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Let me introduce myself. My name is Alex and I'm a 24 year old "Computer Science" student. I've also been known for my music and graphic hobbies. I want to share with you some interesting things about myself and of course my music. I would like to also think of this as a celebration of my 1000th , albeit a late one. My goal is to have you learn something new by the end of your reading this. I also include in this blog, a link to my album compiled just for TL with songs from 2000-2008, called Loser Songs, cause they are just that. Nostalgic, sad, some not, some shit, some very good, most at least interesting I hope. Before they are completely forgotten I figured I would share them, all 57.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/kGJPk.png)
My project for you: The Powder Room - Loser Songs. Some may say a rather fine collection of interesting pieces of music.
So I at least want to begin with some interesting stories before it all goes downhill.
I was born in Costa Rica, my family fled Nicaragua due to the communist government being menacing assholes and kidnapping/torturing people at random, just for being "possible conspirators" or what not. My dad did not want to fight for the government, so to avoid recruitment he and my mom decided to flee to neighboring Costa Rica. I trust it was the right decision. I was born there, and by the time I was one years old we were accepted into Canada under refugee status. It sucked apparently. We had to live in a shelter for 3 weeks. I think we then moved to Toronto where we shared a house with my aunts and uncles (my moms side had come with us). Back in Nicaragua we had a beach house, a farm, 2 houses, maids etc. all gone. I didn't know about it till later in my life of course. But we made out alright. My parents are split now and I'm living with my mom studying at community college (cause I dropped uni twice) and hurting because of it's slow pace and lack of theory. I should have done community right out of high school and then into uni. I'm a loser cause I lacked guidance, and I'm also a loser cause I blame it. In my first year of university I was so anxious and worried about being accepted, and about being the "right" person. I don't know what right person means but I know it's a crock now. I just know to be empathetic to others and trust myself, instead of someone's ideal of what oneself is. I loved some parts of university. My grades could have been better. I was spending way too much on booze and pot. A decision I regretted later. On the bright side I got laid a few times, with one girl being a 26 year old phd student, nice. I eventually got lost in financial trouble and dropped out, without the confidence to ask my parents to help me out. I never did have the confidence to ask for help. I do now.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/aXvAp.jpg)
Me (center) at the uni pub. I barely knew those people around me I was just there to drink.
Back to around the time I was 12/13. My dad was/is a software programmer as well as consultant. He actually worked for Blizzard for a while. He didn't work on the actual game but for some business software. We got StarCraft before it even hit stores! My dad programmed the (incomplete) A.I. for my game BomberMan VB. Once I saw his code I stopped programming for years. I felt he withheld so much knowledge from me. I was using procedural style code with massive arrays holding game state, where as he was using OOP in vb6 with such logical style. It's more complicated then that, perhaps not so straightforward, but we definitely had issues that drew BomberMan VB to a halt. Regardless, in our old house (we lost after stocks crashed via the bubble in '99) we had a sick network of 4 computers in the basement/family room. We used to play Starcraft all the time, and we would even play over phoneline with my best buddy and his older brother.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/7QCp9.jpg)
An old picture of my older brother ripping my younger brothers head off. I have another brother too
This was the basement where we LANed it up. We moved out of this house around 2000/2001.The worst part would be when my mom picked up the phone mid game to make a call and we would disconnect
lol. Those were MY old days, things like Napster and Pokemon just hit North America, as well as my beloved MOD music scene. I was browsing the web when I ran across a music file format .xm I was like what? Is this like mp3 but smaller (the files were significantly smaller in size). Little did I know my curiosity to discover what the file format was would change my young little life . I discovered it's a music format of the software Fast Tracker 2 made by Triton, released in '93. I would say it was the most popular tracker of the day, with Impulse Tracker a close 2nd. Both of these allow you to sequence samples and loops to create songs all on your computer! I was blown the f*ck away. ![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/W5cqt.png)
FastTracker 2. This beast took me a long time to learn from scratch.
The first month toying with FT2 I didn't even have the soundcard configured right, so I would play with it, nothing would happen! So I would scrap it and come back the next day until I realized the problem of setting up my sound card (Sound Blaster ftw). Nobody had helped me before with these kinds of things, and I regret having to learn so much on my own. I forget the name of the website that I frequented, but I downloaded tons and tons of .xm files and learned the software by playing the songs through, clicking buttons and pushing keys. After what must have been weeks I was able to deduct the basic functionality of the software including the sequencer volume control that is displayed in the song patterns along with the notes and basic effects like the phasing, and echos. The tracker website even had charts for different genres. I quickly latched onto a group by the name TSEC, with members Andreas Viklund (1980- ) and Björn Karlsson (1976- ).
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/oIqCR.jpg)
Andreas Viklund performing with his now defunct group Lagoona. I grew up to his indie electronic music, and tried to emulate him.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/6XBxY.jpg)
Him in 2008
Andreas in particular I had affection for due to his style and aura. To me he was as good as Elvis. I remember one of his songs incorporated a techy .wav loop and I had no idea how he came up with that awesome 404 sound, of course not realizing it was sampled. In the song comments he had mentioned 'I know it's cheating but, whatever' lol. I never understood till much later. TSEC became Lagoona, and now Andreas does web development/word press stuff.
Another idol of mine at the time was an artist by the name of The Alchemist, a 16 year old american, and he had produced a great track called "Pharoah's Cry" that had gained my loyalty. He later helps me promote my first public attempt to gain in the mod charts! I had played with a bunch of my own songs, using samples ripped from other peoples .xm files (open source basically). I learned about a new tracker, called ModPlug Tracker ( by Olivier Lapicque) and this was windows friendly! Therefore I quickly switched over, and felt more at home with it's windows interface and menu/tab system. It is now called OpenMPT if anyone is curious.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/4ueg3.png)
ModPlug Tracker.
Due to lack of time, Olivier Lapicque discontinued development of ModPlug Tracker itself, and in early 2004, he released the entire source code under an open license. Consequently, it is now known as OpenMPT, and is being developed actively by a group of trackers/programmers at SourceForge.
So I created this song called Summer Breeze (included in the album) and quickly uploaded it. I asked The Alchemist to comment and he said something to the like of "Watch out for this kid! He's going to be big!" To a 13 year old, this was the world. The voice clip in the track, if you listen to it, is actually me 11 years ago, saying "And now for the latest weather news, it is going to rain all day today and tomorrow" just as the song turns into a storm. I checked the charts all the time and it seemed whoever was downloading from the charts took interest as mine climbed fast! I can't even recall if it was a highly trafficked site but to me it was BillBoard Top 100! lol. I couldn't believe the day that my song, Summer Breeze, had actually reached #7. I was one above a TSEC song (possibly coming down after a long period, but regardless!). I was ecstatic I was jumping up and down I raced up the stairs to tell my mom how happy I was! I was #7, one above my idol TSEC! lol. However, as things always seem to turn out in my life, I had little faith beyond gaining anything more but that one jump in the charts. I was working on a new song that I felt, from my limited perspective, was rather weak. I remember sending the Alchemist and email with the song attached to see if he could "fix" it, I think what I really wanted was advice as to becoming a more proficient producer. He returned the file and the changes were minor, with the melody and structure still weak. He had simply removed some poor sounding echo fx done by duplicating the notes and reducing their subsequent volume. I was afraid. I had/have this fear of failing expectations, and I felt I had failed the Alchemists. I think the months that followed were rather slow going, as I had no vision and just played around with different song ideas, typically influenced by RPG genres. I was also working on Bomberman VB at the time, with some songs produced by me specifically for the clone. I remember had tried to show my older brother, and in a moment of joy I thought that I had excited him with the brilliance of one of my songs, only to discover he was grinning at a joke a person had told on the television right behind us. Again I felt ignored and my efforts pointless. What next?
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/JKOdf.jpg)
In high school I was mid line backer. I'm the big guy pushing the scrawny kid in red.
High school came around, and I had written a song that had a rather driving beat and was "ok" for dancing, called Comin' Back. I was naive about mixing/mastering techniques, in fact was probably oblivious to it existing, so it completed with a hideous bassy mix. I grabbed the cd and spoke to a DJ at our school to play the song for the next dance, he ok'd it.
The song played and I felt people enjoyed the first bit, but the mix was just too muddy and I think eventually the energy of dance floor began dissipating in the confusing sound. To top it off my older buddy Dan grabbed me in a headlock in his stupid way to show off to his friends that I had written the song. I wanted to dance to it! Geez. Anyways, as the mix started killing the energy of the floor the dj quickly grabbed onto the breakdown to mix into another superior track, saving me from the credit of killing his floor As a side note, those school dances used to be mad! I would be dripping in sweat by the time I got out, you could not touch my shirt with out getting soaked! High school was also good for the football. Our programs are dwarfed by the US ones, but whenever we got to go down to Columbus and play their teams I made sure to make them hurt. They even mentioned one of my hits to the coach cause I literally gave 2 guys a concussion as I got one and a half concussions lol. I ended up getting Defensive MVP my final year for my excellent role as mid line backer. ![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/ylCS9.jpg)
Fruity Loops. The next frontier.
I continued to make music, finally deciding on a more robust DAW. I had heard of fruity loops and so grabbed it, I believe at the time the version was 3.5, it's currently at version 9. I loved fruity loops, it had soft synths! Wow! I had never played around with them before besides some basic reverb effects packages for mod tracker. It was so much fun to play with real time effects via knobs instead of typing hexadecimal values lol. The one thing that was still nagging me was my lack of classical training, and it still causes a feeling of regret and disappointment. If only I had started early with a nice teacher to teach me some piano. Regardless, I kept my love for trance and rock. The pumpkins were still my number one band, despite never having seen them (yet
, I've seen them twice since) and I loved all sorts of alt rock like pearl jam, foo fighters, and the sappy kid in me liked some of coldplays stuff as well. I made tons and tons of shit during my high school years. Many are included in the download.![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/vBUAo.jpg)
My short lived band circa 2006 celebrating Steph's birthday. We played "Bury yourself", "Modern day miracle", "All alone", "Going nowhere", "Dig up the grave", and others at several small music venues. My guitar skills were not up to par.
Around summer of 2005 I lost my computer to a crash. I was working on my two 'best' songs to date, Run to Avalon, and Going Nowhere. I was again just shaking my head laughing at myself. Fucken loser! Backup your shit! I had mix downs of what I had done up till then thanks to having emailed them to my gf at the time, and you can find Run to Avalon in the pack. Really after this date everything goes really downhill. I stop really trying and sort of mindlessly churn out beats and play with synths without any real direction or goals, and with no distinct structure to my tracks. I had really given up and for all I could see, a career was hopeless, so I continued in my passive-aggressive way to pursue graphic design in high school. I think I'm talented in graphics but out of practice and by now far out skilled by peers, I feel the same way in every avenue of my life, music, arts, programming, fitness, money, broodwar. Outpaced. How do I regain pace? I don't know. This is a good step at least, I think. I believe I never realized that practice, for whatever objective, is not for the sake of practice but for the sake of improvement. A notion so basic had slipped by me. What do I do now? I barely touch fruity loops, but I have a goal to practice guitar 15-30 mins a day. I also am beginning to go to the gym at my college so that I can burn calories in between classes. Lastly, I'm focusing on the difficult/math parts of software/computer science so that I can develop/design killer apps by the time I'm done studying. I hope you guys enjoy the album, it's really my life's work, as a loser child and hopeless teenager. It's a strange bag of emotions, and I hope you either love it, hate it, or at least just listen to a song. I'm not going to lie about their quality, but they do have good stories. See you around tl.net and thanks for reading.
Download (200 mb - 57 mp3 songs) :
www.mediafire.com/?yh55aqsryr257r4
Bonus (for those interested in tracker files):
+ Show Spoiler +
Tracker Files (.xm, and .it) (7mb)
Includes 99-00 dated Summer Breeze, Comin' Back, and most importantly Andrea's Viklands work as TSEC in it's original XM format, including his remix of Alt Jag Vill that uses the .wav loop I spoke about earlier. Wonderful stuff.
Includes 99-00 dated Summer Breeze, Comin' Back, and most importantly Andrea's Viklands work as TSEC in it's original XM format, including his remix of Alt Jag Vill that uses the .wav loop I spoke about earlier. Wonderful stuff.
