Category Archives: Unrelease

The Cosmic DJ “album”

I did eventually play through the entire game/program, and here is the entirety of the album output that resulted:

Cosmic Jam 1

Cosmic Jam 1B

Crunch Time

Ache Throb

Tone Drone

wut

If you’re curious as to just how much of a difference the user input actually makes, you can compare what I came up with to an album uploaded by another user of Cosmic DJ here.  The background “structure” of the song does sound similar, as you would expect, but the user input forms the core of the melody and produces a decidedly different sound from different styles of input.

Hiphoppish Demo

It’s probably not exactly a secret to those who know me that I can be very opinionated when it comes to music.  There are certain genres that simply rub mew the wrong way, and on balance, hip-hop (or rap, or all things similar) is often one of those.  Don’t get me wrong – I certainly don’t hate it all.  I do have some rap albums and mixtapes, although they generally fall into the following categories: progressive lyrics, nerd/geekcore, or thoroughly electro-influenced oldschool rap from the mid-eighties.  Nowadays, though, the genre to me feels musically bereft, and usually devoid of the interesting musical hooks that can get you into it.  Monotone rapping on top of a crap beat that sounds like a keyboard preset, thoroughly vapid “gangsta” lyrics about guns and money and prostitutes…  bleh!  In fact, one day I sat down and thought, after listening to one particularly odious example, “this stuff is barely music.  It takes no effort at all.  I could probably sit down in an hour and pull together a hip-hop-style track I’d rather listen to than this dreck.”  A few minutes later, I decided to take myself up on the challenge, and fired up my DAW.  About an hour later (most of which was spent tweaking a beat and some sounds in microtonic, and auditioning some interesting-sounding royalty-free samples that came bundled with Logic), I had the following track, which I would much rather listen to over the majority of major-label hip-hop being released today.

hiphoppishdemo