So now that the EP Mandatory Memory Trip Of The Year is FINALLY done, i wanted to share some behind-the-scenes/fun facts about it. A LOT of things happened and they are all compiled below in no particular order. But first! ...a little introduction.
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|- Intro -|
The Mandatory Memory Trip Of The Year EP (which i will now refer to as EP from this point forward) is the third EP i produced.
This was one of the most difficult things i have ever produced so far (which is saying something)
the EP began production back in October of last year! what i thought was going to take me at least a month and a half minimum to finish, ended up taking me over 6 MONTHS to finish O_O
So what happened? the other EPs (Everlasting and Run N Jump) didn't give me nearly as much trouble. here's a list of fun facts explaining what happened!
|- Fun Facts! -|
-The EP began production on October 25th, 2022. the original name was A New Age.
It was about 'remembering what PR2 was and its current present'
-A New Age (the EPs main song) was finished on September 9th, 2022. the song came out sounding... okay-ish. it wasn't quite what i was looking for and i didn't want to just make a 'Run N Jump Version 2'
I scrapped it but... hmmm... maybe i can use those melodies again for later!
-My brain died.... (that's the fun fact xD) i couldn't come up with anything catchy. nothing! and if i did, it either sounded like some other tracks i made or just not up to my new standards.
-Out of all the attempts at making tracks, i was able to salvage four songs: Nocturnal Horsemen, The Philosopher's Dragon (Later renamed to Camer The Dragon King) Concentrate, and Midnight.
-all scrapped songs were: Medieval Towers, Da Umbrella, Essense Of Fire, and A New World. all of which i would love to revisit at some point. They were scrapped for the EP but not scrapped completely!
-Nocturnal Horsemen just sounded cool so it went through. The Philosopher's Dragon ended up inspiring me just by the melody alone. Gave me a more solid idea of what i wanted to do. but! it came with a cost... i ended up raising the 'production' value a little bit too much and it ended up giving me more problems. More on that later.
Concentrate was supposed to be like a new TMM43 Hello? but i scrapped the idea. The beat just wasn't landing for me. and Midnight has a really cool piano melody on it but just didn't fit.
-OMEG4 SWING almost didn't make it!
I had this idea of making a track with lots of baseball samples but, ended up not finding good enough samples to well... sample. so i ditched the original idea (of a breakbeat track) and went back to the drawing board. ended up with a song that is super fun but that, conceptually, doesn't make sense for the EP. But whatever it's fine. Was already desperate on making anything good to come out of this anyways.
-at the edge of time is such a sweetheart of a track. was the ONLY track that didn't give me headaches. no technical issues, no brainstorming on melodies, no structure issues. It remained good all throughout.
-There is this track called 'Butterfly Rhythm' that has been stuck in development for a long time and i wanted to use it for the EP but, i backed out at the last few months of development since i realized i didn't have an ambient song -_- it is 'Mandatory' for my EP's to feature any type of chillout/ambient track of some kind.
i will make that track one day, it's been sitting on my folders now for the past i kid you not, 3 years.
-All thumbnails were made by me (but the backgrounds came from this website called Pexels. it's great, i recommend it!
-The MM EP Logo Development Process
first attempt
nah, doesn't work
alright getting there!
much better!
-I made two versions of Camer's CINEMATIC EXTENDED UNIVERSE tracks because i wasn't sure if anyone would get the joke on the original Story Version of the track. That track has me (Genius77 A.K.A Adulock Van Liovick A.K.A the person writing this right now) ''''''''''voice acting'''''''''' a funny dialog i come up with and recorded. perhaps if by any chance the song was to be chosen for PR2, hearing that would get a little... repetitive i'll say. so i made a 'hands up only' version. Also i wanted to make this whole battle sequence in the middle of the track with me voice acting but again... i ain't no voice actor xD not yet anyways... so i never did it.
I wanna get into voice acting at some point. Doing that recording brings me back to the good old days with my friends in my neighborhood.
now i'm just getting off track aren't i? :v sorry.
-The background of the EPs main thumbnail is a photo of my backyard! it was a nice day out, so i took a photo.
-Camer's track is literally 99.9MB of size. Just like his account Camer999! what a coincidence!
-Western Connection was supposed to be the new first track of the EP once i got everything back on track but i moved it to be the penultimate track after realizing the tune worked just fine as an ambient track.
-Also, Western Connection had a hands-up remix! that was awesome! WHICH I LOST! :D 'cause guess what happened? the lights went out on my entire sector as i was making the track. Just to add salt to the injury really because i was already struggling to make the original ambient mix.
-No mustangmans were harmed during the production of this EP.
-The Desert almost broke my PC! TWICE!
I got this sorta new free version sampler player/VST Called Kontakt and it came with loads of cool sounds and stuff but BOY! was it Ram expensive! my poor FL Studio went from 20% CPU usage to nearly 50%! (which means the track started to buffer super hard and was nearly unplayable) Thankfully! i figured out how to optimize pretty well over the years otherwise i wouldn't have been able to even save the track at all!
Around the minute 4:02 it started to buffer so bad I'm dead serious, not too sure about this but i heard a weird noise coming from my computer. O.o it was nuts but totally worth it.
And that's pretty much it really. I'm sure i forgot a couple of things but it's okay.
It took way longer than necessary or needed because i didn't have a straight vision of what the project needed to be. for those who missed it, the main theme of the EP is medieval. Which is something i wanted to do for quite some time. Combined that idea with old-school Hands-up tracks, and got an EP that sounds just enough different from the other EPs (which was my goal)
Making going through many many many days of 'how in the actual ****** do i even make music????? WHAT IS MUSIC???????????????' the many days of putting off tracks that sounded cool but once i made the structure they didn't work at all... all of that stuff... was super worth it in the end.
I love music and i will continue experimenting! this EP taught me so much and i wanted to thank anyone in this wonderful community who gave my music a listen! thank you and thanks for reading.