I'm Michael Guy Bowman, and it's time to officially get my sock on! *(Struggles for two seconds.)* God, that's stupid. Hi everybody, I'm Michael Guy Bowman, and I'm happy to be a part of Stuck at Home Con this year. This is the online Homestuck convention, and this year I'd like to talk with you a little bit - as a special guest, honored to be here - about my contributions to Homestuck, specifically its music of which I wrote quite a bit! Those of you who are tuning in kind of randomly, who may or may not be familiar, you should know: Homestuck! It was a very fun and out there visual novel I participated in the making of, all the way back in the distant year of 2009. And, it's grown to be sort of a weird online phenomenon and franchise, which has endured and continued throughout the many years since it began. And, I was lucky enough to be a part of the original team that was making music for its animations and its interactive elements back in the day, and that's what I wanted with you about! So, how did I first get involved with Homestuck? In 2009, I was just getting into Problem Sleuth, actually, right as it ended. This was Andrew's comic from right before Homestuck began, back when the website was called mspaintadventures.com. I was actually recommended it once, and then I was checking the updates on daily Dinosaur Comics by Ryan North, and he was like, making a big deal about the end of Problem Sleuth, and what a crazy year it had been - you know, really shouting out his buddy Andrew. So I checked out and I read the whole thing and, you know, my mind was just, super blown by it. But I didn't grow up with Sam and Max, or Monkey Island comes to mind, but I'd, you know, I'd sort of osmoted it. I could tell that it was like, the pride of a gamer generation slightly older than me. This was all before Telltale games sort of revived the genre, kind of created a new paradigm with the episodic release style that sort of became where Homestuck went, with the Hiveswap video game project. So at the time this came out, it was nostalgic for something that was... you know, just disappearing a little bit beyond the threshold of what I could understand, as somebody that was, you know, just playing whatever games were out at the time. I was also really into like, Homestar Runner, you know. I don't know if they were doing the Strong Bad roomisodes or anything at the time, but that was another hybrid phenomenon, a flash phenomenon, where they'd brought back this kind of defunct, what once had been a triple A game style, and were doing it in sort of an independent way. And I really loved what it was as sort of like a humorous commentary on the mechanics of it. Anyway, so I got really into Problem Sleuth, right as it ended. I read the whole thing in, like, you know, a day or two? Two days? I was blown away by, kind of the improvised feeling of it, you know, obviously the mechanic that existed in Problem Sleuth - it existed also right at the beginning of Homestuck, which was the audience suggestion thing, really appealed to me. That was around the same time I was first getting into improv theater and improv comedy, so I saw a parallel between that and what was being done with this comic. So I think there was like, kind of a weird synthesis of thoughts that were going on about interactive art and technology. Keep in mind that 2009 was like, not the social media landscape that it is now - you know, the idea of Web 2.0 and like, "content will be dynamic," - I remember the word "crowdsourcing" like, literally evolving into the culture as this comic was coming out. So, it just felt so cutting-edge and interesting to me. Anyway, how did I get involved in the whole thing? Andrew had a really cool blog- (laughs) That sounds so dumb. "He had a cool blog! He had a *cool blog."* He had a blog that was like, his personal stuff, and you know, I checked it out and he had this wonderful little open call for musicians to participate in his next comic. He was going to use Flash - still at the height of the Flash era, before you had to like, click everything to make it run, and before it got banned completely from the internet - and he was going like, yeah, I'm going to discontinue the still images thing, and I'm going to go, so, Flash animations, and I'll need loops and all these things that I can't make, and let's expand this "crowdsourcing" idea from user suggestions - which, you know, he really just used to make fun of, and kind of, willy-nilly decide whether or not he was going to advance the plot - and let's expand it out and do something where, now, the giant reader-base that's evolved is also contributing art! Specifically, music. At the time, my music background was mostly training in percussion in high school, and I was in college and not really diong music at all - I was interested in becoming a songwriter, singer/songwriter, and mostly doing that... you know, a little bit, in my spare time, and toying around with producing in FL Studio, something I picked up from the Overclocked Remix crowd - I'd heard that their software of choice, back when the main home production information I had came from remixing video game music - so, I don't know exactly how qualified I was, but, you know, I had a big imagination, and *some* music background, and I just decided to go for it. And it turned out, a few dozen other people went for it, too. There was a subforum within the mspaintadventures website, that was just for this gang of a couple dozen musicians, most of whom did not know each other, and many of whom had, you know, never produced anything! With some big exceptions. There were all kinds of people. Malcolm Brown comes to mind; Mark Hadley, who had done music for the epilogue of Kid Radd, which, like, blew my mind at that time - it was like "oh my gosh! you did, you did this for this other thing, that's kind of similar to what, what we're going to do now!" - Lots of people were involved, right off the bat. And, when I got in there, the way it worked was like this: There'd be something coming up, and rather than telling us what was going to happen in the plot, we were on our toes kind of guessing at what was going to be needed, based on little hints like, you know, "I want something based around violin," or "I want something that's based around, like, a beat machine." So, the first major piece I worked on that ended up being used in the comic was Sburban Jungle. Andrew had wanted something that sounded like music from SimCity 4. He had linked us to this piece called Epicenter, and said, "I want something that sounds a bit like this," and he specifically focused on the marimba breakdown in the middle of it. And, it had kind of a pulsing beat, and sort of this evolving, atmospheric thing going on. I was at my computer, at the time he posted it, seeing the speed at which people were working, where they were like, seeing these little requests on this forum, where we'd just kind of talk with him. I was like, oh yeah, I gotta sit down and *immediately* make something, 'cause like, Andrew's style of working is to pick the first good thing, really. You know, he doesn't want to dwaddle. He could only really make that comic as quickly as he did because he had a philosophy that's sort of, like, I think kind of an improv philosophy of like - go with the first idea that isn't so bad you go *eugh,* you know, and sometimes even go with a bad idea and see if by decorating it, you can make it a good one. I knew that the gauntlet was thrown and that if I didn't make something, like, right away, it might not happen. And I sat down in FL Studio, on my terrible Dell laptop that I had had to uninstall Windows Vista from and put Windows XP on because it was so buggy and bad, and immediately got around to composing a piece that involved looping... xylophone. I think I was drawing a bit from the kinds of music I'd studied in percussion, actually. Anyway, what I ended up writing was about a minute of material - it was like, the first thing that got posted that night. I think it might have taken, like, an hour or two of, you know, feverish "let's just get something in there and figure out", and he immediately liked it, and was like, "This is what I'm going to use," and within days, it was in the loading screen for SBURB, with the spirograph and the graphics and I was just like, pleased as a peach. It was, like, one of those moments where it transitioned from comedy to an epic. Sburban Jungle was so clearly necessary to expand upon, and I went ahead and just wrote the full thing out, you know, with the big bridge, with the piano breakdown and all that stuff, just to see what would happen. Because, actually, the main emphasis was going to be on loops, originally - we thought that everything that appeared in the comic was just going to be a piece of looping media, the idea that he was going to do full animations, with a beginning, middle and end, that wasn't in the scope of the project yet. Finishing out Sburban Jungle and saying, like, "now *here's* something that could progress from start to finish, and stand on its own," motivated him to later bring it back at the end of Act 3 as this big moment. And that's what ended up happening, with a lot of the project, is [that] people said, you know, "let's move away from just doing loops, and let's also focus on full-length pieces." Everybody just started working that much harder, as we saw that Andrew was willing to do that kind of thing. I'm gonna go through my notes here, you know, one source that I actually use a lot of is the Homestuck Music Wiki, which is maintained by some really cool volunteers. Sometimes I need a trip down memory lane, as well. Oh, the rock version of Harlequin. That was such a cool deal. Um, that was I think one of the first, like, really collab-y things I did, where it was like, hey, let's work with multiple sources, let's take this person's piece - that was a Mark Hadley composition - let's take that and let's arrange it some other way, and we got live guitar on that one - not my playing, but, y'know, better than I could have done that quickly. I think it's so funny that when it comes through the speakers, it's just, *so* stupidly loud... it just blasts you with energy. Explore was one of Buzinkai's pieces. Um, RIP, of course. Chip music ended up having such an important role in this comic. I was never like, a big chiptune person - I didn't have the same dedication to trying to work with the hardware emulation that a lot of people did, and the handful of times I did chip music, I just faked it using the 3x oscillator within FL Studio. What I felt I could do, was to approach it - y'know, 'cause I'm always trying to think of it like it's something being produced in a studio, even [if it's] a simulated one within software - was to pad it out and put drums behind it, and find a way to make it more than just a loop, but something that progresses, once again. So I put the simulated drum sounds, the simulated guitars on that, and created this big ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch rising scope to it. I only mention it with, you know, humility, that we had so much to work with because of Buzinkai. Including Doctor, and Endless Climb... they were drawing a lot from Cave Story and the soundtrack to that game, which was such an inspiration for a lot of people. I was just glad to have something to contribute to that piece of inspiration, which I think maybe came closer to the grove, on what Homestuck - and anything that's sort of, like, a retro "let's revive the aesthetics of classic Nintendo gaming..." all that sort of thing, is about. *(Edited in post:)* Andrew did us a little favor around that time, by creating interactive elements that he could use to include otherwise unused music. So first, there was Dave's beat maker, and then later the FreshJamz player, where I had mixed Ohgodwhat done as a remix with all kinds of goofy stuff added on. *(Back to the recording:)* Oh, the Chorale for Jaspers - I don't know if it's a perfect chorale, but I did draw a little bit from basic music theory classes I took in high school, to make something that's, you know, got a little bit of a shared four-part thing, in like a pseudo-Bach kind of style. I think I might have broken the harmony a little bit with the descending meows on that. I did break one taboo that we had established, real early on, which was that there were going to be no voices in the comic. There was going to be no person doing any of the character voices, there was going to be no singing, and - right away - I managed to just do something stupid enough that Andrew took it and ran with it and made a big exception for me. And of course, on Pony Chorale, the little secret page where Rose is riding on Maplehoof I guess, we snuck in a little "neigh" in there as well. I was a big fan of KC Green and Gunshow, that was another webcomic that was going at the time, and I remember going to an independent press expo in Austin that was called "Staple!". KC Green happened to be there; I don't know if he was promoting anything, or if he was just hanging out. I touched base with him briefly and he said that was his *favorite* thing from Homestuck, which, uh, I'll feel free to brag about, because... y'know. I loved that comic when it came out, and I can't believe he was, like, that into the pony music. (laugh) This was, I think, right at the cusp of Bandcamp being, like, a known platform, and for a minute when we started releasing these albums, they were, like, routinely the best sellers on there. At the same time that the Alabama Shakes were on there, like, breaking out as a band, it's like - "Wow! Look at this big indie band that's, like, doing numbers using Bandcamp - this obscure platform!" We were routinely outselling (laugh) the Alabama Shakes. We were super stoked to just expand on that, with, uh, non-animation, non-interactive element contributions. And, the first big thing that we did with that was the Midnight Crew album, where we took the Midnight Crew characters and said, well, like, they're actually a band, and this is their album, containing video-game-style jazz music on it. My contribution on the Midnight Crew album was an original called Lunar Eclipse, featuring sax by someone named Fenris, who we've never heard from again! We don't know what happened to them. And, the other thing was an arrangement of Hauntjam, which I just added drums on and synthesized out and did the bounces[?] for. *(Edited in post:)* The original on that one is by Andrew Huo, and supposedly it's based around a track that Andrew Hussie himself wrote, that was just called "haunt". *(Back to the recording:)* This was one of Andrew's initial ideas, which was like, there were going to be many many bands within the comic. He wanted to do something like, Gorillaz, but, different sets of characters. So, the Midnight Crew would be a band. And the Felt would be a band, and they made orchestral stuff for that - I wasn't a participant on that one, I was a little busy. And, I think we drifted away from the band concept... there were proposed bands that were never done, there was the two robot rappers who cameod but never really were expanded on, there was an interest in doing, sort of like, a robot hip-hop album, which would have been fun, had those characters gone anywhere... There was also the idea that, of course, each of the kids were going to have their signature instrument, you know, the piano, the violin, the beat maker, and the bass. The culmination of that would have been music that features those four instruments, as if it's like, well, here's the demo the band was making. This is what the four beta kids were doing in their spare time. I would have loved that one to see the light of day, I think that would have tied the comic together. How Do I Live was another glaring exception to the "no vocals" rule. I think that was another one where I knew it would make Andrew laugh, so I went for it, even if it wasn't really what was called for. But, I knew that he had a special fascination with Con Air. I, on a whim, made the How Do I Live track, done, y'know, stupidly and sarcastically and with this idea that, like, "I'll do it dumb just to do it," and... (laughs) I think I might have tried a little harder. And I realized, y'know, how far How Do I Live was going to go. As the cosplay and convention scene for the comic built up, we saw, y'know, videos of people showing up to places where Andrew was tabling, and singing at him. *(Caption in post: "please send me this if you can find it")* When they're performing it in large groups of people in costumes, I'm hearing the notes I sang come out, rather than the notes that were on the original recording, and that was, like... one of those surreal things where it was like, oh my god, I can't believe who this has reached! I could tell that Andrew hated having people sing at him. No regrets there, a lot of fun. That was one of the pieces that was on Homestuck Volume 5. By that point, people were really starting to cross-polenate - the musicians were talking to each other a lot more. Andrew was bold enough to say like, hey, y'know, you've all written so much music that's probably never going to be used in the comic because there's more of it than he actually needs at the rate he can produce animations... Let's just say, all these albums are like, standalone expansions upon the concept. Let's not limit it to this "fake band" idea. So, suddenly, the albums go from like ten tracks lasting twenty minutes or so, to like, this fifty track monster. *(Caption in post: "71 tracks, actually")* So that was like, a cool shift for us, that suddenly created a lot of creative freedom, and kind of - had us starting to think, you know, this is more than just a little soundtrack, it's kind of a little label. Homestuck Volume 5, I did Greenhouse, which was dedicated to the location that Jade Harley lived in. I also arranged strings for a piece by Erik Scheele, which was called "Ruins". He had submitted Ruins to the forum, and I said, well, here's my, you know, decoration - my production on top of it, I said, this is Ruins *with strings,* and for whatever reason it was just published on the album as as, you know, "Ruins" - in parentheses - "(With Strings)". Which, I was just like, *yeah,* it's really just Ruins... but you know... whatever. And I like that it had that Myst-like interactive element that went with it. That felt like something that touched home for me. I'm already a big Myst fan, and I would have loved to be somebody making music for Cyan, and so it was sort of a fulfilment of that dream. Hardchorale! They arranged out a heavier version of Chorale for Jaspers, and were like, "can you contribute meows to this?" and I was like, sure! I got a noise complaint from my neighbors because, I think I'd left all the windows open. I was just screaming. (laughs) Whoops on that. There was another, like, twenty second *(Caption in post: 35 seconds)* Toby Fox-produced Chorale for Jaspers that was called "Happy Cat Song!" - I really only set that into the program, into FL Studio, and chose the synth patches for it, like, hardly anything else. I think he expected me to go somewhere with it, and... I was just like... I don't know what to do with it. So, twenty seconds, somehow ended up on an album! Lost to the sands of time! The Squiddles album. I'm not familiar with the entire history of how the art team's work went, but I do know a bit about the Squiddles album, and their association with it - which was that they made the Squiddles! cartoon intro, and wanted to do this whole, like, oh, we're going to figure out a way to make a Squiddles spinoff pilot. I wish that it'd really gone somewhere. I think we did a good job establishing the kind of, like, on the surface, you know, show for babies thing - um, that was actually secretly some... satanic eldritch horror thing. But I played it completely straight on all of my pieces for it. I really enjoyed the Squiddle Samba, that's kind of... a pastiche of Chicharia[?] or something. Tangled Waltz, I think it owes itself a little to Yann Tiersen and the Amélie soundtrack, which I was listening to a lot at the time. There's also Mister Bowman Tells You About the Squiddles, where I dared self-insert into the comic, as myself, doing vocals *again.* I wanted there to be, like, some creepy verses that were, um, "they laugh because they love, they swim because they're swell, they smile because they have no sense of heaven or of hell." I think that direction might have been funny, but... I was just playing it completely straight, I turned it into something I could take to conventions and like, just perform and have people actually sing along to. And you know, just, Captain Kangaroo style or whatever, everyone just becomes little kids singing along, y'know! I Don't Want to Miss a Thing - (scoff) I was, like... totally high on paint fumes when I recorded that one. I think I would have, liked, once again, to have tried a little harder to do it, like... *well,* instead of just sarcastically do it. But, I liked kind of making fun of the dramatics of the Aerosmith recording. I liked weaving in all the other little themes on that. I kind of did a light remaster, when I went to the Requiem Café, I dug through my junky computer and found all the stems and went, oh, my god, I would never do it like that today! Mobius Trip & Hadron Kaleido, now there's something! When the fake band idea was being proposed, I think partly because of all the guitar and drum stuff I had been writing out on some of these, Andrew was really into the idea of, hey, you know, you should produce a rock album. And that's what he actually told me - it was just, produce a rock and roll album! That's what I'd always wanted to do, is produce original songs and do rock music. Originally, I think partly inspired by Plastic Beach, I was kind of interested in an underwater theme, characters like Eridan and Feferi and the sea kingdom thing... like, one of the first ideas I worked on that was Lies With The Sea. More broadly, what we ended up doing with that - I wanted to do, like, a prophetic work, where I wasn't tied to concrete storytelling episodes within Homestuck, because ultimately I didn't have authorship over the comic, Andrew did. And I wanted to create something that would be able to be interpreted freely, so that he could use it however he wanted to use it. So he never really... gave me characters, or anything, that he wanted there to be. I was just like, you know, let's come up with some loose characters, and we'll just see whether or not Andrew wants to use them. Because he never had a real, like, hard idea for that one. I think he was just too busy with other stuff. The characters were a collaboration of myself and Tavia Morra, and we based their images on ourselves, and we came up with these citizens of Prospit and Derse who were generals, who were on opposite sides of a battle. And of course, knowing the comic, the battle is futile, and really the answer lies somewhere in the eternal, and they are prophets of peace who express that prophecy through cryptic art. (laughs) They are telling you something that's kind of, a psychedelic truth, which is that, you know, the universe is bigger than we know. And I always respected that about Andrew's ideas with the cosmology of Homestuck, even with Problem Sleuth, with the Godhead Pickle Inspector and stuff, and staring into the lotus, and like, the microscopic becoming the macroscopic. He was always playing with the idea of, what's our eternal purpose? in a universe where time may be cyclical and where individual lives may not amount to much, in the face of cosmic destiny. I think thematically, that's what I wanted to play with. I did that on Dawn of Man, which was this piece that wove, you know, near-death experience, atrocity, and the survival instinct, and it's kind of like... 2001-style, oh, you know, pre-history and history and the future are all connected. And, taking that journey toward, you know, a culmination on Chain of Prospit, which says that our reasons for living are personal, and not refutable simply because the universe is giant and possibly indifferent. We have our own right to live for ourselves. To some extent, that album was a turning point for me, because, you know, when you compare it to how stupid it was to do these... silly songs, you know, I think *so* much of the stuff I did for Homestuck ended up being funny, and it was like, I managed to get my way back into the comic again and again by being, you know, a comedian, that - pivoting so hard, to this, y'know, big serious thing that was more about "what does life mean?" (laughs) And doing that while decorating it with the elements of this comic, which are... sometimes just stupid and shocking. I don't know, I think it hit right in the weirdest way, by reaching people that weren't expecting it. When people tell me that Chain of Prospit, for instance, really connected with them, and made them feel like they're not alone, or it made them feel like, that it... that it is personally true that they have a reason to live and that they shouldn't doubt their own struggle to keep going... I think it made me change, quite a bit. How cynical can I be about the world, when there's this other side of myself that... does honestly believe that, what you do with art, even if it's for some crazy thing like Homestuck, um, could actually touch somebody, in some real way? I was really encouraged by Mobius Trip & Hadron Kaleido, even if it wasn't ever incorporated in the comic, I was more motivated to say - you know, I care about my own songwriting and want to continue with it. That meant that I ended up pivoting that year to making more solo music - those of you who follow this channel and know my personal work, it's probably not the biggest history lesson for you, but, that was the beginning of me doing a series of solo albums that I'm continuing to work on to this day. Of course, I didn't stop making music for the rest of the comic. We worked on more volumes and compilations. At the same time that Mobius Trip & Hadron Kaleido came out, we released Homestuck Volume 7. That summer of 2011 was so cool because we were in full swing releasing one of these cool spinoff albums, and one of these compilation albums, like, every month. So we were operating on the capacity of an independent label, and like, really killing it. I would have loved to see that continue. Let's see. On Homestuck Volume 7, Warhammer of Zillyhoo - I think it started as a non-canon Problem Sleuth page and somehow spun its way into the canon of Homestuck. That was, of course, the page where he bothered to lip-sync John Egbert's lips to mine. Somehow, once again, we broke the rules, and there's voice acting involved, which there was never supposed to be. Y'know, you can take it as maybe like a, like, well, it's a fantasy, or it's what John's *imagining* himself doing. Y'know, it's not like I ever did it again. But, you know, one more brag for me, I guess. Oh, Maplehoof's Adventure. I don't know what attracts me to the dumb pony music so much, but, you know, knowing Andrew and his obsession with the horse paintings and Humanimals, I figure it's just par for the course. *(Edited in post:)* This is something else I didn't get around to recording, but there's actually another lost Homestuck album. It was called The Wanderers. It was a compilation that I had two songs on. One was called Aimless Morning Gold. The other is Ruins Rising, which is, again, another treatment of Ruins by Erik Scheele. This one, the guitar intro is kind of drawn from the Frippertronics technique of Robert Fripp, and, it actually features a lot of re-re-re-re-record scratches and cool textures that I hadn't really experimented with before. *(Caption: "God bless the fruity scratcher")* I really liked the whole desert-punk vibe of this record. If you feel like tracking this one down, be my guest - it's a really great record and I wish it were still up there. *(Back to the recording:)* Okay, Homestuck Volume 8. Calamity. Awesome tune. I don't know what else to say about that. I thought Walk-Stab-Walk was a cool contribution from Erik, and I just wanted to create something that wove that and the honking and all that, and build up to this big showdown moment between Karkat and Gamzee that never happened! You know, we were all just guessing at what Andrew was gonna do next. And sometimes we got it, and sometimes we got it wrong. But at least we got this epic piece of music out of it, huh? Ocean Stars Falling - I liked Mark Hadley's Ocean Stars. I thought it was this incredible little moody thing, and taking it in kind of this indie rock direction was cool... God, I'm just looking at the list of stuff that was on that record. Escape Pod - with Homestuck Volume 8, it was almost like I, uh, said, you know, it's the eighth volume, so I'm going to write eight songs! *(Caption in post: "I only got to 7")* Frog Hunt was atmospheric and kind of based on, like, a weather report. Tyler was, ah, such a huge fan of Philip Glass, and we really connected on that. Gust of Heir was me taking a MIDI, I think, that he'd written, and setting that to some electronics, and I just thought it was so cool that somebody else got the appeal of that kind of composition style. I was really glad when he had that Sburb album come out, you know, he referenced Sburban Jungle on that, which was, you know, an honor of course, and hearing it performed by Erik Scheele on the piano... And I think that's my favorite piece of Homestuck music that album, just because regardless of where the themes came from, it was just good listening. You know. Could put that on during breakfast. (laughs) Revered Return, that was a piece of Nick's music that I arranged out. That was one where I rewrote the piece, basically, from beginning to end, from this chiptune. At the time it was literally just me going through the, like, haphazard not really built for multitake thing on FL Studio and trying to write guitar lines that would, you know, go through, nearly one measure at a time, just to get it down. But I was so pleased with the result. The D8 Night version of How Do I Live, that was like a more serious attempt with it. I played with the key change a little bit, because I always thought that like, the massive key change on the choruses was like, really corny. So I, I got rid of that, and I added guitar from Thomas Ferkol on that one. The result, I think, is much spacier, much more serious. And then Homestuck Volume 9 - oh my god, I can't believe I busted my ass so hard back then... I have Another Jungle, which was more stuff in the style of Sburban Jungle. I think it's more evolved as a piece, I really love the way it progresses, and it's less copycat from section to section. Just a moment of great composition, if I dare say so myself. The GameGrl rap - I loved Erik's GameBro rap, and I thought that - when the idea of there being a GameGrl magazine was introduced - that it would be funny to write a rap and have Tavia perform it. That was based around the idea of there being a gamer girl, as it was, in the 1990s. I think we did a really good job imitating all the, like, nuances of how this girl in overalls with a backwards hat represented the ideals that were being marketed (laughs) through toy commercials, and otherwise, to girls back then. If you think it's cringy, that was the intended effect. Oh, Minihoof's Adventure - that was another piece of pony music. That was another thing where I was like, really on a roll, and like, writing beginning to end. I feel like I could have written, like... an hour of that, if I wanted to. It's just like, once your palette is figured out with like, the kind of carnival environment that it was supposed to sound like, it was just so easy to just be like - let's have something different happen here, and let's have a little breakdown, and... I could write hours of pony music if I wanted to. (laughs) I don't know why I would, but I could! Elephant Gun, I think that one was a bit Frank Zappa influenced. I like, kind of the weird breakdown on it that's jumping around. I think if I were playing a game and I had to do a little battle, and (gesturing) press my buttons and pick my attacks while that was playing, I would be pretty hype, and not get, like, bored and driven crazy, the way that sometimes you can be in an RPG. (gasp) Busting Makes Me Feel Good! Now that's a piece where I have to say... I beat Neil Cicierega to the punch on that! I'm just saying! He did that Bustin' thing years later. I beat him to the punch. I'm not - no, I'm not sore about that, you know. Parallel thinking. Everybody wanted to make fun of Ghostbusters. It's a weird line. I mean, "busting makes me feel good"... you know, there's entendre built in there, you know. Oh, iRRRRRRRRECONCILA8LE, I was so happy with that one. I would have liked to have seen the, uh, the attempted merge between Tavros and Vriska go on longer, and wrote it as soon as I saw it happen - wrote, like, the first chunk of it before the additional guitar with Thomas Ferkol on it. And then when they updated the comic and the two of them immediately blew apart, I had no choice but to cap it off with the sound of, you know, the whole thing (pfwhoosh) popping apart, and a random honk in, just for the sake of keeping you all on your toes. (dramatic honkscare) My version of the Midnight Crew song - I called it the post-punk version because it's modeled after Nightclubbing, from the Iggy Pop album The Idiot. I suppose he was post-punk at the time, but, you know, 1977, let's be real, Sex Pistols and all that stuff, it was really the breakout of it as a commercial genre. I've heard that people say I sound drunk on the song...? I don't know, like, where people got that idea. The idea of the intonation there was to make it a little sinister, a little seductive, a little creepy, you know... It is about some villains that wander around, ostensibly being gangsters - what do the Midnight Crew even do in the comic? I forget. I was really satisfied with that one. And that was a great collaboration, Erik on that once again... *(Caption in post: "Erik Scheele - piano, Marcy Nabors - theremin / accordion") Oh, Another Countdown, of course I put a little cap on the Another Jungle thing, with a revisitation of Mark Hadley's Sburban Countdown. And then in the later years of the comic... 2013 was my final actual production that was a contribution to it. I did Constant Conquest, another piece of work with Erik. I took the Caliborn side of it and Erik took the Calliope side of it. Erik wrote the Calliope theme first, Constant Confinement, and I took the theme from that and decided to just go... real crazy industrial with it. You know, it's so hard when so many villains have already been introduced! You know, you've got Jack Noir, and Lord English, and all these other characters that are already in the mix - and they're already all dangerous, and now you're four years in, and you have a new villain, and you have to like, heighten that much further than the previous ones. You know, a bit of a Dragon Ball Z style problem. This was the only piece I actually used Logic Pro to write. I had switched over to Logic Pro at the time. I used a whole new palette of sounds, and played with all kinds of new effects chains, I found it way easier to edit the piece... I had pedals that I had used for my live performances. That was fresh off the year where I had made my live debut (laughs) - I had gone to South by Southwest and I'd had a little band involve Marcy Nabors, Erik Scheele, Clark Powell, and Riki Tsuji, and we had done a backyard show, and a show at the Velveeta Room, where we performed stuff from Mobius Trip, other Homestuck music that we could figure out how to get arranged, and stuff from my second solo album, Ithaca. So I had all this leftover equipment from that crazy adventure, and played with, you know, running the keyboards and guitars and stuff through wahs and distortions and just created this great little crunchy mess. I even brought in Buzinkai's Doctor for two seconds because, you know, at this point, Doctor was in so many remixes and references and revisitations, that it was fine for me to take it for the first - and only! - time, and do it in this, ah, totally out of tune, random vignette. Just to say, there, there's my Doctor remix. Y'a happy? And then, uh, the project shifted, quite a bit! We stopped releasing albums regularly, there was, you know, several hiatuses - a shift in the way that the work was made. I would have wished that the, you know, intense period of like, releasing music in 2011, had gotten to go on. Because, I think there was always a demand for it. If the comic couldn't be updated at the breakneck crazy pace it was being updated consistently, we were more than hungry enough to continue running our weird little cyberlabel. We didn't do another Homestuck volume until a fan volume that was being organized eventually was realized as a real album, that became Homestuck Volume 10. My only real addition there was Solar Voyage. I didn't do any of the production for it, but Solar Voyage, which I think was coordinated by Marcy Nabors, was based on something we had put together at that South by Southwest show. We took Ruins, Explore, and Flare, and we mashed it up into one giant medley. We really loved that one, and even though I didn't personally oversee getting that one produced, I was really glad that that one got organized and put on Volume 10. 'Cause, you know, that was one of that few IRL collaborations that we actually did together. I would have wished we could have done more with that. There weren't the resources to, you know, permanently do a Homestuck band or something, but the chance to, you know, really bring it out in person, and have cosplayers be there and listen to the stuff we made, was so cool. And all during that, like, 2011-onward period, I started going to conventions with the guitar and playing these songs, just totally impromptu. I played the Mobius Trip songs, and some of the other ones that were like, the vocal-driven ones, and had so much fun doing it. And for years I didn't really bother going back, because, as the years went by and the comic was, you know, going through a series of hiatuses and disappearing and coming back for... updates more sporadically, you know, the fanbase kind of dwindled and moved on a little bit. So these last few years where I've been able to show up to these new events, specifically the Requiem Café - first, last year, performing acoustically, and this year, performing with, you know, an electric backing - it's been this fine opportunity to, like, really go like - you know, these may be old pieces, these may be pieces from my past, but it's a chance to say - you know, this mattered. These were fine works. And I'm still proud of them. Homestuck is, I think, like, the defining webcomic of its era. It brought people together in a way I don't think people have been fully able to realize, because... it was so niche. It was niche, and yet it was gigantic. And I think that's what continues to intrigue me about the whole project, even as it, you know, evolves into, kind of, a new stage. I am excited to see it go on, whether or not it's the long-awaited third installment of the Hiveswap game, or Homestuck^2, or any of these continuing projects. I am so happy to have been part of the timeless memory of 2009 to 2013, and whatever (grins) - it was a thrill. So anyway SAHCon, that's the gist of it! Now you know about me and my musics. I hope this was a fun trip down memory lane, for those of you who already knew most of it. And I wanted to talk, real quick, of course, I did mention that Mobius Trip & Hadron Kaleido was the beginning for me, of the long journey (laughs) into being a solo musician. Some of you are probably familiar with the subsequent series of albums, starting with Mobius Trip and coming all the way to today - and that's why I wanted to talk with you about this! This is my new album, all shiny and new. It's called Your Majesty. It's gonna be out on August 9. Twelve new songs by myself, I'll uh, announce a little bit more about it later, but I just wanted you to get a look at this thing. Look! There's me! Whoaaa. I hope that you'll continue to join me on my musical journey, and I'll keep checking in with all you fine people, as time goes by. Thank you very much, for some of yours. And now for a brief QA! I do mean brief. I've been working on this for a while, and I'm tired, and this thing has to go up very soon! I had meant to do this panel as a live thing, but, scheduling being what it is, I had to prerecord it. So, I've gone out of my way to get some questions from Twitter first, so let's go ahead and answer those! "How did you first get involved with Homestuck?" Well, I answered that in the video. (Instant replay. It is about 20x sped up.) Um, open call. "What are your biggest musical inspirations?" My father is a trombone player, my mother is a flute player, and, you know, I had their record collection. They had an interest in jazz and classical music, and they had a lot of pop albums. Of course I'd be remiss if I didn't mention being really into David Bowie, and I mentioned my love of minimalism and Philip Glass... I've listened to lots of music. Join me on my Discord or something! You know, I do a song of the day there, and I talk a lot about this kind of thing. "Do you have any advice for someone new to composing music?" I, you know, just try it, see what happens! Zappa has a thing about how music is about decorating little bits of time. So, you know, just make something happen between the beginning and ending, and if, uh, if it's a sound, you should be on the right track! "Could I do a cover of Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd?" Maybe later. "I'm thinking of a number between 450 and 850. Do you know what it is?" (smirks) Wouldn't you like to know. "How did you react to fan reception of your songs?" Um, how did I react? Uh, you know, with joy... and positivity... um, you know, any time that they said nice things I was like, "yay!" and any time they said mean things I was like, "well, you know. I'll ask somebody else their opinion." "Who is your favorite they might be giants john." Um, mine is John, actually. "What's your favorite synth?" Well, you know, I don't... I don't own any analog synths, so that's a hard question to answer. I honestly think I, uh, learned more about music synthesis using FL Studio built-in sampler that's just the basic sampler that you can pop anything into, than I have from anything more complicated. Highly recommend it - have some fun with that, if you have FL Studio. "do u fw fnf?" Well no, I do not fight with friends nor family. Because I care, simply too much. "What was the transition from making music For A Thing to making your own music like?" I was encouraged because there were already people I knew who were listening, so mostly it was just like, all those little nagging thoughts at the back of my head, that I've been holding onto - it was time to let them out! "How much has your process changed between Mobius Trip and earlier works, and Ulterior Motives?" You know, aside from like, the software changes, I think I have experimented with - doing things in different orders. Some of the time I was doing things with, like, intention to produce the beat, or come up with the instrumentation or something first, and sometimes I was doing things lyrically first, and trying to have um, a song written in an instrument. Actually, lately, *since* Ulterior Motives, coming up on this new album - that's been the main focus, is to move over from trying to do things with any production idea really in place, and have complete demos, just like a normal singer-songwriter, and then go in and start arranging them as if you're in the studio, and be your own producer. "Did doing the falsetto-y screamy thing in Mobius Trip hurt your throat?" Not as much as staying up late and, uh, working on this video has. I probably sound real scratchy right now. "What were your main inspirations for Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido?" I talked about that a little bit, of course Bowie comes to mind again. At the time I was really listening to BT, Brian Transeau - I think that's how you pronounce his last name - and he is a trance music pioneer. I'd been listening to This Binary Universe, and that was a really great album of instrumental electronic music. And then it had a wonderful follow-up album, that was called These Hopeful Machines, and I loved both those albums a lot. I think they were really... I refrain from saying eye-opening... because they were ear-opening. "What song on the Homestuck soundtrack did you have the most fun making?" I'm gonna say Minihoof's Adventure. I hate to say it, but like, every second I was working on that, there was a smile on my face. "When writing music with lyrics, do you write music-first or lyric-first?" Yeah, see, that's why I was like, so nuanced on the other answer. Because you already know - sometimes, I do one or the other. But these days, I would say when I'm writing "lyric first", what I mean to say is that I'm writing lyrics with chords. And sometimes, I have a melody in mind, and I have to like, do settings to the melody - and I think, the challenge for me as a songwriter right now, comes from the synthesis of that - saying, here's the format, and how do you better fit the format? And the result is poetry. "What is *your* favorite Homestuck track?" Anything off of the, uh, Sburb album. That whole thing, I really enjoyed a lot. "What's a Homestuck track that doesn't get enough love?" Probably Song of Skaia by Mark Hadley! That was a really huge set up, in terms of production. Where'd he get the singing on that? I'm having to look that up. Tarien... Ainuvë? I probably saw that name, years ago, when this came out, and... didn't know how to say it back then, either. "How is my credit score?" (smiles) I think we all know the answer to that. Pretty good! "When writing your music, do you stand on your head or swing from a vine?" If I was standing on my head, all the music would be upside down. And if I was swinging from a vine, it would all go like this: (Tarzan roar) And "what number am I thinking of?" (stares into camera; whispers) It's 720.