Neuropa - Once Upon A Time (Impulse Tracker goa trance collection) to be released on May 18, 2024

[Paul Eye]

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.

 

[Paul Eye]

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

[astralprojection]

On 4/27/2024 at 12:46 PM, Paul Eye said:

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

thanks for the reply makes perfect sense 

[Prana4ever]

Upload day my good brother.

[Paul Eye]

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.

 

[Paul Eye]

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 😅

 

[acid being]

I enjoyed these last couple of tracks and can hear the Hallucinogen influence. It's extra impressive attempting this kind of music in a tracker and your music would have probably equaled or even bettered the music of quite a few on the Ultrabeat site which I used to be a bit obsessed with.

[astralprojection]

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. 🤩

https://openmpt.org/

[Paul Eye]

5 hours ago, acid being said:

I enjoyed these last couple of tracks and can hear the Hallucinogen influence. It's extra impressive attempting this kind of music in a tracker and your music would have probably equaled or even bettered the music of quite a few on the Ultrabeat site which I used to be a bit obsessed with.

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

[Paul Eye]

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. 🤩

https://openmpt.org/

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.