through the website design. Thinking I could go in a more campy direction and really tap into those maximalist late 00s aspects of the genre. Now that I'm writing this I'm pretty sure I'm gonna do that actually so yay win fun

I also made a Bandcamp and Instagram page and started building a consistent aesthetic by matching the website / Soundcloud / Bandcamp in terms of visuals and colors. I released another song and promoted it on the Instagram as well as following people who I've already connected with in the scene, and I'm planning on continuing to build a brand / aesthetic through the Instagram based on the content posted by my main musical inspirations, such as SALEM's Jack Donoghue, whose social media isn't really based on promotion and direct references to his music but instead has an almost esoteric vibe. I feel like this in conjunction with a revamped website that matches that kind of esotericism would resonate a lot with the audience I'm looking for since my peers in the scene seem to like that kind of stuff.

SONG OPTION #4 - AMBIENT / NOISE

This one was super interesting to experiment with. I've listened to a variety of ambient and noise music and I've found that the stuff that intersects both genres is what I enjoy most. Artists like Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and lovesliescrushing create super interesting textures and atmospheres through their music, sounding almost angelic and revealing overtones / harmonies within different layers. 

VPVVVPV · lisca

For this track I recorded my guitar straight into my laptop microphone in order to get a dirtier sound, but most of the work went into adding effects and layering things. I used a looooooad of reverb to make the sound as open and echoey as possible in order to achieve that ambience and then added distortion for the noisier aspect. I also slowed down the stems to make things wider and more eerie which helped the ambience as well. I then layered the result over itself and messed around with even more effects, ending up with three layers that worked super well together to create a dreamy atmosphere with some rumbly noise textures which is pretty much exactly what I wanted !!!

The artwork process was pretty silly but also fun. I took a bunch of pictures of my hair and layered them, messing around with lighting and overlays to make this dreamy wash of color that I associate with ambient music. Turned out sick I think.

(Left to right: Sugar Wounds - Sugar Wounds, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma -

Love is a Stream, lovesliescrushing - xuvetyn,

t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 - 肉体からの離脱)

This was really fun to achieve and I'd like to make more stuff like this in the future for sure :P I don't think I'll be doing a video for it though because that would be quite boring, maybe at the very end in a big compilation of all 4 songs. 

SONG OPTION #3 - BREAKCORE

Breakcore is a genre that I've actually explored production with quite a bit. I'm pretty comfortable with chopping up drumloops and figuring out which effects work best, like flanger and delay in some parts to make things sound cooler. Also it's just insanely fun to produce.

VPVVVPV · ZZZZ21000

The song is based primarily around My Chemical Romance's 'The Ghost of You,' which I sped up to 210bpm in line with breakcore's usual tempo range as well as pitching it up quite a bit and messing around with sections. One of the most important steps is cutting out the lower frequencies of the sample with an equalizer so that the original drums are less audible over the breakbeats. I cut out some bits and reversed them (forgive my keysmash renaming LOL), layering them with other segments (especially the chorus) to create a pretty cool atmospheric effect. I also used gross beat, an effect that allows you to manipulate the timing of a stem and shift noises around basically. Gross beat is super useful in breakcore in my experience, especially paired with reverb and stereo delay to create complex textures. That little sample in the bottom left of the first image below is a kind of producer tag I guess? that I made with this super cool text-to-speech program. Fun fact: the same TTS program was used for the Wired voice in Serial Experiments: Lain :D

After messing with the sample a bit comes the obvious main component, drums. I have a hardcore breaks / jungle drumloop pack downloaded with a bunch of different breaks, and my usual process for breakcore involves choosing whatever sample has the best timbre / tonal qualities and then chopping it up to match the rhythm of the song sample. Messing around with rhythms and patterns is sooooo much fun to me, I love lining things up with the original song as well as flipping rhythms up through the drums. 

As for the cover art I kinda just came up with something I thought looked cool. I layered a US flag over a still from Tony Scott's Deja Vu and added a cool little old web US flag heart thing in the corner because breakcore has always had a connection to 2000s internet culture. There's not really a set look for breakcore cover art, but internet imagery is pretty pervasive. So yeah LOL I really like how this art turned out.

In terms of music videos, I don't think I've actually watched any breakcore stuff ,,, but since the visuals in general are internet- and anime-based, I guess I could do something like Machine Girl's DJ mix visuals.

Most of my breakcore stuff is very sample-based, as with a lot of the genre, this song included. Breakcore has evolved a LOT since its conception. It used to consist of IDM-adjacent super fast drill-and-bass type stuff with a dark aesthetic, but in the past decade or so its grown to be more adjacent with things like the nightcore and anime communities. I chose to sample an MCR song because they've been one of my favorite bands since elementary school and newer waves of breakcore tend to draw a lot from childhood nostalgia, hence the prevalence of nightcore, which was popular in the early 2010s. I've been into breakcore for around 4 years now, getting into it through Machine Girl, who I mentioned in the footwork post, but never thought about producing it myself until late last year. One of my favorite albums, which inspired me to get into producing breakcore on my own, is hsiu's you were beautiful when i loved you, you were beautiful when i lost you., which the creator has said is a very personal and sentimental sample-based project for them. Seeing someone transform music they love into something that sounds arguably even cooler was super inspiring, and I went for something similar here with my own flair :nerd: 

SONG OPTION #2 - FOOTWORK

Footwork is a genre I've wanted to experiment with for a while, but I never produced it myself until now.

VPVVVPV · 2step heaVn

The main component of footwork is the drums, so I started out by laying those out. Although some footwork has more complex kick patterns, I went for a 4-on-the-floor approach for most of the song that taps into the genre's deep house intersections (I also added some house-y open hats) and included a different 808 pattern later on that introduces some cool rhythmic textures. By far the most important part of footwork / juke / East Coast club is the little rimshot percussion patterns that basically guide the rhythm of the song. These usually consist of triplets and other fun stuff so I really enjoyed plotting mine out.

The melodic aspects of footwork are also quite simple, usually with some kind of short repeating vocal sample or house stabs / ambient pad synths depending on if you're leaning more into deep house or drum 'n' bass respectively. I went with the latter as well as using some one-shot vocal samples in a hardcore breaks sample pack I have, adding effects to make them echoey and cool sounding. I'm really happy with how this synth turned out, it just sounds so dreamy and creates a really nice environment.

I went for more of a dnb / breakbeat leaning track, adding some chopped up drumloops in the second half. I've experimented a bit with breakcore and I find chopping up drum samples like that so much fun, it's so rewarding creating different rhythms and textures with a pre-existing loop.

The process is pretty simple but the results always sound super cool, it's a really interesting genre with a vivid culture behind it. One of my main musical influences in general is SALEM, who themselves make witch house but still have ties to footwork and other similar subgenres from their origins in Traverse City, Michigan and Chicago. Jack Donoghue had a juke project called Young Cream and SALEM's DJ mix XXJFG has a bunch of juke songs that provide insight into the origins of footwork culture. One of my favorite albums, Early Victims by DJ Lucas, explores several East Coast club subgenres, including juke and footwork. Additionally, the songs 'Hell Na' by cakedog and some of WLFGRL by Machine Girl also opened me up to different possibilities within footwork, such as sampling and incorporating jungle breakbeats, the latter of which I included in my song :)

As for the cover art, a lot of the straight-up juke and club records I've seen go for a fuzzy black-and-white aesthetic that I find mirrors the music very well, so I went for a similar vibe here.

(Left to right: DJ Sprinkles - Midtown 120 Blues, DJ Lucas - Early Victims,

Club Casualties - Club Causalities, SALEM - XXJFG)

I'm pretty happy with how this song turned out (one of my friends who's pretty into house music said he likes it. win!), but I don't think I'll be making a video for it. If I do, I would probably do something along the lines of Yabujin's songs like 'CHALICE OF MIND' and 'ZAOS DA JUMPING GARGOYLZ' that feature clips of people dancing in jumpstyle. Footwork is a very dance-based culture, so I think something like that would work.

SONG OPTION #1 - WITCH HOUSE

I've been working on four songs to figure out which one would be best to make a music video for. In the context of the project, all four songs would be included on the same EP which will be what I'm marketing and designing the digipak for later on. 

VPVVVPV · L1SBETH

The first of these four is a witch house song, this being the genre I have the most comfort and experience producing in. For music production I use the digital audio workspace (DAW) FL Studio 12 and have for some time, and the main synthesizer I use within FL is called Serum. Serum has some pretty sick presets for witch house including hoover synths and hypersaws as well as one called 'Rave' that works pretty well for lead melodies.

In this song I used a basic hypersaw at a lower octave for the main backing chords, layering the 'Rave' preset at some points (especially the chorus) an octave up to fill up space and create cool little harmonies that happen with these kinds of synths due to the different waves being played simultaneously. I also put flangers on both these synths (only slightly) because that adds to the witch-housey sound a lot, especially the harder, almost wave-inspired sound I went for on this song. For the lead that comes in during the chorus I used a hoover synth and made some tweaks to the envelope (basically note speed or how it fades in / out, hard to explain LOL) and the oscillators / sub-bass. 

In terms of how I built up / wrote the song, I started out by laying down the main chords with the hypersaw and rave hoover. Once I came up with a chord progression I liked, I did the drums. Drums have always been my favorite part of producing because witch house is so snare-heavy and you can create some really fun textures and rhythms by messing around with different one-shot samples. 

In this screencap the top pattern is the main drums; I start out with laying down kicks and then add in snare rolls and space out other rhythmic stuff. The bottom pattern is the hi-hats; I made these separate from the rest of the drumloop because being able to add and take out stems like that makes for a more dynamic and sonically interesting track. For example, no hi-hats during the first verse, hats come in during the chorus, sporadic hats during the second verse, hats full-force second chorus and then a sparse ending with only drums and the basic synth line at an even lower octave.

After all the stems are laid out and structured I go in with dynamic effect stuff like little love philter riffs that make the melody more interesting, as well as cutting out the volume when the synths cut out because hoovers have a tendency to make a very audible 'winding down' noise when they stop playing a note. Then comes the mixing process: I'm not super proficient in mixing, I usually just do what sounds good to me lol. I like making my kick drums really strong which results in this sick effect where it sounds like the synths are side-chained with the kicks, cutting out a bit with each hit. Like I said, I also add flangers and stuff to the synths but most of my mixing is just making sure nothing is clipping or too loud / quiet. 

Then comes artwork. This song was heavily inspired by stuff like CRIM3S and Sidewalks & Skeletons, even Crystal Castles to an extent that make up the noisy, heavy, EDM-ish side of witch house, but for the art I took some creative liberties and went for something that spanned the whole genre as opposed to that harder second wave. Some traits include vertical symmetry, lots of dark cool colors like purple and blue, crude image cutouts and editing, basic fonts, lots of triangles and other weird symbols, and a general thrown-together vibe that I tried emulating with the art for this song. 

(Left to right: RITUALZ - Ghetto Ass Witch, CRIM3S - CRIM3S,

Crystal Castles - Plague, Black Kray & Jayyeah - Back to the Witchhouse)

And yeah! That's pretty much it. I have a bunch of witch house videos in my music video inspiration playlist, and I think this might be the song I'm going with for the video because I have so much experience with WH visuals. But it's always good to experiment I guess :P