having to youtube-mp3 my own music

 at the beginning of february my macbook turned off for good. i took it to the apple store and was met with the bad news that the laptop would not turn on again unless i sent it in for an expensive repairment, and even that wouldn't guarantee me a permanent fix. something wrong with the circut board-- some dust and junk on it. regardless, if i paid for this, the computer would come back completely wiped, and i hadn't saved anything on my drive. so, a new laptop it was. that first week of february shaped up to be the most expensive week of my life, the purchases of a shiny new macbook and a new (no longer pirated! we made it out mom's house y'all) ableton live authorization adding up to a stressful two thousand dollars. 

at the time, i didn't own an external hard drive. NONE of my music was backed up, apart from whatever i had already sent to myself and saved in my files app. these were mostly demos that i already had publicly uploaded. anything i worked on secretly or for shits and gigs in my four years of producing, regardless of whether or not i saved it into a compressed wav file, was lost. and fyi- data recovery in the bay area can cost up to 7k. screw these tech moguls. do i want five months rent or my 2021 demos back?

the funny thing, though, is that all of my old garageband files were saved to my google drive. having nothing, pockets so empty of digital ableton lore, i revisited these files, some of which dated back to as far as 2018 when i was just a sixteen year old stereolab fan with a ton of free time (classic). this was pre-midi controller, pre-sound card, pre-mic, pre-LAPTOP-- my setup isn't impressive in any way now, but the lack thereof back then was real. garageband iphone app and wired headphones, babe.

curious to hear? yeah, so am i every six months. i recently watched poor things (i promise it's relevant), a film where the protagonist bella baxter begins as physically an adult woman, but mentally a rapidly growing infant. producing for fun, i kinned bella in that my garageband app period was, essentially, my own infancy. i keyboard mashed and slapped in-app effects on youtube-mp3 samples of songs i liked (not too far off from what i do now sometimes, the key distinction being deliberation and routine). 

 

i made this demo when i was seventeen and the concept of a demo didn't really exist to me yet. a secret: there are lyrics to this demo that i still remember perfectly. that's the thing about writing music. it sticks because it's yours. once there are real lyrics attached, it's suddenly tangible until you have the capacity to forget (muscle memory, probably. speech muscle memory. i'm referencing my own lyrics like they're primate calls).

i miss this approach to music. now, when i write a song, i know exactly how i'll structure its demo in ableton. before 2022, NONE of my vocals were doubled. within a single vocal take is probably the margin where an artists' humility exposes itself. and i'm geriatric now. i'm stuck in my ways-- i'll take a short stack of vocal stacks. 

 in reference to this post's title- recently i needed the stems for a song of mine called my bell rings but was reminded they exist on a laptop that has since croaked. so i youtube-mp3'ed my own master, which exists in its mastered state only due to a youtube-mp3 transaction of the song's samples in 2022. you either die a sampler or live long enough to sample the sampler. i guess there's a moral here that i had to be the guinea pig for, that being back up your shit to an external hard drive of course. 

to the demos from 2021-2023 that i lost (you know who you are, files) i miss you. to my releases under different artist projects (warren peace exists solely on bandcamp. imagine i buy my own music back for a quick five) i miss you, less so.

i will leave you with every moniker i've released music under:

die hipster scum -- warren peace --nelly name -- vloggystyle -- operelly

p.s. elliot started a blogger chain and it's like the new ice bucket challenge. my friends are starting blogs left and right! i love it. !!!BLOG CHALLENGE!!! i nominate walker price and erik yoo.