Advancement

01 Ghosts - 4:28
02 Digital Appearance - 3:28
03 Simple Chords - 4:40
04 Decay - 6:53
05 Burned In - 4:36
06 Humanoid - 4:45
07 The Spy - 8:31

My first ever release on streaming services does lack a bit of polish, but still features some unique ideas.

ALBUM / Space / Electronic / Experimental

Oh Advancement, so young, so innocent, with such great dreams...

I do connect a lot with this album. It is basically a collection of the first works I finished using Ableton Live. After having experimented for years with Magix Music Maker, I had at some point decided that I need professional software for further development. I was kinda overwhelmed with the amount of options offered. I also had no idea of professional music production techniques. EQing the low end? Never thought of. Song structures? Nah. Compressing drum hits? Not in a mile. This album is raw. But I still like some of the songs on it. Let me take you on a walkthrough.

Ghosts
I've always loved downbeat music. When I was younger (which certainly was the case when I was producing this album), my parents used to play Bar Lounge Classics while we were having dinner. That's basically Smooth Jazz that can run in the background without ever really becoming intrusive. My dad used to say "so Musik kannst du doch eigentlich auch machen, oder, Philipp?" (you can do music like this yourself, right, phil?). Given how simple some of the song structures were, just repeating a single phrase for minutes and just having a Rhodes piano playing over it with some synthesizer FX running over it, it seems easy to do. So I tried it, going all spacey in the process. The drum pattern from the beginning is just a preset synth from Ableton Live 9 Standard, the edition I was using at the time. You couldn't really disassemble synths like you can in the Suite version (which I'm using now). Anyway, I used that as a foundation and then had great fun twisting the preset macro knobs on the 5-6 instruments that are running in parallel. One of the synthesizers had a "Ghosts" macro, which gave the song its name. In the end, I had the idea with the piano phrase, which I recorded using my Yamaha keyboard at the time. I didn't even have an audio interface, let alone monitor speakers, so this ran over my PC's soundcard. In the aftermath, I'm impressed it still sounds so good.

Digital Appearance
Ladies and Gents, I present to you another piece of presets. I don't have much to say about this song, it's one of the more generic on the album. The main riff is played by an Ableton preset, many other synths are simply pads with some automation. Actually, I'm pretty sure this was the first ever Ableton track I finished. I published it on reddit at the time and asked the users there to review it. One music producer even gave feedback, noticing that the bass lacked ... bass. Anyway, it's not so interesting. Moving on.

Simple Chords
A live favourite of mine, Simple Chords is the definition of an electric guitarist's wet dreams. The entire song is built around a very simple open a minor chord progression, which first loops, introduces a moody, beautiful melody, and then turns into... TRANCE!
The reason for it is Air Music's summer sale at the time I was recording that song. They basically gave away three software synths for 1€ each. Having just acquired those, I immediately loaded one up and looked what it could do. Little did I know that it was the lowkey trancemaster itself, Hybrid 3, which is amazing at creating drone sounds with a lot of high end, and pretty much nothing else. After hours of trial and error, I stuck with this trance synth, also because I had basically no idea how the synth worked and I didn't have the patience to tweak it further.
The part from 2:55 onwards is my favourite. It's just amazing how the synth comes back and the buildup leads to that fat guitar solo. And as mentioned, it's one hell of a fun thing to play live. I also need to stress that I already minded the important rule of never recording the direct out of a guitar amp. I used my vocal microphone and placed it in front of a small 10W modeling amp, chained after a tc-electronic dark matter pedal I rented from my school band's arsenal. That thing has a great sound!
Maybe one last thing - the drum loop is the "Electronica" beat from my Yamaha PSR-S710 I had at the time. Another preset :D I had no idea how to properly mix drums at the time, let alone build a good loop. But it still turned out great, didn't it?

Decay
This is the most complex song, written in 3/4, but having a drum pattern that quite masks this. Only later (1:40) does a bongo come in, emphasising the beats. I quite liked the idea, also because I really was into mid-2000s Radiohead at the time, with songs like 15-step and Pyramid Song quite pushing the boundaries of perceptible rhythms. So this song basically shows what I did with a 3/4 signature, using all kinds of different rhythms. Because it felt kinda wrong from the beginning on, it felt natural to add detuned strings to it. Which is how that song turned into my first song with actual violin recordings. I played the instrument myself - as always - but not having touched it for months because of my position as guitarist in my band, I was quite rusty. Which is why I masked my mistakes with some distorted and Lo-Fi-like processing on the recordings. In the end, the imperfections are still perceptible, but they quite fit the song in my eyes. And with it being my first album, I am not as critical with many of the mixes.

Burned In
Okay, can we just not talk about that one? Thanks.

Dude it's an EDM track. I tried to make an EDM track. I never again did. I don't like it.

Humanoid
For a long time, I considered this song the worst of the entire album. On Instagram, where I advertised for it with some posts, I wrote "MIDI orchestra meets MIDI synth - because I'm broke" (or something similar). But that's basically what this song is. It was originally titled "Mechonis-like project" due to the similarities of the first few seconds to the Mechonis Field Theme from Xenoblade Chronicles - such an amazing game... (see my gaming articles on this website for more reference - maybe not online yet). So I added strings from my keyboard, and I actually hooked it up to my PC via MIDI cables. That was quite the hassle at the time, because it is possible to change banks and voices via MIDI CC by Ableton. Figuring this out was super time consuming, but in the end I managed to change the instrument and the volumes mid-song, which was necessary because audio bouncing was not known to me at the time (yes, I exported this entire song multiple times in real time, let my keyboard play along and programmed voice and volume changes into MIDI CC for the keyboard to react to). The trumpet, the strings, this stupid flute or what it is that plays in the end, it's all from one session on my keyboard. It was super fun to do at the time - but nowadays I'm unable to recover this project because I never bounced the individual tracks and I don't have this keyboard set up anymore.
Ending my introduction, a fellow bar keeper from beautiful Karlsruhe once listened to Humanoid and was absolutely amazed by the transition from 2:16 onwards, making me appreciate the baroque influences that found their ways into this track a little more. Maybe at some point I'll be able to play a 4-part fugue live on top of it. But right now I have other priorities.

The Spy
By far my favourite song of the album, The Spy, or "Spy Academy Background", as the project title read, is a homage to a quite unique video game character: Team Fortress 2's Spy. I used to run a YouTube channel mainly covering TF2 content, with my biggest success being the so-called Spy Academies. In these series I covered certain unique aspects of my favourite class, the Spy. Because these videos were rather long, I wanted a laid-back, quite mystical tune to accompany them, which led to me playing a cold electric guitar over an ominous bass riff. I took my time with this one, drawing inspirations, again, from the Bar Lounge Classics, but also from Dire Straits' Private Investigations. Amazing track. Anyway, the way this quiet and mystical track turns into power chords, with the percussion slowly rising to higher intensities and an analog synth kicking in, towards the amazing Sax Solo, with the intensity then immediately falling back to moodiness right after, is super amazing in my eyes. Also, how the bass changes pitch around 5:40, bringing something new in, after ring modulated guitars and broken pianos, leading up to the second rise with analog arpeggios, an even more distorted guitar solo, and then the analog synth kicking in in full glory for the climax, it always gives me goosebumps. I really love this song. I almost never play it live, because I lack the saxophone, and for full effect, it also needs the quieter moments, which might not work as well on stage (idk though). Might do that at some point again. Anyway, this is my favourite song out of the bunch.

If you're still with me, thank you for reading all of this. I really enjoy writing these texts, and I'm even more happy if people actually read what I write. Now, if you want to, you can move over to another release of mine, where I tell a different story, head over to the blog, where I tell more random stories about everything life and music, or read this article about how I recorded a drum kit for my prog metal song "work in progress name".

Cheers! Phil