on december 6, 2020, i uploaded the song jesus pizza to youtube. it sucks so please don't listen to it, but now i get to use it as a yearly milestone post! (even though i missed it this year but we won't talk about that) i think i'm going to make this post pretty short and to the point, since tbh i didn't really do anything interesting after like june, and also i don't want to write a lot of words right now. so here we go!!

jamuary!!

i'm not kidding when i say that taking part in the jamuary challenge this year i think singlehandedly improved my music making abilities by 100%. making a song every day really started wearing me down, but i think once i got to the last week or so, i managed to break out of it and really start experimenting around. coming out of it i felt a lot more confident in my composition, and it set the stage for me making songs that are way cooler than what i made last year.

pixel day

i made a track and did the sfx for pomegranite's pixelgrounds picross collab game for pixel day! i made my track in famitracker, which in hindsight was actually a really shitty decision since it doesn't fit very well with the game at all. someone actually complimented the sound effects in one of the reviews though, which really warmed my heart even though i spent a fairly insignificant amount of time on them! overall the game turned out great and i was really glad to have been a part of it!

audio tag team

in april, i took part in the audio tag team competition, a contest in which you got paired up with someone random and you had to each make a song with some kind of unifying factor. for round 1, zechnition and i got paired up, and we chose the theme of "technological nostalgia". they absolutely knocked it out of the park, and i think mine was pretty good too, though in hindsight it was a bit repetitive. i would like to tell you how well we did in the contest, but i can't, because the organizer didn't ever end up judging the round 1 entries, so the contest sort of just died a slow, sad death before it even really got off the ground. (i'm still pretty pissed about this btw) it was a fun experience though, i liked bouncing off musical ideas off of my partner and sharing wips and all that!

and then there was nothing

to be honest.. i didn't really do any other collaborative or competitive shit with my music this year. i tried to enter nguac and ngadm and got rejected from both of them, and i didn't see many collabs that i was super interested in ~~or confident enough to join~~. i also got hella demotivated around september and i still haven't really recovered. burned out maybe? idk. i think i need to do more fun collab shit in 2023 to really stretch my limits, but that's also what i said last year before proceeding to not put enough effort into meeting people, so who knows what will actually end up happening?

greatest hits

my favorite song that i made this year was "the new wisdom" and it's not even close. the production was kind of crap, but the bassline has been lodged in my head like a parasite for months. hopefully one day i can come back to it and give it the production value that it deserves!

some of my other favorites were "jet era", "summer slow jam", "swell swim", and "too much gravity". i won't elaborate too much because lazy but i just like them a lot :)

i also started trending more towards cinematic-style music as opposed to synth music in the latter half of the year. not really sure why, maybe because i have to put less effort in to make it sound good lol!! but songs like effortless ascension were definitely the best in terms of production this year. i haven't put as much effort as i should be putting into mixing and mastering, and i think it's starting to show as my compositions get more complex and the instruments start fighting for space. one of these days i'll figure out how to do it well!!

it also hit me this year just how much experience i still DON'T have. i think i'm making the huge mistake of continually comparing myself to people who have years and years of experience over me, so i'm continually floored at how everyone else manages to make their shit sound so good!! i try not to be too hard on myself (as difficult as that is) because of course i hear the flaws in my own stuff more clearly than everyone else's. it's still kind of tough though when i see a song with a description like "sharted this out in 5 minutes teehee might delete later" and i'm like "this is better than anything i've ever made!!"

anyway that's enough ranting with no proofreading. shoutout to anyone who ever listened to and/or enjoyed anything i did this year, it means a lot. shoutouts as well to pomegranite, zechnition, casper, and felithix for being cool people and making this year better for me!! see you in 2023!!

(p.s. additional shoutout to tom fulp for letting me claim the username "glotch" the other day, i feel special now!)

i was .06 average score away from getting into uac this year. not sure whether to be disheartened because i didn't make it or lighten up a little because i got so damn close, especially since this is 2 fan brackets higher than i was at this same time last year. at least i should make it in next year right??? right???? anyway, i'm off to go forlornly smoke a cigarette while looking at a sunset. i have a whole nother year to make songs that are consistently good in both composition and production instead of one or the other lmao

Hello

I didn't post anything for Pico Day sorry!! I kind of let myself stop making music as frequently because "i'll have to start audio tag team round 2 any day now"... yeah that's a month wasted waiting. I've also been working on some wip loops for a game I'm making for a school project, which is cool because I haven't done any substantial vg music in like a year. ALSO THANKS FOR 50 FANS!! Pretty f***ucking cool to see that 50 people in this world like my stuff.

Anyway that was short and incoherent but I promise I'll upload stuff as it gets done including that game music ok bye no you hang up no you hang up okay i'll hang up

guys. guys, guys.. guys.. i have a n important announcemnt to make... i'm quitting newgrounds forever and ever and then i'll die and i still won't be using newgrounds because i'm quitting newgrounds forever today. here are my 10 reasons why i won't be newgrounding anymore.

reason a. tom fulp doesn't listen to the community. whenever i ask him for a new feature, he tells me that he still has a restraining order and that he'll call the police if i don't leave his house. like wtf dude. when people tell you something you need to listen.

reason 2. adobe flash suck's and i don``t know why you guys still want to use it all the time. if i wanted to live in the stone age i would watch the flint stones!!! actually i'm going to do that right now be right back you guys

ok im back

reason . it doesn't constantly update me about my favorite minecraft youtubers like twitter does. i asked tom fulp to implement this feature, but you can see reason 1 to see how that turned out... 🙄🙄🙄🙄 anyway we need more minecraft content on newgrounds, if it doesnt have minecraft i dont have any reaosn to use it.

reason 8. I am stuck in an endless void that's darker than dark. I used to scream for help, but I stopped bothering ages ago. Who else would be out here anyway? It's just been me and my thoughts for as long as I can remember, and nothing will ever change that. All the memories of the people I used to love and care about are even darker than this eternal hell. Have I even aged a day? I don't even know if I should be alive anymore. At any rate, I wish I wasn't.

reason h. everyone on this site DOES DRUGS!!! don't they know that drugs are BAD INFLUENSES on the children of today?? the d.a.r.e. guy came to my school yesterday and told me about cocaine, but aparently people on newgrounds do cocaine all the time!! every art, every song, every game has a picture of someone doing drugs on it! what happened to caring about the kids???

reason #reason. so yeah. i don't use newgrounds anymore. don't call me, don't text me, don't come over. you are hereby officially uninvited to my birthday party. goodbye forever.

I'm surprised I've been posting on this site regularly for over a year. It just feels impactful and fun to have a place to post my own stuff to a place where I see the same usernames cropping up all the time, like a small town. It feels way more engaging than YouTube, where an audience of a few dozen will silently view your video then go about their day, or god forbid SoundCloud, which I stopped using entirely because the only interaction I got was bots asking me to buy plays, which was worse than nothing at all. Even though I haven't done too much in the community yet, I still have fun browsing and posting to this site. (twitter take notes)

So.. yeah there's this month's sappy news post. Thanks for 40 fans, and have a good rest of your day!

"I LONG FOR THE GREAT RELEASE THAT DEATH WILL BRING"

- Bruno Powroznik

The day is December 31st, 2021. I see a post on the BBS: "It's time for Jamuary 2022!" This music challenge seems interesting and like a cool way to participate in the community. 1 new song every day for the whole month of January, no matter the length or genre. It'll be a commitment for sure, but how hard could it be?

...

31 days later, I'm bruised, battered, torn, and other synonyms for beat up. How did this happen? Well, let's start from the beginning...

DAYS 1-7: THE ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS

For reasons I don't quite understand myself, I used FamiTracker exclusively for the first week of the challenge. I'm not sure what spurred me specifically to do this, but I had some kind of untapped spring of ideas for NES music that I exploited during these first few days, and whenever I tried to open Ableton, I just decided to use FamiTracker instead.

As a result, though, I think my chops with FamiTracker improved somewhat because of the repeated practice, and I made a nice variety of catchy chiptunes. At this point in the challenge, I still had plenty of energy and time to do a song every day, which when combined with the ease of use of FamiTracker, made for a pretty breezy experience. As you may infer, though, that was about to change.

DAYS 8-12: SHUTTING DOWN

On day 8, I finally decided to start using Ableton again so I didn't forget how to use it entirely. On days 8 and 9 I used some Genesis sounds, which was cool sounding enough, but I wasn't super stoked about either of them because I didn't have a lot of energy/time when making them. (This becomes a pattern very quickly.)

Days 10 and 11 actually produced songs I was actually proud of, and I figured the slump I was in for the previous 2 days had just been a fluke, but on day 12 I made No Streetlight: something produced on low time and low energy. I actually found it fun to make something so different, but it marked a turning point in my overall process when making songs for the challenge.

DAYS 13-23: THE SLUMP

Day 13 was probably my low point in terms of time management. However, it was an important learning moment for me. I learned that once it passes about 9:30 PM, I pass into a state known as "Brain Mush Hours", where I'm still technically functioning, but any and all music I make sounds like a jumble of incoherent noises. I also learned that even if what I make during that time is not objectively terrible, I still won't like it very much.

Day 14's song was the last song for a while that I actually felt was up to scratch. The rest of them tended to be made on low time, and while not bad, weren't exactly anything exceptional imo.

(Important reminder that I feel is important to interject here: This is also entirely subjective from my pov. If you like any of the songs that I don't really enjoy then by all means keep enjoying them. It's very hard to view and appreciate my work from an outside perspective when I'm so closely tied to the feelings associated with the creation of the music.)

DAYS 24-31: #WINNING

For some reason, something really clicked at around day 24 for me. I don't know if the objective quality of the songs went up, but I think realizing the previously mentioned issues really helped me manage my time better and make tunes that I really enjoyed listening to, event though they're a bit simplistic and scuffed at times.

Not really much else about this period of the challenge. I'm just glad that I was able to end the challenge off on a high note.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Do I regret doing this challenge? No, I don't. Do I want to do it again? Right now I would say no, but next year I might say yes again because I'm stupid. Also, to be fair to the challenge, I'm exaggerating how bad it was. It was fun, just really tiring, especially since some days I just wasn't feeling it, but had to deal with it anyways.

This challenge also finally cemented in my brain that I have actually improved as a composer over the months. Towards the end of the year, I was kind of getting into a rut where it felt like I wasn't improving, and I was doubting all of my progress up to that point. I was in the process of experimenting with new stuff to remedy that feeling anyways, but this challenge helped with that a lot by forcing me to extract every ounce of creative juice I had.

So, in conclusion, TL;DR music funny. Thanks to Droid for making me and many others aware of this challenge. It was a warm feeling to know that others were sharing my suffering at the same time as I was.

Also sorry if this is rambly. I just kind of wrote down the first things that came to my head, and probably didn't say everything that I wanted to say. At least I slept on this after writing it at 10 pm so I could proofread it a bit lol

ps. Thanks for over 30 fans! That's a lotta people!

Hello and happy Pixel Day!!

I got the opportunity to compose a track and make the sound effects for @Pomegranite's PixelGrounds collab! A bunch of very talented artists and musicians came together to make a Newgrounds-based picross game, and it turned out super nice! So go check it out and go get addicted to picross like I did!

This was my first time collabing on a game, and I hope to do some more collaborations this year if I can!

What's good you filthy animals. Hope you're all having a good Christmas and end of year time with your families and friends. And what a year it's been too. Regardless of the fact that there was nowhere to go but up from 2020, this is the year I finally got around to making things I'm proud of on a regular basis, and got myself a small fanbase while I was at it. I'm gonna try to make 2022 the year where I finally ditch my fear of deadlines and try to meet some new people to make something that cures my "I wanna make something like that" syndrome. Maybe I'll even make it past the tryouts for UAC this year!

Anyway, thanks for listening to my stuff in 2021. Keep it real folks, see you in flavortown

One year ago, on December 6th, 2020, I published my first "full length" song to YouTube, called Jesus Pizza. (I put "full length" in quotes because it's only a minute long.) I had dabbled in music a little bit in the months leading up to that, but Jesus Pizza was when I decided to start dedicating some more time to the hobby. Granted, I didn't start actually producing things regularly until February, but I still consider this as the true start.

With that said, I figured I'd make a post about some of the things that I've noticed and did during this time, because why not?

Changing Toolsets

When I first started back in December-February, there were two main tools that I was using: LMMS and FamiTracker. LMMS was fine and dandy, but something about it always just felt slightly clunky, and I could never tell what it was. It has the huge advantage of being FOSS though, so I think it's a great tool to start out on. As for FamiTracker, I still enjoy the ease of workflow I can get using a tracker, and I enjoy the sounds of the NES, but I've stopped using it over the past few months, as I felt that the sounds that I wanted were getting harder and harder to achieve. I've been considering finding another tracker to use for more diverse chiptune, as that's still something I would like to make going forward.

Now I've more or less switched over to Ableton Live. I really like Ableton because it feels like most stuff just kind of works the way I need it to. Here's the thing, though: I really only chose Ableton because I got the Lite edition for free at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. The big limitation that the Lite edition brings is that you can only have a maximum of 8 tracks. Luckily this hasn't been an issue, but in the event that it does, I'll have to seriously consider what I want to do if I'm going to end up buying music software. I ought to try out the FL demo again sometime to see how it works, but for now I'll stick with Ableton.

Stuff I've Learned

Probably the most valuable skill I've learned (and am still continuing to develop) is how to create my own synth sounds using Vital. While I'm still not good enough at it to get precisely the sounds I'm looking for every time, I really like the sense of control over my own work that doing it myself gives me.

However, I've also learned that there's a lot of value to be had in using presets. As said before, I can't get precisely the sound I'm looking for, but the fact that I'm doing it DIY means my sounds end up being very synthy most of the time, which isn't something I necessarily want in everything I make. For that reason, I'm trying to rediscover the magic of presets. That brings me to my next topic...

Self-Improvement

When I look back on Jesus Pizza and compare it to what I make now, I've definitely improved, which is awesome. However, sometimes it just feels like I've stagnated, and that I haven't made anything that truly pushes my limits in a while. One of the big strategies I'm starting to realize that I need to employ is that I need to get outside prompts. It seems like my songs that I feel are most unique are inspired by or based off of something else. Cases in point: Salami, Blue Cavern, and Scrapped Bumper Music. I'm extremely proud of what I did in all of these songs, and they were all directly inspired by some other piece of media.

On that similar note: as much as comparing myself to others all the time is an unhealthy mindset, it's also where I can get the drive to improve so I can make some cool shit. Just this weekend, I replayed the game OneShot, and it really reminded me why I want to keep improving everything I do. It's so unique, inventive, and polished, it made me think "God, I want to make something that amazing." Like this track, for example. It conveys so much emotion and atmosphere! That's the level where I want to be at, not just with my music, but with my programming efforts as well.

As of now, I think the stuff I make is alright, but it's nowhere near that level. Of course, the bitter truth is that I won't just be able to pull a track like that out of my ass tomorrow. But hopefully as I keep working at this music hobby, I'll be able to get to a level where I can do that. With that said...

Things That I Feel Like I Should Be Good At By Now But Am Not

• Mixing: For some reason, I still haven't felt like I've gotten the hang of mixing stuff at all. It feels like something's always either too quiet or too loud or clipping or maybe the whole song is clipping! Hell, I still don't even really know what mastering is. Are those topics even related? I should probably start looking into that, huh...
• Dynamic-y things: What do I mean by that? Well, so far I feel like my songs aren't super dynamic. Hardly climactic swells or particularly quiet moments are to be found, and I feel like that's probably something I need to at least try.

Conclusion

I honestly felt like this post would be a lot more carefully structured than it ended up being, but it ended up being a bit of a thought dump about my current creative process, which I suppose is alright. In any case, I hope this gave you an interesting insight into the mind of a teenage amateur musician. This was probably more valuable as a self-reflection exercise for me than it was a blog post for general consumption, but regardless, if you have any thoughts about what I've written here, let me know!

Thanks for reading! (assuming anyone actually read down this far hehe)

After almost a whole month, I finally got around to finishing another song to upload on Newgrounds. Life's been moving fast, and in the blink of an eye, it had been 3 weeks since I last uploaded here and I still had this new song sitting on the backburner, just waiting to be completed. I didn't really know where to take it, but it also didn't feel like there was many good ending points, but I managed to wrap it up. I hope you guys enjoy this one, and sorry for the absence!