Music

My published music. No more, no less.

  • Gods, Prophets, or Slaves – Lyrics

    N. Toone - Gods, Prophets, or Slaves

    Lyrics and Music by Nicholas Toone. ©2022.

    You wave the barkeep down, order a stronger drink;
    Two parts aversion, three parts apathy
    The colours are dialed low and the communal lip sync
    Is written on the social marquee

    Where you talk of cowering at supposed beastliness with fleeting hope
    As you torch your broken bridge
    And hang the crown with its own rope
    Then endlessly commiserate about how you can’t cope
    The anger comes and goes in waves,
    Our choice between gods, prophets, or slaves

    The world was promised once, yet no one led the way
    Out of childish infinity
    It’s the empty space that you refused to fill
    Far removed from sensibility

    And your avoidance of the harsh realities on which you choke
    Stare at your blackened bridge
    An watch the crown swing on its rope
    Live constantly indifferent, vagabond misanthrope
    Vexation comes and goes in waves
    Our choice between gods, prophets, or slaves

    You think that no one can see
    The petty crimes you believe will never amount to anything
    You cry out “servile!” but what’s not controversial
    Is the saboteur on its knees

    Arms raised and begging absolution like the past was but a joke
    You can’t just fix the ruined bridge or cut the crown down from its rope
    You never seemed to comprehend how slippery was your slope
    Cold reason finally crests the wave
    We choose to live as gods and prophets…

    … but not slaves

  • Music I Used To Listen To: Possessed

    Every once and awhile, just for fun, I’m going to listen to some music I enjoyed when I was a teenager and and post about what I think of it now.

    Today’s entry is Possessed: “Beyond The Gates”

    Way back in 1986, everyone seemed to be talking about this album based on it’s kick ass, gatefold album sleeve and the strength of their debut album, Seven Churches. I had never heard Seven Churches and I never had a vinyl copy of Beyond The Gates. I did buy the cassette version that had the typical crappy mid-80’s lame, basic ass nothingness. I remember the intro was kinda neat but I can’t remember much about the rest of it so I can’t even say that I really “enjoyed it”.

    ANYWAY, I gave Beyond The Gates a listen last week and… wow. Just wow. This album sucks so hard I can’t even find the words. I’m just going to stop writing about it and move on with my life.


  • Sugar and Cheap Entertainment

    I’ve been on a hip-hop kick lately. Specifically Kendrick Lamar.

    Today I discovered, and now absolutely cannot get enough of, Cartoons & Cereal (feat. Gunplay).

    Yes, I know I’m late (very late) to the party, but what a fucking song this is. The passages that begin with “Now I was raised in a sandbox” is unlike anything I’ve heard in a long time; the childlike yet robotic vocals of Lamar and, I believe, Anna Wise, layered, ping-ponged on top of the horror soundtrack style synth and samples is otherworldly. And the way the I-I-I part in these sentences is stuttered adds a layer of, oh I don’t know what you’d call it. Unease? It’s definitely unsettling.

    Yeah, I’m nerding out over this simply because I can’t think of anything to compare it to and I’ve had it on repeat all night.


  • Thank You, Good Night!

    Not quite what you’d think. Some acoustic venom with a bombastic ending.

    Link To Lyrics


    Thank You! Good Night ©2024 Nicholas Toone

    Song Notes

    This origins of this song can be found in this post from March 2022. As mentioned, I had purchased a hangdog of a classical guitar from a local thrift store. It cost me $75 and it came with a case. I don’t know why I bought it. It just felt like the thing to do.

    Let me tell you, once I got a new set of strings on it, it sounded pretty fucking great.

    It was around that time that I managed to snag a couple of second hand SM-57’s and they lived up to their reputation. The guitars on this recording are the ones from the linked post where I say: “The SM57’s are, hands down, the best for close micing the classical guitar. It may be that they’re the best for the cheap classical I have. I don’t know. I don’t have anything better to compare it with”

    Well, all this time later I can say: Who cares about comparisons? In the past I literally setup the used mics, spent a few minutes improvising on a beat up, thrift store guitar to get a test recording and now, well over two years later, “Thank You, Good Night!” is that test recording as it was originally played.

    To reiterate: this is not a rerecording. The acoustic guitar in this finished song is that original, one take test recording. Only some very mild EQ and reverb were added.

    The heavy solo section was built on top of the strummed chords I’d originally recorded. The electric guitars and bass were played through the ToneLib GFX plugin when I was still using Linux. The synths are all SURGE XT presets. This is the first track I’ve done without an actual drum set. The drums are SSD5 Free 1 played manually via my Oxygen 25.

    Lyrics were somewhat difficult. I had a hard time coming up with melody and a theme. What you hear was written and performed in about a day. I was coming up with lines on the spot, recording scratch tracks, and then ran through the final vocal recording while changing words and/or phrases on the fly.

    Finally, mixing was … almost non existent. Most all of the tracks were done with some minor tweaking via the Mixbus channel EQ and compressor. I routed the drums and bass through my standard NYC comp bus (which employs the ACE EQ and compressor) and the vocals were touched up with the absolutely wonderful Flying Delay.

    All in all, I’m super, super pleased at how this one turned out. There’s just something about it that hit all the right notes.


    Note: The artwork is a from the hip photo I took in NYC back in 2011. It was late at night. It was raining, hard. I was walking through Times Square after seeing a play, trying to stay dry with the five dollar umbrella I’d bought from one of the street corner dudes selling five dollar umbrellas. The lights had this ethereal glow to them. I pulled out my phone and snapped a shot… just as a limo came crawling past. Out of all the “in the moment” pictures I’ve taken, this is probably my most favorite; so spontaneous, so accidental, yet it captured that moment in time perfectly.

    1: I enjoyed SSD5 so much I bought the full version when it went on sale at the end of November. It really is a great piece of software. My only gripe is that they use fucking iLok however, you don’t need the stupid USB dongle, just an iLok login. That, and the fact that it’s a one time purchase allowed me to bend a little. If SSD5 was subscription (and/or if it needed the stupid USB dongle) I wouldn’t be writing this paragraph. This is why I’ll never use the Slate Virtual Mix Rack; it’s subscription and it requires the stupid USB dongle for fucking iLok.

  • Oh! What A Time To Be Alive

    “Oh! What A Time To Be Alive” is this thing in completed form. It took a bit (especially for a two minute song) but it was worth it in the end :)

    Click here for lyrics.


    Oh! What A Time To Be Alive ©2024 Nicholas Toone

    Song Notes

    A long, long time ago, early in the mystical year of 2020, I found myself messing around on my hi-hats. I was trying to mimic that style one hears in trap/pop/hip hop by doing quick buzz rolls on 1 and 4 and filling in the 2 and 3 with simple 8th note single strokes – all on top of a simple four on the floor kick. I eventually settled into the pattern you hear on the song and decided to record it in Reaper, and save it with the working title “Cidada Hats” 1.

    I would come back to it a few times over the years. At some point I came up with that funky bass line (recorded via my Ampeg PF-350 before I sold it) and added some basic, clean, delayed guitar and even some shakers and a tambourine. And… it sat on my drive.

    I came back to it this summer in a big way. I was going through my folders, doing a cleanup and saw the silly Cidada Hats directory and decided to see if there was anything there and, as the post from August details, I ended up doing some surgery:

    1. Deleted the clean/delayed guitar outright.
    2. Deleted the shakers and tambourine.
    3. Edited the fuck out of the composition. The original had three verse sections (each verse double what they are now) and four choruses and running about five minutes. It basically followed a pattern I was stuck on for my last two releases. It was too much. So I cut/moved/rearranged the drums and bass into the structure you hear now. Short, simple, to the point. The track is now just a shade over two minutes.

    Once the editing was done, I added heavy guitars guitars to the choruses via  my Ibanez played through ToneLib GFX. Again, nice and simple. The final bit was some synths using SURGE XT presets. One of these was a preset that I tacked on to the back end of the verses as a goof but I wound up enjoying it so much that I figured out how to play on guitar to add as a double to the synth. The guitar double is not super obvious in the final mix, but if you listen carefully, it’s there.

    A more recent thing I fixed up was sound of the kick. It was lifeless. Hollow. Of course it was recorded using the old Intex kit I talked about here. I didn’t even try to EQ it into something. I just replaced it with a sample. Sometimes it’s the best and/or only option. I then added the snare, toms, and splash in the chorus using the SSD5 Free plugin played manually via a midi controller 2.

    The hi-hat, on the other hand, is the original I put down way back in 2020. Thankfully I’d direct mic’d it with a GLS ES-57 3. It was easy to compress and ratchet up the high end to give it that crisp, trap like buzz right where I wanted it to.

    The lyrics and vocals were the easiest of the three I recorded on the rented equipment.  I’d had vocal pattern nailed down and the lyrics about 90% complete since the early summer 4.


    Note: The artwork is a heavily edited stock photo by Pavlofox on Pixabay. The logo font is DymoFontInvers by Manfred Klein and [smartphone] by woodcutter Manero – both downloaded from FontFreak, my go to site for wacky fonts of all shapes and sizes.

    1: I chose the working title of “Cicada Hats” because of this stupid fucking video where Rick Beato whines about the sounds of the hi-hats in an Ariana Grande song and compares them to the sound cicadas make.

    2: I managed to snag a used M-Audio Oxygen 25 Third Gen from Kijiji for like twenty-five bucks.

    3: I did record overheads as well, but they were shitcanned even before I’d started to edit the song structure. They were really serving no real purpose at all.

    4: It all started when the “heaping dose of shit” line came to me one day during a company all-hands that was, well, not fun. It took me maybe a day and a half to come up with the rest. From there it was simply tweaking and editing in the name of cadence.

  • Your One, Short Life Being Remixed

    Yeah, the more I listen to Your One, Short Life on any speakers that are not my monitors, I don’t like the mix at all.  The snare is too buried. The heavy guitars are thin. The bass in the outro is almost non existent. The verse vocals sink into being near inaudible in spots, especially in the second verse.

    So fuck it. I’m in the process of remixing the whole thing. I’ll probably replace the “official” version with whatever I’m doing now, but I may still make the first attempt available just as a reminder to myself that while sometimes pulling the trigger is better than fussing, sometimes it has the opposite outcome.

  • Your One, Short Life

    Wow, it really has been a bit. I posted Gods, Prophets, or Slaves wayyy back in January 2023.

    Here we are then. Enjoy “Your One, Short Life”

    Click here for lyrics.


    Your One, Short Life ©2024 Nicholas Toone

    Song Notes (There’s a lot to say this time)

    The main body of the tune is in F … something? I can’t remember F what. The only scale I know by heart is G major (yeah, I’m looking at right at you post-solo Master Of Puppets). I stumbled on the main verse of this song while fucking around with the scales section of the All Guitar Chords site and it kinda just went from there. I just hit up that site, load up some different scales, play around with them, and piece together whatever sounds good.

    This was one of those pieces that I worked on for an inordinate amount of time. I finished the composition and recorded the guitars in the mid summer of 2023; was still storing a friends axes, tube amp, and cab and used them to lay down the various heavy bits (the clean parts were played on my Ibanez).

    Recording the drums was bittersweet because what you hear on this track is the very last recording of my kit before I sold it.

    I laid the tracks down in about an hour, then put the kit up for sale on Kijiji. It was gone three days later.

    I gave it all rough mix, had a listen was pleased and…

    … then the tune just sat there. Yes, yes life was busy and all that, but the main issue was that I just could not come up with a melody for the verse sections. Everything I tried just plain sucked. Sometimes I’d listen to it on repeat in the car and nothing I tried clicked.

    Late one night, at the beginning of October, I woke up with a start. Without even thinking about it, I picked up my phone, opened my mail, sent myself the following message:

    … then put my phone down and went back to sleep.

    As I talked about in my post from the middle of last week, I decided to rent a pro level mic and preamp and get the vocals done for some tunes I had lying around. This was the first one I tackled and I took my email to heart.

    While it’s not a complete ripoff of Once In A Lifetime, you definitely hear the influence in there. As I moved deeper into the song, I stared jamming more words in there until the third verse is a near breathless block of words that pretty much sums up the overall subject. The choruses flowed naturally out of all this and took on a somewhat “marching” cadence with just a smattering of melody (and a whisper of harmonies).

    The mixing didn’t take as long as normal; I’d been playing with the instrument mixes on and off over the past year and the vocals we not difficult at all. I attribute this to the SM7B/NV1 setup I employed this time around. After all my whining about “top of the line” and how you don’t really need it, I feel like I have to walk that back a little.

    Yes, you can work with inexpensive, sometimes bargain basement equipment but there is a reason these expensive, top of the line options are so lauded: they do work as advertised. Now, top of the line equipment won’t compensate for a shitty performance. If anything it accentuates shitty performances. If you’re competent, however, top of the line equipment can make your recording effort a little bit easier.

    Remember though, work with what you can afford. Rent what you can’t afford (if at all possible).

    With all that being said, enjoy this new tune!


    Note: The artwork for this track is a photograph I took of a stray dog Manzanillo, Mexico in January 2019. Text effects were added via Affinity Photo.

    NoteNote: The drums are 90% the recorded kit. I did have to blend in samples for the kick and snare as my playing is not what you’d call consistent. Recording this track is probably some of the best drumming I’d done at that point, but I still qualify as an amateur.

    NoteNoteNote: I remixed this song on 1/1/2025. You can find the original mix over here.

  • Forthcoming

    This is me most days: Oh I wanna do music! No, I’m gonna write! Actually, I think I’ll pick up a paint brush! You know what? Fuck it, I’m going to fire up a video game and lose myself for a few hours 1.

    This is why I have a pile of half finished/not quite finished stuff lying around, I’m like a fucking ping pong ball.

    Anyway, I recently got a bug up my ass to finish the three songs I have sitting around. The only thing they needed was vocals. I mean, I’m not going to die if I didn’t get them done but I just wanted to get them moving, y’know? Figured there was no time like the present. It’s always good to take care of something as soon as you get a bug up your ass about it.

    My issue this time was pure ego. I did try adding vocals to one of these tracks at various times over the past couple of years using what equipment I had on hand, but was just never happy with the results. I tried my SM-57s, the SM58, the GLS-ES57’s, the Behringer C-1… all of these have served well in the past but now I just could not get them to do what I needed.  

    After hmming and hawing over it, I decided to rent an SM7B and a Great River ME-NV1.

    If you’re on the internet, you know what an SM7B is. All I have to say is “those big, microphones that all the podcasters use”. Yeah, you know.

    The ME-NV1, for those who don’t know is a mic preamp that I’ve seen talked about in many a YouTube video (and audio recording forums) and the general consensus is that these two combined can make for a killer vocal sound, spoken or sung 2.

    I’m never going to buy either of these items. I’ve no real need to have an SM7B on hand, let alone a top of the line preamp. Both are expensive (the NV itself will run you fourteen hundred bucks before tax) and both hold their value on the used market, so rental it is!

    Heh, you know what? I got so into what I was doing that didn’t even take a pic of the mic/pre setup so instead here’s the rental receipt:

    I set up everything when i got home (SM7B > ME-NV1 > Focusrite Scarlett > PC/MixBus 32c), did some quick tests and wow. The vocal sound I was getting surprised me. Like, really surprised me. I don’t know if I would call it major label studio quality, but it was far beyond anything I’d done in the past.

    My main problem was that out of the three songs, only one of them had any semblance of lyrics; just very rough idea sloppily written down. The other two? Pffft. Nothing. Nadda. Jack fucking shit.

    So here I was with a good mic, a good mic pre, three songs, no lyrics, and maybe two and a half days.

    Fuck it.

    I pulled out some blank paper, took a deep breath and started to write.

    And goddammit, I did it.

    I just steamrolled my way through it all, scribbling down words while the tracks played; scratching out mistakes and trying again. Testing out ideas in real time. There was one point where I got stuck and had a mild freak out. “There is no way I was going to pull this off, I said to myself. “It normally take me days to write a single verse”. This didn’t last long though and I managed to push through.

    Here’s the pile of in progress sheets.

    My pen started acting up at one point so I had to stop and figure that out.

    With thanks, as always, to the unsung low subscriber hero’s of YouTube, I was able to fix my pen and move on until finally I had three full sets of lyrics written and the vocals recorded:

    Now it’s on to mixing which I don’t anticipate taking too long as I’d been editing and playing with the mixes of all three songs over the past while.

    So, sit tight and over the course of the next few weeks there’ll be three new tunes appearing both here and in Bandcamp.


    1: Oh. My. God. The Witcher 3 is soooooo fucking good. I thought Cyberpunk 2077 was the best video game I’ve ever played but there’s something about The Witcher 3 that hits just right.

    2: Yes, yes there is also the famous Neumann U 87, but the rental on those beasts are prohibitive. While the monthly rate for the SM7B was $46, the U 87 would cost $300 for the same time frame.

  • It’s Been A Fucking Year?

    Early in the morning last week, I made a cup of coffee and opened this up:

    After having a quick listen and scrolling through the tracks I realized that other than strumming my guitar here and there, I haven’t touched anything music-wise since around this time last year.

    (more…)

  • This Just Sucks.

    Steve Albini 1962 – 2024

    While I’m not a fan of a good chunk of the bands he’s recorded, I admire them for what they were (and still are) and I greatly admired Albini’s outlook on recording and music in general. The Problem With Music is still one of the most important things you can read if you’re a musician of any kind.

    (There’s also this gem on his studio’s website)

  • AI And Music

    Just read this Rolling Stone article about Suno, and wow.

    I knew what I was getting into. All AI articles these days seem to follow the same template: People amazed/shocked at how real this AI generated thing is. Covering the backgrounds of the people who created the AI thing. Going over the difficulty getting AI to make this particular thing as opposed to that particular thing while in the end it’s all scraping large amounts of data to try and come up with something that could potentially be deemed original.

    In short it’s just more techowanking over a recent AI breakthrough. As always, there is a lot of back patting and corporate-speak-rabble-babble about being creative and empowering the people and whatnot.

    And it’s that bullshit that drives me nuts.

    (more…)