This is the “discovery” on which this entire post is based, and I would encourage you to click/listen to this before reading further.

I am a Hypocrite.

After I chugged (God willing) my last beer in September of 2022 behind Trackside Tavern in Decatur I began the process of healing and making amends to people I might have harmed while chasing my entitled, universe-demanding, self-important dreams of EDM stardom and YouTube fame.

Since discovering EDM in 2007 I’ve wanted nothing more than being the big, successful, deadmau5-adjacent figure who raised his hands on the stage of billboard dance festivals while the music built up to a hellraising climax, triggering the drop, and launching about eight million paper streamers, CO2 cannons, and lasers directly into the brainstems of my branded-merch-wearing legion of adoring fans. I was attracted to the scene immediately. It looked like a god-damned blast. The same day I saw my first Ultra – Miami footage (dig the people in the beginning of that video asking “does he ever take it off?”) I purchased a pitiful Numark controller and began in earnest DJing at a local hookah bar. Later that night I remember cracking a copy of Reason 4 so that I could make fat trance bangers in the dorm rooms I inhabited.

Nobody who has ever experienced a legitimate EDM show/rave/festival can deny how intoxicating and awe-inspiring the feeling of listening to the same song, with the same people, in the same space can be. For a moment nobody is fighting, nobody is bickering, and nobody is glued to their Twitter feed. I believe that I was attracted by this harmony initially, and while I genuinely enjoyed the music (still do) and the musical experience that came with DJing EDM, my foray into producing the music itself was all for vainglory. I didn’t write the music because I enjoyed it (enjoyment now remitted to a side effect); I was writing it because of what it brought me: money, sex, and notoriety.

Up until this point I had been solely writing and performing traditional classical music. Nobody paid me to crank Sibelius and Schubert in the Summerville Community Orchestra, and showing someone a string quartet that you wrote, or the Bottesini concerto you spent the last calendar year practicing on your upright bass doesn’t yield nearly the same reaction as showing someone the Tiesto-esque neotrance tune that you stayed up until 3am the previous night perfecting on your sleek Mac Pro and massive Italian job studio speakers. Add in some alcohol, put the song in the front of a room full of young 20 somethings, and suddenly the orchestra nerd is a complete party god. I had never had this much popularity, clout, or attention in my life.  Most of my life had been spent on the bottom of the social stack with the other SAT-practicing, violin-playing, all-state orchestra-attending nerds.

So now, music wasn’t being written just for fun or cerebral stimulation, but for physical pleasure and material comforts. I wanted to be on the top of the Beatport chart, the face on DJ Magazine, and the album cover on everyone’s gym playlists. I wanted to be the viral must-have wedding song that people danced to on YouTube’s trending page.

I wanted this so bad that I even devoted an entire year of my life to writing a song / video pair every day in the hopes that I would have at least one video in 365 go viral and propel me into the music industry stratosphere. I figured that’s how it was done. All of my industry idols had been discovered that way. They produced in their respective bedrooms until one of their tracks took off, and the rest was automatic.

I bought into the idea that if I grinded my musical skills on the internet and in real life (à la Casey Neistat, Gary Vee) I could achieve something like the success I had dreamed of. If I did all the things that the grind kings did, I would be that successful guy. I was the poster child straight-edge, coffee drinking, daily running, wannabe internet celebrity. I styled my hair like the popular kids, I made the popular sounds, I sacrificed my integrity to anyone willing to click play.

(I also wanted to be recognized and respected for my use of music theory in my EDM songs, but I will write an entire other post on the futility I experienced with that at a later date.)

This was an easy trap to fall into for me because of my background in classical music circles. Teachers hammered into my head for literal years that grinding, i.e. practicing, makes perfect. If you can’t play the riff, you haven’t practiced hard enough. If your videos don’t perform well, it’s because you didn’t make them good enough. I was never good enough to hit the numbers that I wanted to hit, and it was entirely my fault. I just hadn’t practiced hard enough.

This was neither sustainable nor healthy. This was an obsession. I needed to prove myself to others. I needed to prove to everyone that I was a good musician. I needed to prove that leaving my friends and family back in my hometown at 15 for a boarding school that specialized in music was worth it. I needed to prove that my music composition degree was worth it. I needed to feel worth it.

I NEEDED VALIDATION FOR THE THOUSANDS OF HOURS I HAD PUT INTO LEARNING EVERYTHING ABOUT MUSIC PERFORMANCE, COMPOSITION, AND ABLETON.

UNFORTUNATELY, my favorite form of validation came from tearing down the work of other, more popular artists. Especially those artists that I deemed “unworthy” of the audiences they amassed because their route to stardom wasn’t the same virtuous music making path I romanticized and wanted for myself. I would use words like “cookie cutter EDM” to describe these nobodies, and worse 4-letter words to describe their braindead fans when the camera was off.

After all, they hadn’t practiced upright bass for 6 hours a day while their friends partied and had a social life. They hadn’t sacrificed vacations and holidays to the music stand gods. They hadn’t taken graduate level classes on 16th-century counterpoint and post-tonal theory. They didn’t write their own musical notes. They didn’t even know how to play the piano. They used MIDI packs, or worse they used unaltered loops and samples. EVERYONE KNOWS THAT IS CHEATING!

When I, as someone who had put such extraordinary efforts into learning the craft of writing music, saw someone else who had put in seemingly less front-end work reap the rewards that I believed I was entitled to, the white hot rage would bubble up to the surface. I was very mean on my platforms of influence toward people with even a little more clout than me because I felt like they didn’t deserve the attention that I was clearly entitled to. What a shameful perspective! I wish I could go back in time and prevent myself from ever falling into this trap. My newfound perspective of “rising tides raise all ships” has been a windfall for my mental health, and has enabled me to enjoy music in a fresh way. It is my hope and prayer that you find this perspective, too.

I feel like my words and actions warrant an apology to the music industry and EDM culture, writ large. I did a disservice to people learning to write and those on the “come-up” who viewed and ingested my arrogant brand of gatekeeping, and I am deeply sorry for it. I can see some of the echoes of this attitude in the cancel culture EDM twitter arguments surrounding NotLö and, while I don’t owe a direct amends to any artist in particular (maybe Marshmello), I absolutely realize that I’ve participated in this type of public shaming before. And at the very least I absolutely threw gas on the fire at points in my career. I’m sorry for that. I wish I hadn’t been as toxic in the past. I’m a hypocrite if I say that I simply “don’t understand the hate” she’s getting without also acknowledging that a younger version of me would have totally bashed her. I’d be an even bigger asshole if I didn’t readily admit that I’ve definitely been on the side of:

LET US BASH ANYONE (ESPECIALLY ARTISTS WITH MORE INTERNET NUMBERS) FOR USING SAMPLES BECAUSE THAT SHIT IS “CHEATING”!

I love Splice.

Splice began slinging samples back in 2015 – and I was one of the first people to jump on it as a net-negative for the music industry. I thought this type of site / availability was going to create a lazy attitude toward making highly edited, well crafted EDM. Fast-forward to my lucky ass picking up some cool contracts making videos for better producers (The Art of Mr. Bill Season 4 – 2019) and seeing how their workflow incorporates sampling, resampling, and using source materials from Splice in order to generate their rump shaking music and SUDDENLY it’s a good idea for me to try it out, too!

Funny how that works, right? Before seeing someone I respect using samples in a way that I tore down as “cheating” – the idea was proper taboo. It wasn’t until I saw the benefits of someone like Mr. Bill using Splice samples as source material in his thoroughly well-crafted music that I was able to stomach the idea of trying it for myself.

I maintain to this day that beginning to use more samples and loops (because of how accessible it was made via Splice) has been the single greatest source of improvement for my music, and I can argue that it has improved everyone else’s music, too. Samples have been around as long as DAWs have, but not in the highly accessible formats of today, like Splice. Samples used to be available to producers via distributed sample packs as zip files, downloads from sketchy torrent sites, CDs, and floppy disks (even hardware expansion boards, back in the Roland JV days), and have been available for producers to mangle and mix since the early days of Stevie Wonder’s commercial success.

For those who are unfamiliar: Splice and websites like Ghost Syndicate (where NotLö is accused of getting her samples / kits) are libraries that sell royalty-free sounds, musical loops, midi clips, and construction kits (whole songs that are dissected into their track-by-track components for the purpose of learning a style). When the purchase is made, that sample is licensed to the downloader to use in any way they see fit. Usually there aren’t a whole lot of do’s and don’ts in terms of how they’re used, however it’s generally frowned upon to leave these samples and loops totally unaltered in a song, as it can be easy to recognize famous samples after a song’s release.

In late 2019 I was approached by Billegal Sounds to help manage their sample pack distribution on Splice.  So, I am intimately familiar with how this industry works, its legal language, and how it makes money, in addition to the fact that before my unceremonious exit from YouTube, I had made some money selling sample packs and “construction kits” based on more successful artists’ songs on my Patreon page.

I would like to make another post about how Patreon became my least favorite part of that old life, and I’m leaving this here as a reminder to myself.

All this to say:

I DEFINITELY UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE ARE MAD AT NOTLO.

The Internet is Good at Uniting People.

I see the hate mob descending on her and the solid block of producers defending her, and my heart breaks for how unfair both sides of this argument must feel.  The artists whose music isn’t being played on festival stages are decrying her as a charlatan, a CHEATER, a HACK! While, in her mind she’s probably playing by an extremely efficient playbook where making a few changes to a construction kit technically yields a quick and easy success! In my mind neither side is technically wrong, but the way it’s playing out is ensuring maximum bloodshed and spectacle and that’s disappointing.

In order to better understand both sides of this argument, let’s take a step back and analyze a few truths and nuances about the modern bass music industry that have led us to this funny gray space.

Some producers who have been in the bass music scene for a while see her faux pas as a valid (albeit low-effort) strategy of quick content generation. I Will State For The Record, That I Fall Into This Category If I’m Forced To Pick A Side. 

Dubstep’s current iteration is very easy to replicate and the market is extremely saturated. There are going to be songs that inevitably sound the same or similar regardless of the methods people are employing to arrive at their final musical products. There have been multiple court cases and instances of this happening in the past. This is not a new problem!

Fame and notoriety in the bass music scene is predicated on being able to produce reliable quick content that sounds good on massive speaker systems. Making 2-4 minutes of riddim every 1-2 months is a requirement for algorithmic success on platforms like Spotify and SoundCloud whose metrics the bass music scene employ as markers and milestones of achievement and which determine artists’ placement on festival lineups, DJ nights, and rankings. So, if someone finds a quick way to generate content that garners clicks and views on these platforms, they are rewarded with material success and notoriety. This is how it works. This is not new. However, most of the producers who can generate content like this put a slightly greater modicum of effort into making their next track sound slightly different than the samples and loops they used to generate their previous track. OR, they treat the loops and construction kits they used to create their work to a degree where they are less recognizable from the original content. There is absolutely nothing illegal or shady with this approach, and people who pretend like their favorite producers don’t use this technique at least a little bit are kidding themselves.

If we’re being fair, the only thing NotLö did incorrectly was break the convention of changing the source material to sound less like its original version. It is not hard to make a new version of a song with a few plugins and about an hour of time if you’re good with a keyboard and mouse. So, we can criticize at a distance and say that her approach is lazy; but we cannot fault her for the process that drove the action. There is a demand for a type of music, and finding an easy way to supply that demand will result in success for similar types. This is the driving force behind the entertainment industry at large, and it will not change because you don’t like it. This rule is the same for dubstep as it is for jazz, classical, and pop – and has driven music creation since the beginnings of recorded history. Jacob Collier copied Miles Davis who copied Stravinsky who copied Mendelsohn and Beethoven who copied Mozart who copied Handel who copied Bach, and the list continues ad nauseum.

AT WORST SHE GOT CAUGHT NEARLY RIPPING A CONSTRUCTION KIT, AND AT BEST SHE’S LAZY.

So if this supply and demand rule applies to all music, even cerebral music like jazz, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the fans of NotLö’s music, the concert goers at this type of show, and the people who have added this music to their Spotify playlists probably do not care how it was created. The music is enjoyed regardless of how it was created. Is this not the point of music? To be enjoyed? Does the difficulty and effort required to produce a song make that song more or less enjoyable when it’s being blasted at movie theatre sound testing levels into the unsuspecting ears of a thousand wooks at a dubstep night? Again, if you think that every song you enjoy listening to required hundreds of hours of effort to produce, you are kidding yourself.

The only people who are having the wool pulled over their eyes are those who are still making the argument that putting more effort into an artistic product makes it better and, therefore, producers of easily replicable music like riddim and dubstep don’t have a foothold for their vitriol and anger when someone finds an efficient macro for production of music whose sole purpose is to entertain drug-riddled brains in the basement of the local music hall. What a silly argument!

HOWEVER, after typing those words into existence I can begin to feel the tines of the pitchfork raised to my throat by the offended reader.

DO NOT MISTAKE ME, I can totally relate to the pitchfork wielding hate mob. During the height of my influencer career I found a group of YouTube viewers and likeminded content creators who were willing to swallow my brand of music industry meritocracy kool-aid. We rallied against the cookie cutter f*** boys who were populating festival posters we deserved slots on. We created 10-part series on how to use music theory in our respective music programs. We thought we were doing it right, and that our hard work and dedication would be rewarded with material success and praise from our various EDM idols.

We were baffled by how someone whose music was as simplistic as Marshmello’s could get millions of clicks on all platforms, while our 23 minute minimal-techno BANGERS (not actually bangers) received piddly squat for plays! Didn’t they hear the homage to Philip Glass in every phrase? Don’t they hear the dedication and practice?

In my case, I kept going until the grindset wouldn’t grease my gears anymore.

There was a confluence of a few things which led to my decision to step away for a few years. I had a kid, I began to realize how toxic my relationship was with YouTube, and I was beginning to look elsewhere for a career. I was beginning to realize that my grind had plateaued, and that music wouldn’t pay out like I wanted, in the way I wanted it to. I pretended I was “ok” with it, but behind my eyes there was a demon who burned like hellfire, wanted to drink about it, and had enough pent up resentments to burn down a major city. This attitude of resentment, hate, and anger burned within me and led me down a path of self destruction and ruination that almost cost me my life, my family, my career, and everything that I held dear to my once-sober heart.

I got piss drunk on a nightly basis and tore down artists on social media, I resented anyone with more success than me, I wanted to make sure everyone knew about any perceived injury I felt toward the music industry as a whole. I made fun of people with crappy studios (at this point I’d really gotten into acoustics and studio equipment), I made fun of women who clearly only got their fame from shaking their asses, and I pointed the finger at cookie cutter artists like Marshmello for watering down my once – sacred art of music comp.

Now, I’m 7 months sober, and feel like I’ve come back haunted by the ghost of my self-righteousness. I feel like I’m outside of my previous YouTube / Creator sphere of influence now, but I have no doubt that my videos, attitude, and lack of compassion for the experiences of others have led to some of this mean cancel culture I am witnessing and myself confused by.

Ok, What Now?

I want to extend one final apology to those who feel villainized by the hate mob of self righteous producers (as I used to be) telling them that they’re the literal devil for using unaltered samples.  You’re doing nothing wrong. You’re using bricks (samples) to build a house (song). You’re not a brick maker, you’re a home builder. I’m fine with it, and your audience is clearly fine with it. If you want less smoke from others, make sure that you’re altering and playing with the samples, loops, and construction kits more so that they’re not as close to their original source materials as this example. Simple.

I want to extend a hug to the producers who are holding on to their pitchforks for dear life in this moment. I understand your frustrations. You feel unheard, victimized, and exhausted by an industry that clearly values quantity over quality. You’re not wrong, but the way you’re taking action will feel terrible in hindsight. And, at worst that hate might lead you down a path of self destruction – as it did to me.

I want to extend a warning to all producers to be more patient with one another and to deliver grace in exchange for hate. Do we lose our minds when someone alters a recipe for mac and cheese? No, certainly not, rather we rejoice that we get to have mac and cheese! Do we slam builders for using blueprints for constructing the same (albeit slightly different) deck on house after house? No, certainly not, rather we enjoy cocktails, cookouts, and fellowship on those decks! Why then, can we not treat dubstep the same way? If we don’t practice a culture of tolerance in our music making methods we’re going to slide down the slippery slope of reductionist thoughts that will ultimately restrict our “allowable” creative output, and I don’t think anyone wants that.

I wish I could take my big lanky arms and smooth this whole thing out. I wish arguments like this weren’t so bloody. I wish the system wasn’t so damn rigged in favor of “what sells” and internet points. It’s not going to get better any time soon, and I believe that the worst thing we can do as artists is shame other artists. After all, I think we’re (most of us) in this for how much fun it is when we all listen to the same song, at the same time, in the same space and sway in motion with one another, harmoniously.

Love,

Gardner