RELEASE: APPOVTALK #02 - Creating Pixelated Soundwaves

After eight months it's time for a new installment in the APPOVTALK series. Episode two steps away from the Quake universe (just for now) and discusses the highly popular online game 'Habbo Hotel' in tandem with one of its most popular features from the past: 'Trax'. APPOVTALK 2 briefly discusses the roots of the hotel, the Trax feature in general and finally follows up with a demonstration of how Trax used to work on an externally operated 2009 Habbo Retro server that showed the game just before the merger from Shockwave to Flash; which unfortunately broke the Trax composing feature irreversibly in its wake (existing songs could be played again a couple of months later - yet, no new songs could ever be produced again). The video is pretty lengthy, around 30 minutes, but I prefer this kind of format as it allows me to truly speak my mind so to say and to really dive into the matter at hand. In addition it allows me to reflect a bit on the good old days of Habbo Hotel.

Afterwards, a deeper look was taken at a number of songs that were featured on the album inside of Ableton Live alongside some personal commentary.  In order to keep the film digestible and to prevent it from being over an hour long, four out of the twelve songs have been shown. For those that are interested in what kind of inspiration I've had for all of the remaining songs, there is more information to be found down below in this post. Enjoy!

The Orient Club in the old version of Habbo - One of my favorite places to hang out

Me inside of my office room

A demonstration of the TRAX UI inside of a external hosted V31 server

A song project inside of Ableton Live

  

 

TRACK #1 - EARLY DAYS

For the first track on the album I limited myself to only the first three cartridges that were released in the Trax catalogue in early 2007. These were the Habbo Theme, Duck Funk and Battle Ball Theme cartridges. I started off the song with a standard drum and bass as a nostalgic nod to the earliest days of Trax. Back when Trax was just released, everyone seemed to make this drum and bass combination as a simple way to get some beats going, or to test out the new feature that Trax brought to the table. Especially the first couple of days you would hear this composition everywhere. Once the song progresses, it also progresses in its complexity and transforms into a nice experimental playground for me to grab existing samples, chop them up, combine them at will and to see what sticks and what not. In a sense, Early Days reflects the good old days of Trax in a modern coat of paint during which two decades overlap.

TRACK #2 - VERMILION

Vermilion is a remaster of the very first 'real' trax song I made somewhere in the summer or autumn of 2007. I've heard the original countless times over the years, even when I log on to the original hotel from time to time I still hear the song and it's a song I really hold dear. To me it resembles my time inside the Hotel and love for Trax in one since I've heard it so much over the years. The song is a faithful recreation of the original, with some 'psasss' added to spruce it up a notch. The runtime is also a bit shorter than the original to keep it free from too much redundancies. It combines the Bhanga Mantra, Jive SideBurns, HouseLoops, and El Generico cartridges. The original song was called Capri 2. I have no idea why I gave it that name. I wanted to give it a better name. It imagined the song as a color and came up with Vermillion and I found it to be a sleek, sassy and classy name that represented the spirit of the song. Fiery, but not in your face.

TRACK #3 - SEARCHLIGHT

Trax had a significant amount of Dance, Trance and House Loops, but didn't you just hate it that the songs were too slow for the samples? Since Trax was locked at 120BPM, you couldn't truly make a real trance song. Luckily, this time by using Ableton Live, I was able to work around that by amping it up to 134BPM in order to make it sound and feel more like a classic trance journey. This is probably the closest I can get to a real trance track with pre-made Habbo Samples. I tried to stay close to traditional classic trance as possible, you know, with a nice long build up, heavy kicks, cooldown - just like the classic trance journey's. I think this song is, together with Vermilion and Lighting the Tiles, by far my favorite one on the album.

TRACK #4 - MIRAGE

Mirage is a recreation of a song which I named '150 degrees'. It is a faithful remake to some extent, but I took out a couple of the pop music references out because they brought the song down. The original had also too much emphasis on the whole '1001-night' thing, so I tried to tone that down a bit. There's not much else to state about the song, I renamed the song Mirage as in a mirage in a desert in order to stay in line with the whole Alhambra music theme.

TRACK #5 - DISCOVERY OF DESTINY

This track combines idea for four different tracks I have made in the past. Two were test tracks with some standard drums and guitar riffs, and the other two tracks were called 'Discovery' and 'Destiny'. Destiny was the only full metal song I had ever made, and Discovery combined metal riffs with classical piano compositions. I initially tried to go the same route, but I couldn't really get a decent result, so I decided to make Frequentia the classic piano song instead and just to go full metal and rock on this one. I combined ideas of both tracks and renamed it to the Discovery of Destiny. All of the samples work together so nicely although they were mixed from probably 5 different cartridges!

TRACK #6 - LIGHTING THE TILES - 128BPM EDITION

This track must sound very familiar to those who used to play BattleBall, or BattleBall Reloaded, or SnowStorm, or whatever it is that the game is called nowadays. Seriously, this game has went through more name changes than most celebrities. It's safe to say I put inspiration from the original battle ball theme that used to play during these matches. And it's also safe to say that the original theme was extremely mediocre at best. It was the same 20 second loop over and over again for 3 minutes straight. I wanted to create a more exciting and tension-laden version of the song and to implement the speed of the game, its tension, the emphasis on accumulating points and also the ever-ticking clock that never seemed to be in your favor. The song would start off similar and slow, but it would lead to a half-way build up and halfway things would hit the roof so to speak - and the music would amplify that - since halfway through the game was often the time to start accumulating those points. I decided to put some more tension on the final part of the song to emphasize that the final seconds of the game had begun and to emphasize: go on, you can still win! Grab those final points. I did that with a sample that kind of resembled a ticking clock. If you listen closely you are able to hear it throughout the entire song! To me, this song really embodies battle ball that its original counterpart did not. It embodies the hectic moments, the fun and the competitiveness. There is also a slight emphasis on speed by amping up the BPM from 120 to 128 in order to create a bit of urgency. Battle Ball games lasted around 3 minutes, so I wanted my new theme to be the same.

TRACK #7 - ROYALE

Royale is a bit of a odd man out. It's made of a combination of random samples, tiki trax packs and reggaeton samples that were found on random trax packs. For most of these samples I cannot seem to remember whether we even had them in the original hotel! Unfortunately I can just be very quick about this song, it's one of the few that uses a standard ABAB song structure and there was no further inspiration to this song than simply listening to all of the samples for hours on end.

TRACK #8 - VOLTA

Volta is a combination of the techno, electro and minimal electro sample packs. I took inspiration from the trendy and hip minimal electro background music you often hear in clothing shops. They are often pleasantly to listen to, contain a nice rhythm, but don't interrupt too much in what you are doing while still offering a bit of diversity in the background. I imagined Volta to be just that. Of course, Volta, is a nod to electricity due to 'Volts' and the electro genre, but it also means 'return' in Portugese. Or at least, that's what my train ticket said. Since certain melodies keep returning over and over again, I named it Volta since I was able to create various recognizable loop while remaining diverse at the same time.

TRACK #9 - BLIZZARD

Yes, there were Christmas sound packs. I believe they were released in the Dutch Hotel somewhere around 2007 together with the limited edition red trax machine. Most of the samples were breathing too much Christmas, like Christmas jingles, 'ho ho ho merry Christmas' samples and what not, so I decided to create a soundscape instead since there wasn't a whole lot left to use. I did enjoy these samples back in the day for some reason, so I decided to give them their own little spot on the album. It also adds to the diversity of the album, which is always a good thing, so why not?

TRACK #10 - DOWNTOWN

I've used all of the r&B, HipHop and Funk trax packs that I was able to find. I was inspired by oldskool street performances, people breakdancing, people walking with boomboxes on the street downtown, that sorts of thing. I wanted to create a recreation of that feeling and that particular atmosphere by imagining a large crowd standing around a dance performance somewhere downtown in a large city while this song was playing.

TRACK #11 - FREQUENTIA

Trax had many genres and styles, but way too less piano samples! They should've made a lot more an there were only 2 cartridges if memory serves me right. There is not much to say about it, except that this is also an audio scape with returning compositions and build-ups. I've tried to create a bit of a narrative inside of the song by combining various piano samples with one another.

TRACK #12 - CALLER UNKNOWN - 148BPM RINGTONE EDITION

The last track on the album is a ringtone! Why? For those that can remember the good old ringtone subscription advertisements on television, you'd know that Habbo had its own ringtone somewhere between 2005 and 2007. I actually had the ringtone on my phone. This is a nod back to that time and the ringtone culture during which people used ringtones to differentiate and distinguish themselves from the crowd. I remember that at that time, everyone almost had different ringtones and people'd swap ringtones through Bluetooth (which took forever, by the way). Now, everyone uses the same standard Apple/Samsung ringtone all over again The ringtone combines parts of the original plus some of the returning compositions that were found on Pixelated Soundwaves in order to make it truly a part of the album.

 

Again, this APPOVTALK was made for entertainment and educational purposes only and as an extension of the Pixelated Soundwaves project. Habbo, Habbo Hotel, Trax and all of the Trax samples are trademarks of Sulake Oy, Helsinki, Finland.