What Does This Knob Do?
The Extended Demos Collection, pt. 1
2018

The story behind this collection of work begins to take shape a year earlier, in the spring of 2017. I had been working landscaping for a few seasons and got hurt on the job real bad with an injury that left me unemployed and fighting an insurance company for the next 12 months. Honestly, things were kind of terrible for a while there, but in hindsight, I healed pretty well, and it changed the course of my life for the better, so I don’t know now. Maybe it was worth it? When I could finally walk half normal again, I started doing some light work around a coffee place for the first money I'd have in months, and the BLACK YO)))GA Meditation Ensemble, a dark ambient/stoner/drone/doom band I had been meeting with regularly since about 2012, resumed by the end of the year, with me on singing bowls, percussion, and a Casio LK-160 through some various lost & found effects pedals.

On the mend and looking for a new path at the start of 2018, I decided to go back to school for a Music Technology degree (the ep “101” showcases that experience more specifically), and launched my first Instagram page to document the process and journey. This is where the name @MassieFect originated. Please check it out and follow if you have not.

Crazy thing is, after all the years spent singing in bands, all the years spent in studios, being the pseudo-producer guy in the second chair to the side of the engineer, all the years setting up shows and/or running sound, this was the first time that I ever did anything on my own, of my own material no less. I'd dabbled in recording before, but the grey areas between 2012 and 2017 are the first times I’d even attempted to touch instruments in lieu of screaming my typical punk/metal madness since 1994. All I really had to do in the Meditation Ensemble was hold notes and twist knobs, bang a drum or hit a bowl every once in a while. But honestly, I didn’t even learn my first scale until 2018, which will likely be evident when you listen to these songs. My first synth was a MicroKorg that I had just gotten the year before (it was broken at the time of these recordings though), so I’m really sharing these demos for documentation of progress, more than the attempt to win any awards for my virtuosity.

These were the very first demo recordings as a “solo artist” in my new studio, recorded during the second half of 2018. All of them were previously edited down to one minute clips for Instagram videos, and then kind of just forgotten about. That’s been bugging me ever since, so I’ve gone back through everything from that time period that didn’t end up on 101, and picked out these bangers (along with a few others that may or may not be coming out right after these in parts 2 & 3).

At the onset of this era and on most of these tracks, the "studio" was built on a Mac Mini running Studio One 3, with a Presonus AudioBox interface and a crappy old Behringer mixer, but I quickly upgraded to mixer/interface #2, the StudioLive AR16, which made a huge difference immediately. The Roland JD-Xi was center stage, along with the Casio LK-160 for more piano sounds. The Novation MiniNova provided most of the pads, the arpeggios, and the vocoder. An Alesis SR18 drum machine, Korg Volca Beats and Keys, Roland/Studio Electronics SE-02, about 35 crappy pedals hooked up to everything, and I’m realizing now that the Boss SP303 makes a ton of appearances on these tracks that I forgot about, which sucks because it wasn’t mine and now I miss it all over again. One of these days I'll have to pick up my own. Everything was mostly DAWless back then, other than the recording and mixing, of course. I’d play and record different things for upwards of an hour, then go back to cut out and focus on cleaning up the best parts. A method I still follow today, only now I multitrack and incorporate software a lot more. Maybe for better, maybe for worse.

I don’t think I’ve found my own sound or true groove yet, even today let alone here, but there's glimpses. This is a start, quite literally.