Category: Music

My published music. No more, no less.

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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

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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)

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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.

Continue reading “AI And Music”

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They Knew You Before You Were Famous – The Just Stop Messing With It Mix

Here is a song I titled: “They Knew You Before You Were Famous”

Click here for Lyrics (Yes! Lyrics!)

They Knew You Before They Were Famous

Song Notes

I’ve been working on this track for far, far too long. My problem is that I just can’t settle. I tweak and tweak and re-do and tweak some more. “If I just add this one more little bit…”

I need to learn to stop fucking with things and just get the songs done. Less is more, as they say.

So here it is. I finally just stopped where I was and decided to put it out there. Maybe there will be another mix at some point but, for now, it’s done.

This one was started on Windows and finished on Linux. I really tried to get the song going in Mixbus, but ended up making a righteous mess of it all. No matter, Reaper was  here to save the day. The final mix was done using Reaper Plugins (mostly ReaComp and ReaEq) and Room Reverb from ElephantDSP.com.

The big thing about this tune is that it has vocals. This is the first time I’ve written lyrics and actually sang anything (other than backing vocals) since early 2013. It took a while for the words to come, but once an idea formed, I put pen to paper and it all came together.

Now that this one is done, I’ll work to complete the next tune, which is only lacking finished lyrics and recorded vocals. I’ve promised myself that I’m not going to keep tweaking and just get it done. Hopefully I’m not lying to myself; especially since there are another thee songs in half finished states that need my attention.

For now, enjoy “They Knew You Before You Were Famous”

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When Something Appears

Here is the newest tune.

https://hearthis.at/nicktoone/nicholas-toone-when-something-appears/

Shitcanned Hearthis. Here is the Bandcamp link: https://ntoone.bandcamp.com/track/when-something-appears

This track started out as  a silly little guitar thing I came up with last April while I was drinking beer. It then morphed into the GLS Test I posted back in September. Over the course of the past few months, it was reworked it and recorded from scratch using the following:

For mixing I only used the EQ and compression on the Mixbus channel strips and the only plugins used were the included ACE reverb and delay. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible and see what I could get without relying on a ton of plugins.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the end result. Hopefully the next one won’t take as long.