=== THE BRIDGE [2003 - 2005] ===

Lets ignore the fact that E-Jay was my favorite music software before I found any decent music software. By the time I uploaded my first songs to Newgrounds I had been messing around with my illegally acquired copy of Fruityloops Studio 3 for about a year. Yes, I said FL Studio 3. It was my keyboard teacher who had burned the software on a cd and handed out copies to his students (I still own mine to this day). He once showed up at our house to instal cubase and connected my keyboard to the computer for midi purposes. He was the best music teacher I had by far! Thanks to him me and the other students were learning songs by Nirvana, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and anything remotely popular at the time. None of it was boring!

I never got my midi settings to work after that, as the preferences screen in FL Studio was incomprehensible to me at the time. To make matters worse, I had to connect this thing through a serial port. I didn't mind it that much though. The software allowed me to compose, so - midi controls or not - that's what I did! It took me a while before I learned how to properly make a song. I had no idea how to change pitch on the sequencer and was oblivious to the piano roll. One of my first songs was composed by duplicating one sample at different pitches and alternating between them on the sequencer haha. I uploaded the song a year later. Having signed up to Newgrounds in October 2003, for some reason uploading music didn't work for me until after the first AP overhaul towards the end of 2003. My first NG buddy @42588 used a couple of my songs in his flashes before I got to upload any of my music. These songs in particular never made it to Newgrounds, I'm not sure why. The movies they appear in are Mortal Kombat Quil Flik, Puncher Girl and A Weird Movie.

My first computer came with a set of small speakers, presumably by harman/kardon. The rest of my studio (if you could call it that) consisted of several shitty microphones that broke down over time and a Yamaha PSR-270 lessons keyboard. I composed much of my early stuff on these keys. Sadly I lost most of my earliest songs due to the reformating of my system (this is probably why some of my oldest songs never made it to Newgrounds). I cried over this loss as I had not anticipated this. Many of the songs I had made were inspired by RPG maker, which I played a lot with and wanted to compose my own songs for. I also replicated a couple of songs, with Zelda in particular. Before I got familiar with the NG Audio portal I had found a website called OverClocked Remix. It was of great influence on my music.

My first experiences with the audio portal were rather good. It didn't take long for me to find The Matrix DNB, which inspired me heavily. For a long time I was obsessed with Drum&Bass because of paragonx9, though I had no idea how to make it. When the portal finally allowed me to submit my own songs, I soon figured out how to cheat the top 5 of the weak. I did this by posting music late on a thursday night and voting 5. Oftentimes it would fly under the radar and get one of the best scores. Other than this, scores didn't mean much to me. Zero-bombers became a prominent threat to many creators, but I didn't care at all. Downloads were much more important to me.

My actual life was going through a rough patch at the times. Hard to believe as it may seem, at the end of my first year in high school I was facing a mental breakdown. I had difficulties finishing that year, and it screwed up my second year completely. During my short attendence of the 2nd year I wrote an assignment on what my favorite song was for my philosophy class, which got me an A+. Passion was definitely there. Failing school was a terrible awareness. "But at least I still have music," I thought. Maybe so, but I was shit at making it.

I kept dishing out songs throughout the year. To this day I've never had a more productive year than 2004. I remember wanting to record from my Yamaha directly, but I had no idea how to do this. I ended up recording sustained notes and used those in my songs. Someone I knew at the time invited me to come over to his personal attic studio. I learned that he worked in Reason and from that point I wanted nothing more than to work with the same software (This transfer to propellerhead never really happened for me as I became too comfortable with FL Studio). He taught me about Recycle and how there's software you can use to edit waveforms and turn them into loops. I worked a lot with Soundforge 6.0 before moving on to Cool Edit Pro 2.0.

Eventually @Chronamut took notice of me in November or so, took me under his wing and convinced me to upgrade my software. He took one of my works in progress and worked on the mix, finishing it together, eventually also sharing it on vgmix before it went down under. He gave me a lot of tips which helped improve my music drastically. In no time I was utilizing the FL Studio piano roll, vst's, soundfonts, mixer tracks, and added effect filters. I mostly used presets though. During this time the simple 7-band equalizer became one of my best friends.

I think somewhere in September of that same year I joined one of the many signature making clubs on the forums. I often stayed up late to work on image requests, literally entranced by the dance tracks that would play on the radio during the weekends. I became a big fan of dance music and wanted to become a deejay. I never knew how to get this done though. Somehow I convinced my parents music was my passion and they bought me a bunch of awesome gear: a Roland Juno-D (which I still use), a Behringer Eurorack UB1222 FX-Pro and two Alesis M1 Active MK2 monitors (one of which was damaged). I coined my stage-name D-Yoop, which I discarded a few years later.

My biggest influences from this time are a giant mess to behold. I had a slight obsession with Lord Of The Rings soundtracks early on, but it's Paul van Dyk whose music caused me to aspire being a deejay. I listened to quite a bit of trance at the time, I think. Tiësto was another big inspiration during this period of time. Despite all this, I had trouble labeling my own music and often compared it to that of the Gorillaz for lack of better examples, but I guess they were inspirational too. Keane was another band that captured my heart. On the other hand there's Newgrounds musicians like Paragonx9 whose music introduced me to Drum&Bass. Then Kingbastard fueled my need to explore new sounds and experiment.

• Reasons To Create: I felt horribly guilty about ditching school but I couldn't tell what my reason was. Not only were my intentions misunderstood, but I went down a slippery slope of distrust of my own capabilities. At some points I felt suicidal, but music was something I had faith in.
• Creative Developments: From behind the keys I moved into the studio. I finally had the power to create my own songs but didn't know too much about the theory. Songs were oftentimes repetitive and badly mixed. My inspiration was endless though. I believed my songs were awesome, although I could not attain the quality of my idols.
• Outcome: For some reason my cringeworthy songs got pretty good reviews, eventually even getting gold and platinum stats. Chronamut was one of the bigger names in the audio portal back then, so I was kind of awestruck when I learned he enjoyed my songs. I also befriended RyeGuyHead. Songs involving the keywords "Matrix" and "LOTR" got most of the recognition. Gee, I wonder why that is?

"I'm sure I can speak collectively and say, as music makers reviews are what we are after, especially constructive critisism that can really benefit the development of our trx."

- monkeybullman

"no program is noobish, only the people using it. Good music makers can make good music using any format."

- Kingbastard

"Newgrounds was a great place to "level up" my music production skills."

- Krank

"As soon as people realise that the Audio Portal is just a bit of fun the better. It's for musicians to play around in and hopefully find some like-minded people who have the common courtesy to leave reviews if they listen/downlaod a trk. Yes it's not perfect, of course improvements can be made, but take it for what it is and learn to take the good with the bad and in time I'm sure it can grow into something to rival the Flash Portal, either that or it will die on its ass."

- Kingbastard

"The Audio Portal was intended to be a resource for the Flash Artists and one of the next things I'd like to see is a better way of Flash Artists developing relationships with Audio Portal artists - because that's where the audio guys will ultimately get greater exposure - if their material is included in a popular Portal entry. If people find plenty of interesting pieces in entries in the Flash Portal, they'll be more inclined to venture into the Audio Portal to see what else is in there."

- liljim

"I tend to not even look at the score of tracks anymore, it's irrelevant, all you gotta do is get yourself a bit of a following by reveiwing other artists tunes and the reviews should be returned in kind."

- Kingbastard

"trying to do something you love will always bring critisism, especially when it's in a creative medium."

- Kingbastard

[INDEX]

1. AN EMPTY STAVE
2. THE BRIDGE
3. IMPROV
4. A RIG RUNDOWN
5. TRANSITION