Robby Suavé Is 20 Years Old, Pt. 5
Okay, let’s see if I can finish up this blog series by the end of the year. Last time I talked about 2010, in which I talked about much about the Rock Band Network. I’ll continue that a little bit here, but the focus will be other things.
2011
It’s next to impossible to date when some of my Rock Band Network stuff happened, so I’ll just throw some of this out there. I’m pretty sure it was in 2011 when I got involved in the authoring group called That Authoring Group. It was called Ultra Heavy Beats for what seemed like weeks before the founder of the group was asked to change it. Obviously, Ultra Heavy Beats was a name inspired by KMFDM’s self-described style of music. It was inevitable the name wouldn’t stick, but it’s good that the name change was prompted as early as it was.
Anyway, I joined the team pretty early on. I don’t know if this stuff is interesting to anyone who is reading this, so I won’t go into great detail. But I remember setting up the forum we used as our planning grounds for getting songs pieced together. I also designed the logo. I feel like there were a couple variations of it we used, but this was at least one of them.
Working with TAG was cool. One of the coolest parts was getting to work with Devin Townsend. I don’t know exactly how we landed it, but we secured the Ziltoid the Omniscient album. Devin and I emailed back of forth for a few days. I felt bad, but I recall him having to re-render out the drum stems multiple times because at least once, the different drums weren’t as separated as they could have been. Like, the cymbals were mixed with the toms or something like that.
So once we got all the audio files, it was time to determine who was going to do what when it came to the actual authoring. I remember I did the drums for maybe half the songs, and bass for one or two songs. I also did the audio mix for most of the songs. Fun times.
I could talk RBN for forever, but I think I’ll stop there. Let’s get into Punk Rebel Renegade. Last time I said most of the work for that was done in 2011, and maybe it was, but considering I “released” the album that same year, it seems unlikely that I would have recorded most of it then. I don’t know. Let’s get into it.
I wrote up a multi-part blog series back in 2015 when I publicly released Punk Rebel Renegade. Read that here. I don’t believe I posted audio for those blog posts, so I’ll do it here.
One thing I want to make sure to point out, for whatever reason, is that because of the RBN, I had started using Cockos Reaper for my DAW-of-choice for my own musical production. Reaper was was the software you had to use for authoring Rock Band Network songs. So in learning the ins and outs of it for that purpose, I felt comfortable moving away from my super old version of Sonic Foundry Acid. One of the many benefits of that is that I can much more easily render out the audio files that I’m about to post here.
Here’s a “song” called “From a Mile Away.” I only know that because there was a folder called fromamileaway, and in it were 2 audio files: a raw guitar recording and a drum loop. I apparently never even took the time to compile the pieces together. So this audio file is a new mix. I EQ’d the guitar a little bit and put a quick limiter on it, and this is the result. The guitar part is one continuous take. It’s kind of cool. I don’t remember recording this at all.
I’ve literally been looking in the Punk Rebel Renegade archives, and there’s very little else to show. There aren’t even early versions of songs that sound much different from the final cuts. Maybe I really did put that album together in 6 months. Wow. Alright. On to 2012, I guess.
2012-2013
Uh, this might be weird. I didn’t put out any albums (officially or unofficially) from 2012-2014. Heat Stroke was released in 2015, and some of the production for that happened in 2014. But between 2012 and 2013…what was I doing during that time? Let’s find out by looking into the Suavé Archive. I’m sure Rock Band Network was still a thing for part of that time, but as far as my personal output…
Ah. I see now. So starting in 2011, technically, until 2014, I did record a decent amount of work that largely has remained unheard. It’s most electronic stuff that I didn’t put words to. I would post some samples here, but I intend to rework at least some of this stuff and put it out officially one day. But yeah, there’s no much to really speak of during this time. I hope I’m not just totally forgetting/missing something. What was I doing during those years?!
Well, some crap was going down around that time that I don’t want to conjure back up. I’m remembering now. Next time, we’ll go back to the year 2014 when I started working on Heat Stroke. Bleh.