Neuropa - Once Upon A Time (Impulse Tracker goa trance collection) OUT NOW

[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.

[astralprojection]

okay, makes sense! i wish all the best!! 🤩

[Paul Eye]

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

[astralprojection]

final product sounds really good! even on bandcamp. coverart is great, it has that 12bit flair to it

[Paul Eye]

13 hours ago, astralprojection said:

final product sounds really good! even on bandcamp. coverart is great, it has that 12bit flair to it

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).

[astralprojection]

13 hours ago, Paul Eye said:

Is it unusual for something to sound good via the Bandcamp player? 

IMHO yes. Mostly it is 128kbit mp3 quality, cause the artist or label want people to buy the "full quality" and have really bad quality for the streams. 

Poor decision imo. Also illogical. One album I mastered for a person, said the label asked him to get low quality masters for band camp, just to have people buy the high quality versions. I did not comply to that and I explained to the artist how I thought it didn't make sense.. Better it sounds great at first listen, then the listener is much more inclined to buy, rather than it sounds like crap at bandcamp. 

 

Also, I'm not sure what kind of bitrate bandcamp uses. I know soundcloud uses pretty damn lossy compression for free users. (128kbit iirc) which makes the hihats and high end generally sound poor. 

[Paul Eye]

6 hours ago, astralprojection said:

IMHO yes. Mostly it is 128kbit mp3 quality, cause the artist or label want people to buy the "full quality" and have really bad quality for the streams. 

Poor decision imo. Also illogical. One album I mastered for a person, said the label asked him to get low quality masters for band camp, just to have people buy the high quality versions. I did not comply to that and I explained to the artist how I thought it didn't make sense.. Better it sounds great at first listen, then the listener is much more inclined to buy, rather than it sounds like crap at bandcamp. 

 

Also, I'm not sure what kind of bitrate bandcamp uses. I know soundcloud uses pretty damn lossy compression for free users. (128kbit iirc) which makes the hihats and high end generally sound poor. 

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.

[astralprojection]

13 hours ago, Paul Eye said:

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.

What I mean is, they'd have very lossy versions that you can listen to for free. And when you buy the album you get the lossless version. The logic being that if it sounds too good for free, people won't buy the lossless version. 

Which ofc is very faulty logic but yes, that's what the label told the artist to do. Iiirc he wanted 96k bitrate mp3s for Bandcamp, and then lossless flac for when you buy it, also from Bandcamp ofc. Hope it's clearer now

Anyway, I've seen that quite a few times, that the sound quality of the free streaming versions are very poor 

[Paul Eye]

5 hours ago, astralprojection said:

What I mean is, they'd have very lossy versions that you can listen to for free. And when you buy the album you get the lossless version. The logic being that if it sounds too good for free, people won't buy the lossless version. 

Which ofc is very faulty logic but yes, that's what the label told the artist to do. Iiirc he wanted 96k bitrate mp3s for Bandcamp, and then lossless flac for when you buy it, also from Bandcamp ofc. Hope it's clearer now

Anyway, I've seen that quite a few times, that the sound quality of the free streaming versions are very poor 

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.

[astralprojection]

2 hours ago, Paul Eye said:

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.

Okay. I suppose they changed that then? This happened in 2020 I believe so it's more than possible they've changed the way they do things since then. 

[astralprojection]

Now that I think about it, it may have been beatport, and not Bandcamp. But the rest remains the same. 

[Paul Eye]

19 hours ago, astralprojection said:

Now that I think about it, it may have been beatport, and not Bandcamp. But the rest remains the same. 

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

[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