Final Release: November 26, 2016
Production Years: 2009-2013, 2016
Genre: Post-rock, Electronic, Garbage
Album Length: 41 Minutes
Availability: All streaming platforms
Summary
Social Phobia is my second album. The entire process of creating the album from beginning to end was a very long and difficult learning process for me. The music is a mix of electronics, post rock, and a splash of ambient soundscapes. This project was my first time recording instruments and mixing audio along with using Pro Tools. The end result is very cringe inducing, at lest for me personally.
Production
Some of the songs on Social Phobia were first started as demos in 2009 along with demo songs that would eventually end up on The Void. At the time I had no real audio production experience and it was my first time working with Pro Tools as my digital audio workstation. Previously all of my work was created in a digital only environment but now I had the ability to add guitar tracks into the mix. This created an odd genre mix between electronic and guitar driven music. While working on the songs I never preserved the original recordings and instead permanently bounced tracks with very bad EQ processing, this amateur mistake doomed the entire project. Along with my stupidity I also had to deal with corrupted files and system crashes. Due to lost data, I had to take a step back on half of the tracks and use old demo versions (shit happens). A couple songs ended up being scrapped entirely. Although production on this album stems across many years, only a few days out of each month were spent working on it. My motivation was taking a major hit and I had very little time available to dedicate to music production.
Skip forward to 2016 and I once again began working on Social Phobia. During this production phase I was focused on improving the mixes of the songs rather then composing and altering the arrangements. Some alterations did take place but only because I ran into more corrupted files and lost data (shit continues to happen). This in itself was a learning experience. When it came down to it, there was not much I could do to revive the sound quality. I had done so many things wrong from the beginning and thus my mistakes were permanent. Social Phobia was finally released on November 26, 2016. This was the point at which I realized I had to be done with it and move on.
Final Thoughts
Much like Electric Shock, this album served It's purpose as a training course that has allowed me to advance my skills in music production. More importantly it is a lesson of what to avoid going forward. Social Phobia to me is a bad album. It’s not so much the songs themselves that I dislike, it’s just the quality of the final result. Production thoughts aside, the compositions I find to be very… interesting.
