Quick Thoughts

Here's some quick thoughts on some of my music:
First of all, I just went into the Logic Pro X files for a few of my songs, and I decided to look at the "Score" feature. What this does is it displays the sheet music for all of the MIDI notes in the song in the form of a score. I am able to look at these songs as a musical score, which makes it (potentially) possible for a school band or any musician to be able to make a fully orchestrated version of any of my songs if they requested sheet music. Obviously, I would have to modify the score for the samples and drum kits, because it displays every drum hit as a certain note. This makes it slightly harder to be accurate. Also, any loops I decide to use don't get transcribed, which is actually fine, because it shouldn't be too difficult to transcribe to MIDI. However, the various effects I use are not able to be accurately reproduced, such as a riser. The "Endless Riser" preset in Logic Pro is a synth riser that slowly pitches up across 8 to 12 bars depending on my usage of it. Of course, you could just use a trombone for that. Or a slide whistle. Or a controlled, slow, glissando on harp. That's all for today. Bye!

Cool Songs I Recommend

Hey guys! I am here to give you some quick song recommendations, or at least some songs that I like right now.
"Closer", "Roses", and "Paris" by The Chainsmokers
"The Saw is the Law" and "Breeding Violence" by Whitechapel
"Holland, 1945" and "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel
"Cherub Rock" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" by The Smashing Pumpkins
"Epic" by Faith No More
"Snow (Hey Oh)", "Dani California", and "Can't Stop" by Red Hot Chili Peppers
"Heart Shaped Box" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana
Anything on the Gold Skies EP by Martin Garrix
"Toulouse" by Nicky Romero
"Cirice", "From the Pinnacle to the Pit", and "He Is" by Ghost
"Physical Education" and "CAFO" by Animals As Leaders
"Machine" and "Divergency" by Born of Osiris
"Laid to Rest" and "Now You've Got Something to Die For" by Lamb of God
"Welcome to the Black Parade", "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)", "House of Wolves", "Famous Last Words", "Teenagers", "Mama", "The Ghost Of You", "Helena", "Na Na Na", "Sing", etc. etc. by My Chemical Romance
"Dance, Dance", "This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race", "Uma Thurman", "Sugar, We're Goin' Down", etc. by Fall Out Boy
"Miss Jackson", "I Write Sins Not Tragedies", "Don't Threaten Me With A Good Time", "LA Devotee", "Victorious", "Nine in the Afternoon", "Mad as Rabbits", "The Ballad of Mona Lisa", and "Emperor's New Clothes" by Panic! At The Disco
"Forced Gender Reassignment" and "A Living, Breathing Piece of Defecating Meat" by Cattle Decapitation

I'll update this list as more come to me, but for now, that's all! Bye!

THE INCREDIBLE MUSICAL FESTIVAL TOUR album out now (Details)

Hello ghosts and tumbleweeds! It is I, EDM Side Project, the YouTube user who discovered that making music is actually pretty jam. I am releasing a new album which dropped on iTunes this morning, and will be on other things soon. The new album is called The Incredible Musical Festival Tour, and it utilizes all the new tips and tricks in music production that I have learned since releasing This Is 1984. Here is another TRACK RUNDOWN for you guys! I will be explaining the inspiration or story behind each song.
Before anything else, I should probably explain the album's concept. The concept is similar in structure to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" or "Magical Mystery Tour" by The Beatles. The basic idea is that it is structured like a small-scale music festival with all of the styles of music that I make: electro house, metal/djent, trap, dubstep, etc. I made the album as an homage to The Beatles' way of making such a successful album with a crap ton of weird ideas going on. Not to say that this album is a modern Sgt. Pepper, or that it's really experimental. It's just a fun album with a theme. I will go more in depth on this later, but I digress.
Anyways, Here We Go!™:

• Intro
• "Hello everyone, and welcome to The Incredible Musical Festival Tour. Make sure to get merchandise after the show. If you are hungry you can go buy insanely overpriced food. You are about to witness the greatest performance of all time. There will be dance music, metal, rock, experimental, jazz, mashup, remix. If you have a seat, please go to your seat. If you are on the floor in front of the stage, please continue walking around until music starts playing. Thank you for coming, and we hope you enjoy." This pretty accurately encapsulates the album's theme, minus the promise of mashups, which aren't legally okay unless I personally got in contact with the producers of LazyTown and figured out a deal. I did include a sneaky sample at one point towards the end of the album, which I will discuss later.
• Genres: interlude, ambient, sound art
• Plants As Overlords
• There are a lot of things going on in this track. The basic idea was inspired by a Jared Dines video in which he combines genres in weird ways. One of them was a combination of djent and jazz, or "djazz." I thought it sounded cool, because he was using jazz chords to play djent rhythm patterns, which I immediately picked up on as being a good idea, so I decided to write a song with that type of sound. Of course, I unintentionally wound up sounding like Animals as Leaders because I didn't realize that they are literally a djazz band. I decided to run with it by adding a solo with tapping and shredding. Cool. This song and the next song are meant to be forming the set of the first band to play in the festival. They are a djent band, currently nameless, but I am trying to come up with a good name. By the way, all these bands are fictional, meaning that they only exist in the mythology of my albums.
• Genres: djent, jazz fusion, shred, noise rock, "djazz", progressive metal, heavy metal, groove metal
• Djent of the Sugarplum Fairy
• This song was explained pretty accurately in the music video, so if you want to know any more about this song, all I can say is that inspiration struck while watching tv. Commercial comes on with Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy, so I wrote a metal song out of it. This is also by the same fictional band that did the previous song.
• Genres: djent, Christmas music, classical crossover, symphonic metal, progressive metal, classical, groove metal
• Crush The Opposition
• This song is a pretty crappy dubstep song. Not much else to say here, other than the fact that it took a really long time to make. The fictional artist that did this song is a dubstep/EDM producer who will probably get a name at some point soon.
• Genres: dubstep, 2-step garage
• Throwback
• Title refers to the fact that I used a production technique that I actually was using on some of my first songs. This song is for a YouTube series that a friend is doing. In the mythology of the album, it is written by the same artist as the previous one.
• Genres: brostep, dubstep, complextro
• Classically Trained Beat
• No real explanation, basically I decided that I wanted to make another beat and it turned out pretty well. This one is by the same dubstep/EDM producer as the last two.
• Genres: trap, instrumental hip hop, classical crossover
• Space Battle
• This song marks a milestone in my career, because it was the first one I produced in Logic Pro, and it was pretty crappy when I first did it, because I was new to the software and had just started making that type of music. This song is meant to be the headlining act, and it is EDM Side Project (aka Me), in the mythology of my album.
• Genres: big room house, complextro, noise, progressive house, electro house
• Emotional Support
• This is a trance-inspired house song that I did a few months ago for a smaller project, and it turned into a bigger thing than it started out as because it made sense in the structure of the album. This one is also by EDM Side Project in the album's concept.
• Genres: progressive house, uplifting trance, electro house
• We Want an Encore
• The crowd cheers because the EDM Side Project performance wasn't long enough for a headlining act. Trap music starts playing to signify the return of the headliner.
• Genres: trap, ambient, sound art, interlude
• Fatal Error
• EDM Side Project returns to the stage, initially faking out the audience with a different intro to an older song, then the synth riff plays, and it all is revealed as the old song Fatal Error, which I originally wrote last year not long before summer started, and I completely rebuilt the song from the ground up in November 2016. The sample before the drop is from the video "Another Sleepless Night with Phil" by AmazingPhil. In the video, he takes off his contact lenses, and then spins around while putting on his eyeglasses, resulting in him kicking a glass door in his bathroom, which made an insanely cool sound. I immediately grabbed the sample and put it before the drop and then at the end of the song, but made longer to provide context. The song contains my favorite synth pattern I have ever written.
• Genre: big room house, electro house, EDM, progressive house
• Think Fast
• EDM Side Project plays one last song. It is totally new and nobody has heard it before. If I could put out radio singles from this album, they would be "Djent of the Sugarplum Fairy", "Fatal Error", and this song. This song was the one I completed the most recently, and the story behind it is a bit odd. This song started with me writing an electro house version of "All Star" by Smash Mouth, but the song worked well enough on its own, so I removed the All Star vocals and made the song better. This one sounds pretty generic, but I really like it.
• Genres: electro house, progressive house

That should be it! Thanks for reading!

"This Is 1984" TRACK RUNDOWN

Hey guys! So I figured I would give a quick explanation of the tracks on my debut album. Here we go!

• This Is 1984
• The title track, as well as one of my favorite songs on the album. The song originally had lyrics about the George Orwell novel 1984 and the culture of surveillance that exists both in the book and in the real world. I took it more from the angle of the paranoia that it causes and how it is generally a nuisance. I removed the vocals for two reasons: a) they sounded terrible, and b) the song worked better without vocals anyways (UPDATE: I have since released a version of the song that has the vocals processed through a vocoder, and it is on my new album "The Forest"). As for the sound of the song, I would compare it to a mix of deadmau5, Martin Garrix, and Tiësto. Very trancey drop, but the bassline on the verses (which were added back in on the version from "The Forest") takes a heavy inspiration from the song "Professional Griefers" by deadmau5 and Gerard Way, and the synth riff itself is heavily influenced by Martin Garrix's style of synth lead; i.e., anthemic saw wave synths and chords.
• Genres: progressive house, Dutch house, electronic rock, electro house, trance/house
• Spooky Scary Skeletons
• I did this track because I had the Living Tombstone remix of the song stuck in my head, as well as the original version. The whole thing was released on a small scale during the summer, then revised several times until it sounded tolerable. This track is a relic of the days when I made big room house with the Pryda snare sample. Very 3 years ago, despite the fact that it is the most popular song on the album according to the ratings on iTunes.
• Genres: big room house, Halloween music, progressive house, electro house, remix, mashup, meme music
• It Took the Night to Believe
• The song is a cover of a song by the legendary drone metal band Sunn O))). The original song has no drums, so I added drums because without drums it's impossible to listen to. Drums contribute heaviness. FUN FACT: The only part that I played on a regular guitar was the lead part that's really high pitched. Everything else that sounds like a guitar is played on bass, and I also used a Logic Pro plugin called Monster Bass, which is the crunchy sound in the central channel. I recorded 4 different vocal takes using a variety of techniques, and I did something that you should NEVER DO: I inhale growled, which is an advanced technique that you shouldn't do because it messes up your voice if you do it wrong. Don't inhale.
• Genres: drone metal, doom metal, experimental metal, electronic metal
• Megalovania
• You know that one song from Undertale that everyone likes? I did an entire album which musically chronicled the storyline of Romeo and Juliet, and the only comment on the video was a request to make a remix of that one song from Undertale that everyone likes. I spent around a week making a MIDI file of the song from scratch, and then added some extra stuff. I continued to improve on the song until it reached the point where I added guitar and pitch wobbles.
• Genres: video game music, MIDI, bitpop, trap, future bass, house, electronic rock, progressive rock/metal/house
• Rave Wave
• Again, this song, for me at least, was one of the forgotten heroes of the album. I love this track a lot, because it really showcases a major shift in my musical style, changing from 2014-era big room house to a less anthemic progressive house, but with a very big room-type drop, minus the snare sample. I am very fond of the track because it marks one of the biggest stylistic changes in my music. I later changed the drop, rise, drum kit, and deleted a synthesizer part. FUTURE PETE HERE! During production for "The Forest", I made a song called "Mashup", and I have also been consistently revising it for a live version. This song has a lot melodically in common with "Levels" by Avicii, just based on the chords, so it overlaps in the mashup song.
• Genres: progressive house, electro house, big room house, trance/house
• Djent Trap
• This is a song that began a trend for me, which is doing an entire song in a very brief time period. I started the song at around 10 AM and completed it at around 1:30 PM. I have continued doing these songs very fast, including a subtle 2 hours to make the "We Are Number One" remix, and 2 days to finish a ground-up rebuild of an older song. Djent Trap is a song that arose after I got inspired by watching Epic Rap Battles of History, and hearing some of the beats that are used. I wanted to make an entertaining, yet experimental beat. I started with the trap rhythm and built onto it by adding a lead guitar part, violins, and 3 djent/deathcore-style breakdowns.
• Genres: trap, instrumental hip hop, djent, deathcore, metal, classical crossover, EDM
• Final Boss
• This track started out as me trying to do something more progressive than I normally would have done at the time, and it was my first song to start to branch away from my big room house style that I was doing previously. I had been listening to some progressive house, and I wanted to do a complextro-type track. The track became one of my favorites very quickly, and I regard that song as a predecessor to Rave Wave, because it led to me making different music than what I had been doing prior to Final Boss.
• Genres: progressive house, complextro, electro house, glitch house, big room house

That's all the tracks! I feel like I shouldn't have to explain "Djent of the Sugarplum Fairy" because I did it in the music video. I have some more music coming soon, potentially a new album! As usual, the album will be a mix of metal and EDM, which was the original concept behind EDM Side Project. I designed this whole project to be a mix of different styles, mainly to increase the likelihood that listeners will find something they might enjoy, which is why I do metal songs (mainly to fulfill my dream of doing metal music) as well as mainstream EDM bangers (because I enjoy both listening to AND producing that style of music).

Bye!