I️ was an “IDM” producer from the early 2000s and used to chat with Ben on AOL IM, back when he was known as simply flashbulb. After losing touch I️ just recently found this channel. What a trip. Congrats on the success man.
@Walter B Hah, how exactly is this hard to believe? Relatively small community back then, all connected online for the most part, and just about everyone used AIM in the early 2000s. Very very few of the people in this scene have ever been inaccessible millionaire types.
Erothyme exactly right. I️ mean this in the nicest way possible. But those of us who were making that style at that time were kinda all computer and music nerds. We had a big crew of dorks that were doing social media before it was popular. My alias at that time was “chad cells.” Some songs are on RU-vid with release dates on em. lol
The JX-8p has a "feature" where if you jiggle the memory card just right before loading, you get a bunch of super-randomized versions of the patches stored on it.
It’s funny how after all the years you put his hands / fingers exactly the way they have previously worn off the paint below the jogwheel and transport controls.
Dude you have absolutely NO idea how shook i was to find out this cozy music channel ive been watching is the fucking LAWN WAKE guy. You're an absolute beast i've bumped your old Flashbulb albums so many times in my life
@@WARDISWARD i am aware, recently talked about trackers, it was our youth ... its like full circle, speaking to people who are doing this for 30 years and comming back to Amiga and tracker days. In some way tools shaped music to be, trackers are great for IDM and glitch music. Although I know Aphex was using manual midi entry in Cubase.
@@earlsfield Sure he used cubase , everyone did But he used a lot of player pro tracker on mac for drukqs , and come to daddy Not saying he only used trackers , he did use a lot of synths to record audio and further mangle it in trackers etc.. Not everything is sequenced in real time over midi , all the the time The tracker effects are so easy to hear when you have an ear for it , the re-trigger commands , the slide and glide effects , the 09 commands sample offset commands for cutting up the amen break etc... Tracker for live !!! Aphex clip here , posted by the man himself vimeo.com/223378825
Fun Fact: for one of my first forays into music writing, I interviewed Benn when I was in High School for a now defunct website called exploding plastic. Benn was nice enough to answer all my questions and give me a link to an advance copy of Kirlian Selections. 15 years later I'm still making music and have amassed a fair bit of gear as well. Glad to see you're still plugging away and getting your shine Benn. You deserve it.
I bought my DSI Evolver when i was in highschool, 2002 or something, this was before paypal and i had to call DSI to place the order and I ended up talking to Dave Smith for 45 minutes about electronic music
Dave Smith still shows up at small music expos here and there, especially around the SF Bay Area, if you keep an eye open. Roger Linn, too. speaking of, if you still like the Evolver sound, the DSI Tempest is a nice analog drum synth.
I ordered synth sides from The Man himself. It was fun. I later slapped myself on the head - Um.. .you could have asked him WTF was all that with Prophet VS!
WAAAIITTT YOURE THE FLASHBULB??? OMFG. I used to listen to your music years ago when I was first getting into IDM/electronic music. Undiscovered colors!! Tomorrow untrodden! Miles and miles!! Kirlian Shores!! I actually used variations of Kirlian [insert word] as aliases online. trip down memory lane! you got me thru a lot of middle school and early hs! I make music now too haha. Chicago represent!!
*Me making music in 2002:* hooking a MIDI Keyboard /guitar/mic up to a computer with a sequencer and plugins. *Me making music in 2020:* hooking a MIDI Keyboard /guitar/mic up to a computer with a sequencer and plugins and actually knowing what I'm doing.
I loved this. To contrast, I would love to see how you would approach creating your old sound on modern gear, mainly so we can see where your workflow has improved.
Bruh... you HAVE to do a video breaking down how you were doing that step edit recording on the drums- I’ve never seen anyone do anything like that and I’m intrigued.
I'm an 18 year old swedish producer who found you through spotify 2 years ago, found you through youtube a year ago. Red Extensions of Me and Kirlian Selections have been really influential to me, and I'm getting goosebumps listening to these sounds you're able to create with gear seemingly from the stone age. This is amazing.
i've recently found cds that i made 20 years ago and despite having picked up a degree in sound engineering and music production in the intervening years i cannot replicate the tracks. the limitations of the gear i used then seemed to produce more creativity. great video
david cunningham it was exciting back then. You really worked with hardware more and it seemed organic. Today it’s too computer oriented and computers are not sexy lol
david cunningham I still have all the gear I used in 2000. The only thing I don’t have readily to hand is the soundblaster live card which is languishing in a box somewhere haha but I have a software soundfonts synth so I can load all the samples into that.
I want this sound to come back. This is definitely the sound of the late nineties/early 2000s drillnbass/braindance/idm, which have faded away in popularity now.
@@noahleach7690 THIS! I was waiting for someone to put my musical existentialism into perspective on this three year old RU-vid comment! Thank you so much! Life-changing! Woah! But on the flip-side, could it be that I wasn't talking about what music is popular, but more about the textures, mood and techniques used in this specific video? I am talking about the sound here you know. And you might think that this is something that is found on every corner, but that just doesn't go for everyone. Or maybe I was quite drunk that specific night three years ago, getting a bit over-excited. Just enough for me to write what I thought were some positive thoughts, into a comment, without having to think about what anyone actually had to say about that.
Normal youtubers: *pauses for a moment as they collect their thoughts* Benn: Sorry about that, I thought I saw a semipalmated plover outside my window but it turned out to just be a piping plover...
This was definitely worth it. There is some emotional center in my brain that's been hit by watching you immediately fall back into the flow of a cherished set of tools you haven't touched in years. Like your comments at the end suggest, it's a good reminder that "a good craftsperson knows their tools" and that the level of drive you have to make music is far more important than the amount of gear you have.
Ages ago on the metatone forums you posted a list of everything used to make M3 and I saved it for some reason. Seems relevant "Software: Cool Edit Pro, Coagula, Sound Forge, Fruity Loops, Acid, Buzz Tracker, Goldwave, Mobious, Wave Surgeon, Logic Pro, Vegas, pretty much everything from TC Native, all extensively modded and clogged with VST/DX plugins, some homemade. Many more to this list, but you get the point. Hardware: Roland (JX-305 Workstation, MS-1 Sampler, SP-202 Sampler) Korg (X3 workstation, AX1000G effects processor/acoustic modeler) Various mixers, homemade fx boxes, etc, etc. My main computer is a D800MHZ Athlon w/ 256 mb RAM and about 140gb in hard drive space, which is where I do 80% of my work."
I've wondered for almost 20 years how you made all of the early stuff so, as far as how 'worth it' it was, this was at least a huge nostalgia trip for me and put a smile on my face. Pretty inspirational and makes me feel lazy for how little effort I'm willing to put in to write tracks sometimes. Your early work is one of the major things that got me into producing in the first place when I was a teenager in the early-mid '00s so thank you for that.
I love the quote: "The music is not in the violin". That being said, diving into the instrument and spending time with it, will uncover what it can do. The amazing choices we have today is a distraction.
Just turned 30, this brings me back to being 14-15 discovering Benn and his music and jamming out non-stop to his music after school. Nostalgia hit me like a ton of bricks
Just figuring that out myself!! Ended up acquiring a Flashbulb cd at a rave ages ago and instantly put it into heavy rotation in my car at the time. Don't exactly remember HOW I acquired it lol
So beautiful to see how you just got into the workflow like that. Crazy to see how IDM tracks with crazy percussion are made, it's always been a mystery as a listener.
Hey man! I don’t know if you recall this- but we met in Cleveland at “the capsule” when you played with Cylob. We had a beer and chatted briefly about the Alesis ineko. I still love it so much and wish more companies made devices with that simplicity. I got the big sky, to take over the reverb duties I used it for, but I’ll never stop using the ineko! Glad to see your videos on here, keep up the good work!
I can't believe what you managed to do with so little at your disposal! Really made me appreciate the gear I have at my disposal nowadays as I never suffered as you did!
This would have blown my mind back in 2004 when I started making music and honestly even after a decade of being a full time professional producer it’s still pretty crazy!
I had no idea you were the Flashbulb. I listened to your stuff all the time! Part of the inspiration for making my music was the more underground IDM and breakcore producers from the late 90s and early 2000s, the Flashbulb included. I got my first copy of Fruityloops in 03, moved onto ableton and hardware in 07 and I'm still at it. Thanks for inspiring me back then and also with your current videos! You're a legend!
Man taking me back. My setup was 2 run down Ensoniq Mirages where I sampled a toy drum set into and then would sample those mirage samples into Fast Tracker II to sequence along with an MC-303. Sometime's I'd sample sequences from FT2 or the MC-303 back into the Mirage and just make everything insane. I was making Breakcore & Speedcore around the exact same time you were making this stuff (1999-2005). Loved seeing the LOW RES sticker!!!! I still have some Abelcain, Bombadier, and Venetian Snares LOW RES releases on vinyl from when I spun all that stuff. Thanks for the memory lane trip!
Thank you for taking the time to show us your old workflow. I used to try to model some of my music after your Flashbulb albums and this was truly a treat for my younger self to not only see the process, but hear your reflections and advice at the end. It was well informed and much appreciated. I hope many producers and musicians get a chance to hear this message. Thank you, Benn.
23:03 - This part where you can hear the familiar vibrato from Stinger and Eleven Ways to End the Pain gave me chills. Fantastic video and an incredible look into the amount of work it took to make one of your tracks back then!
5:08 It sounds like Streets of Rage 3 music. No really, listen to some stuff from the soundtrack like this: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xM_HHyKq2Jw.html ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-KZ7MzwAXusQ.html You could legitimately crush a dance club with this.
Oh Boy.. the JX-305 was my first synth from 2001 - 2005. Made a looot of tracks with only using that synth, but in hindsight it's probably one of the shittiest sounding synth out there, haha. Kinda miss it now though, for some weird reason. Maybe because at least I was more productive with all its limitations...
Cool edit was the best stereo audio editor ever..... i still use Adobe Audition 1.5 which is pretty much Cool Edit after adobe bought it .... you can still download it from adobe and finding a passcode is simple enough...highly recommended
This was fantastic, especially hearing Elevator Fibbonachi and the new track you were able to put together. I loved `Resent and The April Sunshine Shed` and `Red Extensions of Me` back in the day and this brought back great memories. Thank you for all your music over the years.
Really enjoyed this video Benn, thanks for sharing. It brings me to such a weird point of closure, now, finally, like 18 years after we first met (wow fuck I'm getting kinda old) and you were just releasing These Open Fields and promoting it on WATMM, to see something approximating the setup you had at the time. Not only that, but sharing anecdotal muscle memory of how you worked with it. The end result is such a weird hybrid of your sound idiomatically. Something that falls closer to something off of Love As A Dark Hallway, maybe. There are some subtleties to the velocity programming of the drum sequences that is instantly more recent sounding than something from M3, and yet there are still these clunky sequences that are really really kick and snare heavy that just seem to be self evidently the product of the gear. What a blast man!
Benn, you make a great point about using a little gear to the fullest vs a lot of gear very little. Growing up I made all my electronic music on a single Yamaha workstation synth. Slowly over time, as budget allowed, I added to my rig piece by piece. What that Yamaha synth taught me was how to work through and around limitations, which still applies today because I'm always missing some key piece of gear or software that would make things easier. The challenge of figuring out how to get the same results without those missing pieces is not only rewarding, but also keeps my brain working hard, and perhaps keeps me in check to never rely too heavily on new toys (and can even save money in the process because if a problem can be solved without a new plugin or hardware, why not?). Thanks for the fun video, btw! I love looking back at old gear and techniques!
Wonderful to watch, hope you are doing well ^^ When I think back how I started 4-5 years ago one year before graduating highschool (started with a VX49 + Ableton live lite) and pull out old tracks, I remember how I pulled allnighters to finish them because I was so motivated and had huge amounts of time to spare during holidays with bad weather. Fast forward a few years and now Im spreading work on projects over days and even weeks, taking time for sound design sessions and overall spending less time on music, since I actually have other stuff to do. I think computers and software are awesome and while some musical craftmenship fades (I notice that I play the piano less than I used to as a kid and feel lost on physical synths) I can do more overall: I make & play music, create artwork, manage photos, cut videos and write shitty reports with a small box, I think thats as awesome as it gets if you are young and want to just create SOMETHING without a lot of money... btw the only thing I pirated is my OS, because apple wont make sanely priced hardware with decent support, but I think you are spot on with that guess, even after all that tweaking and patching to make it work its still piracy :(
ah dude, I'm only catching up on your work now, but, the presets on that Roland, gave me the best laugh I've had in years! thank you, subscribbled immediately!!!
holy shit, I've been listening to your music for years! I remember watching some videos on your personal channel but I only just found this channel. I'm about to binge watch every video.
I was looking at that mark wondering how it go there, then seeing him rest his thumb there - Amazing!. I LOVE THAT THUMB MARK - makes the keyboard seem like an old pair of jeans.
I didn't have a workstation, but in other respects this feels like watching myself 25 years ago, sequencing cheap hardware on an Atari STE and recording to 4-track. I'm nostalgic about the gear (that I no longer have), not the LEAST nostalgic about the workflow. Great video, thanks.
I thought this video was amazing! It was really interesting to hear and see your mindset and approach towards creating, also your ability to narrate and entertain completely negated the need for the screen. Loved the video, as always a great watch :)
Twenty years ago, I had just graduated from making music with tape experimentation, and trackers, like "ModEdit", to using a computer sequencer and a cheap synthesizer. And I was STILL using the tracker for a kind of... drum machine, sampler. I was running everything through a cheap, Radio Shack two track mixer, to a tape recorder.
Dude I just randomly clicked on this and didn’t realize you were the Benn from the Flashbulb. Extremely cool, I love your music. Looking forward to watching all your other videos. Thanks for sharing!
This was such a cool video idea, I really enjoyed seeing him break out his vintage gear and looking back on his initial production techniques. Today’s technology has truly democratized the music recording and production for modern artists. Seeing what a difference 20 years has made
Been a fan for over a decade now, got goosebumps just hearing the first few seconds of that slightly botched Elevator Fibonacci pattern lol, just an awesome treat for us to see the roots of these albums :) thanks for the incredible talent you've given us over the years! Also delighted to see you also possess the elusive Zoom Sampletrak, would love to hear your thoughts on it sometime :)
Just caught this video. New subscriber, but I just have to say that I have the EXACT same circumstances and experiences surrounding my Roland XP-80 that I used back in the late 90s to early 00s. I did find one at a pawn shop many years after selling my original XP due to some unfortunate $$ issues back in that era, and did purchase it. This was back in 2014 and this thing has basically been in surgery ever since. I fear I may never live my old halcyon days of XP hardware programming and writing, but I will say this, I got an MC-707 about a month back and this is the first time I haven't missed the XP since my original. Great video. Thanks.
the factory setting trance with the super distorted kick drum at 5:21 is kind of a fuckin bop. noise trance forever i guess. whatever is happeing at 5:31 is also godly. if you end up recording the full length demos i kinda need em LMAO [edit] holy fuck "blues" is the future [double edit] oh wow, elevator fibbonachi!! one of my faves of your older stuff for sure!
just randomly clicked into one of your videos, then I saw 'the flashbulb' on screen and my heart exploded. Chaining through all your videos now! Love this content, and loved your music from the second I first heard it almost fifteen years ago! Cheers!
Great video - 20 years ago, I remember asking my parents to buy a Soundblaster card for the family Cyrix x386 PC for my birthday...so that I could hook up a kids casio keyboard via midi... and proceeding to make very bad tunes with the stock general midi sounds on the free Cubasis CD that came with it! Then I discovered freeware VSTs...Reason...Ableton live...mpcs...Native instrument stuff....synths....grooveboxes...and 20 years later, I'm still making very bad tunes!
"20 years ago, I remember asking my parents to buy a Soundblaster card for the family Cyrix x386 PC for my birthday...so that I could hook up a kids casio keyboard via midi..." That made me sad!
When you were talking about knowing all the nooks and crannies of the JX-305 vs. not really knowing all these plug-ins anywhere to that depth. It made me think of this quote. “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” -Bruce Lee. You said it yourself; it's just muscle memory. It doesn't even matter that the screen is unreadable. This was cool to watch as someone that would mess around bit on a Kurzweil K2000R, E-Mu Orbit 9090 and Roland SH-101 & Roland TB-303 that both had MIDI to CV into them.
This made me listening back to your Acidwolf - 303.5 Fm set on soundcloud :) I hope you find the time to release some of the tunes someday. I love the stuff ypu put out under this moniker
that mini-set you played sounds like something off red extensions! i’ve been watching a lot of gear videos lately and it can be too easy to fall into the trap of “oh i could be a better musician if only i had this one thing.” seeing you do something cool with a few pieces of 20 year old gear and talking about how you should dive deep into what you have is very inspiring as someone of limited means during this crisis. thanks so much for making this video!
lmao I've been watching this channel for a couple years now and had zero idea Benn was The Flashbulb. Crazy. Been a fan for way longer and have always loved the tracks, big ups
I have a weird story about how I acquired my Korg MS2Kr... so my cousin handed one to me one day, telling me that he found it in his ex-girlfriend's apartment building trash, in Georgetown, DC. I could immediately tell some of the buttons were stuck, and had tentatively planned to disassemble it and clean it out. Well I didn't get around to doing so until the quarantine, but when I set out to do it I realized that somebody had definitely spilled some kind of cola or dark soda on it. There was residue all over the interior, on the chassis as well as the control board. I set to work very carefully microcleaning it using distilled water, Q-tips, and cheap toothpicks. It took about a week but I finally got the entire thing cleaned out & in working order. So yeah, I got the damn thing for free, but put in a lot of effort to get it back into fully working condition... but I did it, and it's fully functional now! I assume some rich asshole had bought it, spilled soda on it, and just dumped it into the trash... but my cousin definitely gave it to the right person, and I'm glad I was able to bring it back to life.
Gave a buddy my ms2000br. I have a Radias already, and it was just sitting unused. Good on you for restoring it. Doesn’t take much to get most things up and going again.
I just wanted to say that I loved seeing you work out those beats and melodies the way you used to. It looks so tedious, but there's a bit of magic in imagining those old flashbulb songs that meant so much to me being made in this way!
@@cybWasHere It's funny, I met a girl about two years ago who used to date him, actually. Fuckin small world, given that my high school love story heavily involved bonding over Benn's music.
Benn, I have wanted to see this video for a very long time, without fully knowing it. Goosebumps when you first started playing Elevator Fibbonachi. Even your tweaking sounded just like the original recording. Also would love to see that EF-303 video.
I remember when my MC 303 was my world...spend so many night on it...was the most expensive thing i ever bought (poor student inside at this time) , friends looked at me and my lil’ wonderbox like a mad one...never ever regreted this...addicted to synth and sampler since 😃
It was really interesting to get to see the montage of your drum sequencing, would you ever consider doing a video more in-depth about your process of putting together, say, an 8 bar percussion sequence?
Benn Jordan - You speak well. Your videos are super interesting, easy to track, informative, entertaining and just great. I’ve never listened to your music but I will. It’s apparent you have mad skills and are a hard worker. Anyway - just some real feedback. Keep it up and bless you.
