Paul Eye
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Posts posted by Paul Eye
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19 hours ago, astralprojection said:
Now that I think about it, it may have been beatport, and not Bandcamp. But the rest remains the same.
Ah, that makes sense. Of course I have no idea how Beatport functions.
And afaik Bandcamp has always had the lossless upload requirement (don't quote me on that one though) since they've always had the option for customers to get a lossless version (wav (and aiff?) download was enabled in 2015 iirc, before that lossless downloads were flac). I made a release with another project in early 2020 and the lossless requirement (almost) certainly was in effect then
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5 hours ago, astralprojection said:
What I mean is, they'd have very lossy versions that you can listen to for free. And when you buy the album you get the lossless version. The logic being that if it sounds too good for free, people won't buy the lossless version.
Which ofc is very faulty logic but yes, that's what the label told the artist to do. Iiirc he wanted 96k bitrate mp3s for Bandcamp, and then lossless flac for when you buy it, also from Bandcamp ofc. Hope it's clearer now
Anyway, I've seen that quite a few times, that the sound quality of the free streaming versions are very poor
Well, the thing is, you can't do that (referring to the label owner here of course). The Bandcamp release editor doesn't even accept mp3s as explained on this help page. And if you convert your crap quality mp3s to wav to get around that, then all files in your release will be derived from those crap quality fake wavs. There's no way to set those crap quality files for streaming and the real quality files for download (unless of course you create another release with the real quality files which would be incredibly silly). Here's Bandcamp's answer to why to upload lossless files.
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6 hours ago, astralprojection said:
IMHO yes. Mostly it is 128kbit mp3 quality, cause the artist or label want people to buy the "full quality" and have really bad quality for the streams.
Poor decision imo. Also illogical. One album I mastered for a person, said the label asked him to get low quality masters for band camp, just to have people buy the high quality versions. I did not comply to that and I explained to the artist how I thought it didn't make sense.. Better it sounds great at first listen, then the listener is much more inclined to buy, rather than it sounds like crap at bandcamp.
Also, I'm not sure what kind of bitrate bandcamp uses. I know soundcloud uses pretty damn lossy compression for free users. (128kbit iirc) which makes the hihats and high end generally sound poor.
That sounds incredibly weird to me, that a label wants "low quality" masters on Bandcamp. I mean, where are people supposed to get the high quality release then? (or just the normal release if my logic is correct) I mean, Bandcamp only lets you upload lossless files for your release, and all the lossy versions (if someone wants them) are derived from those files.
And I'm not sure if this is a feature of Bandcamp Pro (or if there even if such a feature at all), but as far as I know you can't decide the quality of the streaming version. -
13 hours ago, astralprojection said:
final product sounds really good! even on bandcamp. coverart is great, it has that 12bit flair to it
Yeah, those paintings a friend of mine did are nothing short of magical. I'm so glad she offered to do these
Is it unusual for something to sound good via the Bandcamp player? Most often I use it to skim through the tracks in releases I'm interested in getting, so I don't pay much attention to the sound quality. I actually did stream this release in its entirety (just to check that everything was ok and good to be released). -
Out now! Get the release here: https://pauleye.bandcamp.com/album/once-upon-a-time
Tracklist:
01. Time Traveller
02. Satellite View
03. Fomalhaut
04. Liquid Crystal
05. Hyperspaceoids (2.0 Mix)
06. Virtual Trip Into Eternity
07. LumiSaDe
08. Phylogenesis
09. Hallucinative Space Voyage
10. Seven Circles
11. Spiritual Frequencies
12. Meganeura
I also updated the first post with this info
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3 hours ago, astralprojection said:
sounds nice! now all you need to do is export each channel as a seperate stem, mix and master it, and it would sound great!
i recommend OpenMPT, it can open any tracker file, and quickly export each channel to WAVs. 🤩
Already did that, but instead of OpenMPT, I used XMPlay to export the tracks to stems (and of course I did it my way). Also, I didn't do any "mastering" since I want to keep the tracker sound as untouched as possible. The only thing I did was bringing up the tracks to (somewhat) the same level, and used a very gentle master limiter just to keep the tracks from clipping of course.
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5 hours ago, acid being said:
Thanks
and I still keep wondering how I managed to pull off all those tracks back then. And heh, I actually posted in that Ultrabeat thread a decade ago, but as things go, it took me until now to actually get anything done XD
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And the end isn't near anymore, instead it's literally here. This is the last track from the collection. It was finished in mid-May 1999, and continues from the gritty aesthetic of the previous track. Very much influenced by The Lone Deranger, this is literally my take on Snakey Shaker from that album, although I'm not sure if that was a deliberate or conscious choice I made when writing this track. Also, the 7/4 time signature in the middle part was definitely inspired by the first Shpongle album (which in itself was quite the revelation to me back then). So in that sense this track is very Posfordian, and I think it's quite a fitting closer for the collection.
This track was actually released on the Neogoa compilation Celestial Transvibrations pretty much a decade ago, but the mixdown I sent in had some technical issues (I only realised this after the comp was released) so it was actually missing an entire background melody. So this version is the actual real version of this track.
Bandcamp release is a week from now (exactly 25 years after I finished this track) and I'm both excited and absolutely terrified about that 😅-
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Ooh, need to take a listen
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Next up, track 11. This was finished in early April 1999, almost 2 months after the previous one, and this is where things are getting a bit weird. I'd been spending much of the preceding months completely fascinated by The Lone Deranger, and the Twisted Records Dementertainment compilation. Listening to those on an almost daily basis, here is where my sound took a turn towards more gritty and should I say "dark". This is definitely the most complex track I managed to write in Impulse Tracker, both technically and as a composition. I remember a situation where I described the track as "organised chaos", and that's quite an accurate expression here. The only things that bother me a bit about this one is the rather murky and nondescript bassline (I really wish I could have come up with something better), and the track title feels oddly disjointed.
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On 4/24/2024 at 5:13 PM, astralprojection said:
can you give a bit more information about the samples you used? and from what synths they were sourced?
for such things as kick, bassline, hihats, leads etc. would be interesting to learn where you found all the samples at that time (98).
Hmm, you're asking difficult questions here. That friend of mine who introduced me to both goa trance and Impulse Tracker gave me his entire sample library (most of which was quite useless tbh) and I couldn't in any way tell where all those samples were from. I do remember we found some websites with useful sample packs, so there's the source of most of the sounds in my tracks. Of course I couldn't tell which synths and drum machines the sounds are from; I did rename all of my samples for the sake of organisation, so the original file names are lost to time. There are some hints in some of the file names, but of course you have to remember that back in 98/99, I had absolutely no idea what words and numbers like "acid", "juno", "303", "909", and so on even meant. They were all just useful sounds to me
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We're getting close to the end now, this is track 10 and it was finished in mid-February 1999. Here is where I started experimenting with adding in a bit more complexity, at least from a technical point of view. I can't really pinpoint any specific artist influence here, but that synth solo that comes in at around 5:45 is definitely a nod to the Hallucinogen track "Demention". Of course I took it quite a bit further, and I clearly remember I managed to crash Impulse Tracker when writing the solo, so something about it got lost in the crash.
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Okay, I'll be honest here. This next track is quite terrible. Finished in mid-January 1999 after I took about a month off making music, this one tries a bit too hard to sound like the classic Hallucinogen track LSD (and fails at it quite spectacularly). In any case, the remaining 3 tracks are much better than this, and maybe you can find something positive about this track because I sure can't 😅
P.S. that track title is quite facepalm-worthy too.
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Next up, track 8. This one was finished in early December 1998, and it's the last track I finished that year, before taking a break from making music. I kinda remember I was running out of ideas around this time (evidenced by a bunch of unfinished tracks). This one takes some initial influences from the Transwave/Helium title track, but of course I put my own personal spin on it. Perhaps the most positive track in the collection (no cheese here in any case) and it has a nice groove to it, if I may say so myself
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8 hours ago, Prana4ever said:
Genuine question, is YouTube's algorithm really able to distinguish what is old school goa or new school goa? Intuitively I really doubt that especially if the track was made at the end of the 90's.
I doubt youtube's algos have much interest in something as niche as "goa trance" and its different flavours. In any case, that track has already broken the 1K plays mark, and I'm baffled.
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Next up the, ahem, "creatively" named track 7. Finished in mid-November 1998, I can't really pinpoint any specific artist and/or track influence for this one, so in that way it sounds very much like myself. The bassline is something that could be called "proto fullon" (without being blatantly fullon in any case) and somehow at least to me the track sounds simultaneously both groovy and melancholic. The title translates to "snowfall", and 17 years old me must have felt very clever when coming up with those intercaps XD
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37 minutes ago, astralprojection said:
ive not really listened to them all thouroghly yet but maybe its because it sounds the most "neo" goa, and some sort of AI is pushing that to people? or is that wierd.. if i had to find a common denominator it would be that thats the one who sounds the most "neo" out of all of them i think
Uh, nope. It's the most amateurish piece of simplicity in the compilation, and definitely doesn't sound like anything from this millennium. Youtube is weird.
And as a side note, I absolutely despise the term "neo goa" as a genre/style name, I just call all goa "goa trance" without much distinction which decade it happens to be from (and not singling out your specific use of the term here, just my stance on its use in general).
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19 minutes ago, astralprojection said:
not really close to the astral files imho
Being influenced by something doesn't necesarily mean sounding like it, you know. Dunno how I should word it then but it's more like the idea to make a "downtempo goa" track came from those AP album last tracks.
And the mixes of the tracks are what they are, and they'll go into the release exactly as they are. I wanted to keep them sounding just as they did back then.
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Next up, the only downtempo track in the collection. Also, we're halfway through now
This one was finished just 3 days after the original version of the previous track, maybe I had a rush of inspiration going on or something. Very much influenced by the closing tracks from Astral Projection albums, especially "The Astral Files", it of course does sound distinctly like myself.On a side note: why does that crappy Liquid Crystal track have the most views, likes (and also dislikes) of my tracks, at least at the moment? Go listen to the better ones ffs XD
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If the previous track was a bit of a disaster, this one is a huge step up on pretty much all levels. Finished about 2 weeks after the previous track, this is definitely the breaking point in the evolution of my tracks. Still very much influenced by Transwave's album Helium, but at the same time throwing lots of my own ideas into the mix. Also, at 150 BPM, this is the fastest track in the collection.
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9 minutes ago, acid being said:
It still manages to be groovier than anything I've come up with so far! I enjoyed the sounds around 5:30 on as well.
Heh, thanks. You're of course free to enjoy it even if I don't
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Next up, track 4. This one was finished in early October 1998, and I have to say that personally, I don't like this one at all and I almost left it off the collection. Definitely influenced by Transwave's album Helium (the first goa trance album I bought, apparently around the end of September 1998), I guess this was meant to be nothing more than a quick experiment. It didn't even have a title until I had to think of something for this collection (and naming it "untitled" would have been just meh). It does feature a little gimmick in that the kick (and by extension, the entire rhythm section) is on the offbeat, if it seems to you that there's something a bit off about this one. File this under "growing pains", there's much better material coming up
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Next up, track 3. This one is also from September 1998, and was finished just a day after the previous track (so I've probably been working on these somewhat simultaneously). It's very much a twin sister to the previous one in theme and structure. If you're wondering about the peculiar title, to quote Wikipedia it "is the brightest star in the southern constellation of Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish, and one of the brightest stars in the night sky". If you'd ask me where I found the name of this star, the only answer I can give is "I have absolutely no idea".
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Next up, track 2. This one is from September 1998, and goes back to a time when my tracks started to take on a more "goa trance" vibe. Inspired by outer space, this one is still quite simple in its arrangement, but this is when my sound really started to evolve, slowly but surely. Do keep in mind that I was 17 years old when I made this
The metal thread
in Other Electronica
Posted
Wellll, just to keep this thread still somewhat alive, Nightwish released a new song/video a few days ago. Epic, as expected of course (depending on your point of view). I just wish the vocals were a bit more upfront.