Paul Eye

Okay so this is what I should have done right from the start (sometimes I just don't think things through enough) but the collection is now "name your price" on Bandcamp. Which means it's free if you put 0€ as the price. And no, I won't even ask for your email address to be added to my spam mailing list (because I don't have one) https://pauleye.bandcamp.com/album/once-upon-a-time

I listen to about nothing else than local music files. Fuck streaming, I have too much music on my hard drives to have time or energy to listen to all of that.

Use "Shuffle (tracks)" instead of random and you won't get the same track until all others in the playlist have played. Of course the thing here is that fb2k in shuffle mode keeps an internal playlist of the tracks in your actual playlist, so when all tracks have played you get the same shuffled order of tracks again. You can of course counter this by holding shift when opening the playback menu and selecting "reshuffle".

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 😅

Ooh, need to take a listen

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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.

Heh, thanks. You're of course free to enjoy it even if I don't