2025 Music Production
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Happy New Year!
It is the year 2026. As I get older, months go by like weeks. The next thing you know, it feels like days. That is probably when I forget to remember that I am moving pretty slowly. I mean, that can also be a good thing, I guess. It is part of the aging process that God has given us, not to remember anything before we go. And when you possibly reincarnate as a human again, your soul has little to grieve about, especially when you do not remember anything.
Scientifically speaking, you will have a new brain, like a brand new hard drive, ready to store another set of memories, other than the natural ones such as crying, hunger, laughing, and all those things that are already included with the package. The rest are experiences meant to become familiar and to comfort those natural feelings, primarily your mother, who also carries that natural package. Her voice, her touch, her lips, her glowing eyes, her breast milk. You begin storing memories of familiarity, where comfort slowly transforms into affection.
This includes moments of disliking your father when he makes your mother upset or when he teaches you discipline, such as scolding you for throwing a fork at her. When he makes her cry, it confuses you why they seem to love each other again as if nothing happened, and through that confusion, understanding begins to develop.
You start learning reasons to avoid the feeling of pain. Your brain develops through rebellion with your brothers or sisters, first as rivals or even foes. There are also others at the same stage and in an equal state of reason as you, especially in school, where even more data is added to your memories. Over time, you grow to appreciate those who raised you.
Well, earlier this year we laid our father to rest, and what took him was not old age. He had me when he was young. He was more like a brother. Although there were times when I did not like the guy, I never stopped crying for weeks, and I still feel many small aftereffects even now.
Now there are a few laughs when remembering his funny character, who he was, and especially the way he walked and talked. I even felt bad for him for the things he tried to achieve or earn. He was popular among his peers, especially those from the Philippines whom he went to college with and later, amazingly, found eachother again in the States, living not far away. They joined family gatherings and stayed connected. The same goes for coworkers he befriended, even if they no longer worked together.
Many of them, however, have also passed away, and I feel that this made it easier for him to go, as I saw no fear in his eyes. He seemed ready to join the bandwagon beyond the life we are living now.
To make it short, he passed away from cancer. Seeing his condition in his final days, everything I ever disliked about my father went out the window. To be honest, and although I may know why, I kept ignoring how severe his cancer was, especially when my mother showed me the paper listing his conditions after his death, and it was extensive. At times, I even blamed myself, wondering if there must have been a conspiracy behind it. I truly thought he would make it. I even encouraged him to walk in the park more often with my mother when he recovers, and I told him I would be there with them. He is still young, I thought.
And just like that, when the cancer took hold, the devil showed no mercy. There was nothing we could do but grieve and pray. He was leaving us, eyes open, breathing heavily, his face frail, with tears forming two long streams down both sides. In the early morning, I was awakened by my mother’s cry.
I miss him. He loved gardening edible plants and vegetables in our backyard every summer. Just like in the Philippines when I was a child, he would play songs on our family Hi-Fi stereo system, which had been stored in the backyard pavilion, bringing nostalgia from the old tapes. He also sang karaoke with his grandkids, with an analog television above it showing the scores after the eight-bit lyrics, like a Sega Genesis video game. I thought that if I won the lottery, I would buy him a yard with a big greenhouse. Thinking about this, it must have been the pesticide he inhaled; he didn’t wear protective gear while getting rid of bugs in his garden. It was almost like a whisper from his voice as I saw the dead leaves he had planted, slowly dispelling the conspiracies linked to his passing.
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Press Start was my first album earlier this year and a newer version of an older Press Start album. It was built from two previous albums by selecting the best tracks from my earlier works, EXIT and Radio Reception, as well as from a refined version of an older compilation titled The Turquoise Flute, which also gathered the best material from those two albums along with newer tracks.
There were quite a lot of tracks across all three albums. All of them were the result of my on-and-off work with little consistency from 2005 until 2014, when I discovered that you don’t need a record label to get your music on iTunes and Spotify.
I was still naive then. Even my brother in law, who already understood how the industry works, asked me, “Are you going to promote it or join a record label?” He even complimented me, though I wasn’t sure if he was serious, since he always had a grin on his face when he liked a few of the tracks I made. He teased that my baby nephew back then also liked them. Turns out the baby really did like my B-Boy-themed track, Superheroes.
I just said, “Maybe later,” but honestly, I didn’t know at all how it worked. I thought that if you made good beats, people would just discover you. Boy, was I wrong.
I even developed conspiracies in my head over time, making me feel insecure why I had chosen to include music production in my life journey in the first place instead of pursuing a white collar career. I even thought about abandoning it. But why not continue pursuing storytelling, my last ticket to sell a story to Hollywood, even behind the scenes, just enough to buy a large greenhouse in my backyard and spend my days blogging about the project?
Which I did after I had a stroke in 2016. No, not the greenhouse, but storytelling. It was difficult to make music while recovering. My rhythm wasn’t the same anymore. My walk lacked its old swag, and my legs that used to speed up stairs now only climbed holding the rails like an old man. It upset me when people I was with seemed to think I had always been that way, especially as a security officer, earning just enough to keep a roof over my head, doing simple grocery shopping that I could turn into some kind of Filipino gourmet experiment through mobile photography to post on Facebook, and buying simple musical gear that was just enough to cover Affirm monthly payments.
Yet storytelling kept me busy enough to avoid sinking into sadness over my body’s changed rhythm.
I took a break from writing books, especially when the promotional side felt the same as in music production. When it comes to getting more streams on Spotify and SoundCloud, book promotion is just a whole lot more expensive. Slowly, I kept gaining more knowledge on the side about music as I tried to figure out how in the world I could attract any readers, considering there are millions of others as well. In music production, however, especially on social media like Facebook and Instagram, attention to music gear and now AI technology has become important. I was already impressed with the new version of Splice and with gear like the Arturia MicroFreak, which allows you to download unique, gritty sounds ready to upload directly to the instrument.
I figured, let’s go back to this dimension again. I can always return to writing books, where age doesn’t matter much and isn’t used as a controversial weapon against making good music. Commercially, especially in the mainstream, youth tends to come to mind when it comes to music, and that can sometimes hinder your progress. Well, I love music, period. It is also art, like making books. And it has no age limit, like being Willie Nelson. Actually, it is not like he didn’t start being famous young, lol, ouch. There it is again, the assumption that a guy struggling to climb stairs has always been that way. Well, Willie, on the other hand, doesn’t even hold the rails, so to speak, and his voice has even richer soul in it today.
I am not an instrumentalist per se. I have mastered the Korg Kaossilator Pro, jamming with MIDI keyboards, making simple chords, and using preset MIDI files dressed up with virtual instruments. I use samples, and I am particularly a fan of royalty free kits. I have very little time to dig for vinyl. To the best of my knowledge, my strength lies in my ability to select good music, whether underground or mainstream, both classic and modern. Overall, it is having an ear for music.
And miraculously, in my lifetime, and after Timbaland made it acceptable to use it regardless of the lawsuit surrounding AI music, I jumped into it right away, alongside the new version of Splice. It could also be the loss of my father earlier this year, as well as the passing of Ozzy, Val Kilmer, Hulk Hogan, Foreman, and more figures from the entertainment world, that triggered something in me. First of all, isn’t it odd that when my father died, there were suddenly more than a dozen well known figures from the entertainment industry who also passed away in 2025? That felt very strange.
Well, in December 2024, before I discovered AI music and the updated version of Splice, I took down EXIT, Radio Reception, The Turquoise Flute, and Press Start, and decided to start again with a new version of Press Start. In that replacement album, only one track used AI music, titled Blue Sky Breeze. Supposedly, Blue Sky Breeze came from a paid vocalist I found on Fiverr, and her service cost three hundred dollars in total. She was from France. But never again, thanks to AI generated vocals, where you have much better control instead of having to obey the rules of divas on Fiverr. I was not really satisfied with the result, and if I wanted revisions, there were extra fees. So I let it go and thought, people pay you to make beats for others.
However, this new music technology answered my prayers. AI music and the updated Splice, combined with what I already knew about gear and instruments, along with my knowledge of Logic Pro and online mastering services like LANDR, and finally using DistroKid as my distributor, allowed me to create fifty one records, both EPs and albums, throughout 2025.
Now, I am not saying to replace divas. Although China already has robots as backup dancers in concerts, in my lifetime it would feel uncomfortable to replace vocalists on stage with robots. As I mentioned in a previous blog about using AI music, AI can be used as a cover or support for real human artists. Think of it as a sketch or a draft that can help make great artists even better, using AI as musical notes or tools. Something like that. I remember thinking, wow, talk about quantifying quality. There is no "over” here.
Aside from getting back into writing science fiction again, fingers crossed I catch the attention of the film industry or even explore AI film, I am still riding the wave of where this intelligent music might take us. Maybe, down the road, it will not be artificial after all.
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