Month: August 2022

DAY 9 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Featured

One day away from day 10, nice! In a way I’d say it feels a bit therapeutic even, writing these thousand words daily, I really think more people ought to try it, at least once in a while if daily’s too much. To be honest I think daily might even be too much for me, but I love the challenge and I’m glad to be taking it on, since I feel like there’s too much shit on my mind, feel like I need to declutter my mental space. It’s nice living life as an observer, and writing down my thoughts and ideas helps me keep organized and on track about what I’m doing. If you’re reading I also appreciate you, it definitely adds another dimension to my mission, it feels like I’ll grow my audience depending on how real I can keep it, how much raw reality I can express in my words, how much of my message I’m truly able to convey. Writing is simple, yet it’s a skill one can always improve on, there are no limits to imagination and creativity, to the combinations of words one can form, and the meanings different people derive from those groups of words, which we might call phrases or sentences. Maybe I can inspire someone to write what’s on their mind as well, and whatever they write could inspire someone else, sparking a chain reaction of inspiration. It’s the invisible things life these which inspire me to write, things I might never notice. So many things have inspired me, things I’ve read I mean, without the author knowing I’ve been inspired. We can’t know whether everything we write is correct in every sense, but if our heart is in the right place then we should have nothing to worry about. Expressing our honest opinions on certain topics can maybe open up the door for much-needed conversation about it, sometimes problems can’t be solved just because there’s simply no dialogue to come to an agreement, so hatred and violence continue to grow. Communication is the key to moving forwards as human beings. Assuming we understand when we really know nothing about something is bound to lead to problems if we ever interact with others who truly do understand. This is the reason why nowadays I spend most of my time watching tutorials, learning the ins and outs of the craft I’ve decided to pursue, now that I finally decided that’s what I want to do for sure. I’ve realized that there’s nothing quite like being prepared, and knowing even more than the necessary just for doing what needs to be done. Things that stand out have to be done with passion, yes, but they also need to be done in the right way, and a lot of times being too passionate at the beginning might result in us starting to soon, and starting off wrong. There’s no such thing as starting too soon, as long as we are prepared, but if we started off wrong then maybe we may as well not have started off at all! So the best scenario is to start off early but to be prepared, and if you didn’t start off as early as you wish you had, don’t get desperate – take the time to learn properly and then get started, now that you have a clear vision of what it is you intend to do, which is what you lacked back then, and the reason why you never got around to doing it earlier. Leaning is the key to life, and to every aspect of it. Hands-on learning is extremely effective, but usually this goes along with learning from someone else, someone who is already very skilled at whatever we are learning, and who is willing to pass that knowledge on to us. We learn by receiving ideas from others, who communicate these ideas from us. Every word I’m using in this post is an idea in itself, and when paired with the words around it, can convey a very different idea than it would on its own. That’s not always the case, but it’s a possibility. Over time, figures of speech become accepted as things everyone says and understands, and as our ideas shape our language over time, so does our language eventually shape our ideas. It’s all a cycle; art – or literature – imitates life, and life imitates art, one reflects the other, back and forth, back and forth. There’s not even a need to specify, to differentiate between art and literature, since great literature could possibly be the highest form of art, effectively transmitting powerful ideas to another, or transmitting powerful emotions through the stories of the character. One Piece is a show that does this in an amazing fashion. I’m not really a huge anime fan, since most animes just don’t have what One Piece has, but One Piece has been my favorite show since I was a little kid in the third grade, I’d wake up at 3:30 am to watch it when it came on at 4am on 4Kids, Sanji’s cigarette was replaced by a lollipop. The point is, I got up super early to watch it because I was intrigued by the story and the characters, by their emotions and the dilemmas they faced. They were emotional and complex yet realistic, or at least relatable. I’d recommend this show to anyone, I’ve even got my mom into it! If I ever complete a novel or any work of fiction, something which I’m actually already working on by the way, that’s what I aspire for, for it to be as moving as One Piece, for it to evoke feelings in the viewer in that exact way. That’s ultimately what I hope to do with the lyrics for my songs as well, I despise mainstream rap because the lyrics are fake and uninspiring, promoting materialism and stupidity. The type of hip-hop that moves me is songs like 2Pac’s “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” a story about a young girl who dies to soon after becoming trapped in the lifestyle of a sex worker, or Flipsyde’s emotional “Happy Birthday,” a track he raps about a child who was aborted because they were not ready to be a family, and the emotions that go along with such a situation. We need more inspiration, people are drowning in worthless pleasure, numbing themselves from an inner feeling that something is wrong, because there’ simply no inspiration. Speak up if you think you have something to say, you never know who you might inspire, and just what might come of it.

much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 8 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Featured

Time flies, and I’m often torn apart by indecision, since everything is a possibility, yet there’s not enough time for everything to be done correctly, or even at all. A person might struggle along one specific path throughout an entire lifetime, but does he or she finally know whether they’ve succeeded, once the moment of death arrives? Can we ever know for certain that we have lived in the right way? If there is really a right way to live, then it’s terrifying to think that we might convince ourselves into living a certain lifestyle, only to find out once it’s too late that that wasn’t really what we should have done with our lives. Would this regret even be valid though? It’s easy to wish we had done something different, once time has passed and we didn’t do it. Another story is whether we would really do it if given the chance, if we could somehow magically go back to that moment. The past is the past, and we didn’t know back then what we know now, so perhaps we would have done the exact same thing we already did, if we were ever given the chance to go back and relive, or redo, certain moments of our lives. It’s crazy to think that we might never really know whether we’re living correctly or not, we just have to trust our decisions and stick with them. There’s no trial period for the consequences of our actions and beliefs, or our lack of actions or beliefs. Certain things need to be done for other things to happen, certain sacrifices need to be made for certain doors to open. Certain beliefs lead us to act in certain ways, or to refrain from behaving in certain ways, but how can we be sure that our beliefs are the right ones when almost absolutely everyone seems to be one hundred percent positive of their own beliefs? If our beliefs are wrong then doesn’t that mean that all of our actions will be wrong from the very start, that all our dreams are doomed to failure? The scariest thing is that, to succeed at most endeavors we have to spend years and years perfecting our skills, learning, practicing, networking, diving deeper into whatever we are pursuing, whether we’re talking about personal or business endeavors. Who’s to say that, after so many years of working hard at something, we won’t be unfulfilled and left wishing we would have done something different? Maybe we’ll only realize that because of the life experience we’ve gained from whatever it is we ventured into, which we are now thinking was a mistake. But was it really a mistake? How could you have learned this lesson if you hadn’t lived your life in the specific way you have up until now? But then again, what’s the point of this lesson now when it would have helped me out much more so many years ago, when I actually had the time and energy to invest into whatever it is that I now consider what should have been my actual pursuit? Mind games, leading to regret and dissatisfaction. Buddhism would emphasize the need to live in the present, to minimize attachment to what would have or could have been, and to just be happy in the moment, to be present and not to wish for anything to have been different. Sure, this could definitely be the healthiest and most practical approach to life, maybe even the correct approach to life (again, could be, but not sure, just like any other approach to life), but that doesn’t really mean that it isn’t valid to say that maybe we would have been more successful or happier if we had done something else, if we had turned our lives into something different. The point though, as I see it, is that whatever we have gone through was our own experience, it is specifically ours so that we may grow from it by relating to it in our own specific ways, dependent on everything else we’ve experience during our lives. Maybe everything really is meant to be in such a way, and then again, maybe nothing is meant to be, which would mean that all of our experiences, all of our pain and our struggles, our joy, the love we feel our friends and family, would all be random and trivial in the grand scheme of things. It’s true that I’m not a hundred percent sure about anything at the end of the day, if I can be completely honest, but I sincerely doubt that idea, that everything we experience is trivial and that there is no deeper meaning to any of it. As we learn if we study Hermeticism, “As above, so below; as within, so without.” Everything goes way deeper than we could ever know, all of our decisions and experiences, all of our thoughts, our feelings and emotions all stem from farther away, from deeper than we could ever imagine. Well, again, that’s just kind of what I feel to be the truth, no guarantees! I know that someone has the best chance of succeeding if they focus all of their time and energy, or at least as much of them as possible, into one thing and one thing only. Unfortunately I’ve never been able to settle for one thing. I love making music because so much music inspires me, and I love writing because so many great books have inspired me as well. I love rapping because that’s what I started with, that’s what I’m best at when it comes to music, but I hate so much of what makes up hip-hop culture these days. It’s never been the healthiest culture, understandably, but I think any fan of hip-hop knows what I’m talking about when I say that things are much worse now, and it’s gone downhill in a really sad way. Another path for me could be beats, since I love producing beats as well, and I’m getting into it just now like never before, taking my beat game up to the next level, so we’ll see where this takes me with time, I pray to God I make the right decisions, and I have to work at keeping my mind clear and free from stress and distractions.

much love

~ rebel eye

Featured

DAY 7 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

We can get so busy at times that we forget to make time for those we love. Life sometimes demands so much from us, and it seems impossible to win if we don’t spend every waking moment planning out our next move. We think we’re doing our duty since it feels like we simply must provide for our families at all costs, we must protect them. We can get so caught up in creating the life we dream of, that we forget to live life in the present, to appreciate those who are unconditionally there for us. By the time we turn that dream we’re chasing into a reality it might not be exactly what we expected after all, yet they might no longer be there. We change along with life. Change is actually the only constant in life, the most common of things, for good or for bad. We don’t know what’s ahead, so we should always be grateful for the present, we should embrace it and live it to the fullest, just be alive in it. We shouldn’t brush it off as if it didn’t matter, as secondary to our future projects, or even worse, as something from which we wish to escape at the earliest possible chance we may get. We need to embrace the present, and the people who surround us at the moment. Sometimes the people who love us might be the exact people we wish to avoid, and perhaps it’s because we know that they’re willing to call us out on our mistakes while other so-called friends won’t. We might convince ourselves that they’re wrong, that they’re getting too involved in our decisions and that we have everything under control. We might even start to resenting us, but there is no reason to, since friends should always try to build each other up, to help each other grow. Sometimes we can hold grudges and allow resentment to gradually separate us from those who love us, but this will only lead to loneliness and regret in the end. No amount of money or success is worth more than true love, than enjoying life alongside family and friends. I can’t say I’ve never been guilty of this myself, I’ve let the pressure of trying my best to succeed get in the way of me maintaining healthy relationships. Thankfully I still get along with my family, who never gave up on me no matter what kind of crazy shit I was going through, but I can’t say the same for a lot of my so-called friends. A lot of people have walked out of my life for one reason or another, both voluntarily and not. I’ve lost some good friends along the way, a lot just went their own ways and we drifted apart as the years passed, as I travelled through Brazil and Honduras, wanting to fulfill my fantasy of backpacking and seeing the world as a hippie, yet never getting started. Let’s just say things didn’t go exactly how I had planned for them to go, but I’m not complaining and regret nothing in the end. The thing is that I was hoping to make crazy friendships overseas, to immerse myself in different cultures, which are actually my own cultures, since I was born in Honduras and my father’s side of the family is Brazilian, while I failed to realize that I was neglecting a lot of my friendships back in Canada. Some people I purposely wished to cut contact with, a lot of people were only there for the good times, when there was a party going on and lots of booze and bud, but never for anything else. People are complex, and we are all searching for something. I know because I’m complicated as hell, sometimes my ideas might be all over the place, sometimes I might have extreme focus on something that captivates me and catches my interest at the time. Despite the complex nature of human beings, despite the possibility for misunderstanding and issues that may arise from it, it’s still worth it to make connections with others, to keep in touch with old friends just to see how they’re doing, to let our closest friends and family how much we love and appreciate them. You never know when someone might appreciate a conversation, you never know what others might be going through. It’s great to chase our dreams, to work hard, to save money, but we shouldn’t let our relationships suffer in the process. We might become completely oblivious to the basic things the ones we love require from us, we might lose our temper and lash out at them, under pressure by the demands of the grind. What is the point of working hard to provide financial stability to a family, yet provide no emotional stability, to fight and even to hurt one’s partner, to set a harmful example for children, to become bitter from stress and worry? Life is tough, that’s true, yet it is meant to be enjoyed. We shouldn’t spend every moment trying to get ahead, life is not a race after all. Every breath is just as important as the next, they all keep us alive. Every moment is significant, all the moments of our lives add up to create us in our entirety, our ideas and our present thoughts, our preferences and decisions, they all stem from everything we’ve ever been through, and we shouldn’t be ashamed of any time of our lives. I think a lot of us need to take a moment to slow down and appreciate what we have, especially the people we have in our lives, people we might just be taking for granted, not realizing what an amazing influence they’ve been in our lives. Moving forward I think I’ll try spending more time with my parents, and it would be pretty cool to talk more and even hang out with my brother Uriel, although he lives in the States for now so that’s not something for right now necessarily.

much love

~ rebel eye

Featured

DAY 6: Cutting down on weed after more than a decade (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Day 6, I hope everyone who reads this is having an amazing day! Today is a sober day for me. I’ve been trying to cut down on weed for quite a while now, trying different methods, but haven’t had much success. I’m not blaming cannabis itself in any way, the issue is personal. I’ve been blazing since I was like twelve or thirteen, and even though at the beginning I smoked with my friends and just talked and laughed about random things, as time went on I started feeling less and less interested in hanging out and smoking with friends. I started mostly blazing alone, and eventually decided it was something I enjoyed enough to indulge in every day. Music was better, and since I always loved listening to music this was a big deal for me. I could blaze and listen to some beautiful music, some Bob Marley or Pink Floyd, and just look out at the sunrays shining through the leaves of the trees, and that in itself was just such a beautiful moment. I would walk around the streets and listen to music and just feel alive, as if there was this whole world out there, and I was just an observer, observing and taking it all in from the comfort of my own little world within. The people on the street didn’t know I was high. They didn’t know what music I was listening to, and they didn’t know that the combination of these two things was creating a whole landscape of ideas in my mind. Sometimes these moments would inspire me to write, whether ideas or possible lyrics for future songs, so I always kept a pen and notebook handy as well. I’ve always been super interested in spiritual or mystical experiences, and I believe these experiences were definitely mystical for me, they made me see life in a way I never had before and allowed me to just enjoy the moment. Unfortunately, as many stoners can probably relate, over time the magic faded, and it became just something to do to feel chill, eventually just to feel normal. I knew this wasn’t the right way to consume weed, but honestly I didn’t really mind, because I still enjoyed life a lot more while stoned, and I could still function pretty well, was still making music, still going to school and work and doing everything I was supposed to do. I feel like, in a way, this is where weed can get tricky. For example, an alcoholic or a heroin addict might feel the need to quit more intensely than a stoner, precisely because of the fact that the damage being caused in the alcoholic or the heroin addict’s life is obvious and hard to ignore, often they lose their families, their health, everything they have in life, to satisfy these vices, until maybe one day they feel absolutely compelled to quit. I haven’t ever gotten to that extreme, but at a certain point in my life, when I was feeling really negative and cynical, I was drinking heavily for long periods of time, and it quickly started to spiral out of control. So far I’ve gone this whole year without drinking even a beer, and I intend to finish the year in this way, and might even keep it up after the year is over. Alcohol just makes life a mess, no matter how fun it might be when you’re drunk. Weed, on the other hand, seems harmless, in the sense that we feel as if it doesn’t interfere with our ability to live life, maybe it even enhances life. It also doesn’t make us act in violent ways like alcohol does, and it doesn’t create a physical dependency either. What’s the problem with adding some extra spice to life then? Well, weed can definitely bring some things out which might not be expressed if one just goes through life sober forever, for example sometimes I’m more creative in the moment, it’s easier to focus on something which I really like, like making a beat and just jamming until it’s perfect, I know the effects of weed can be beneficial in many different settings. However, when I’m high I neglect other aspects of things, such as the marketing and promoting aspects of the music business. After all, no matter how much I may hate it, it’s still a business just like everything else in this world is. The boring stuff I never want to do just never gets done when I’m stoned. Why would I want to get stoned and try to reach out and market to people, to plan out marketing strategies and budgets, to look into this and that? I wanna get stoned and make music, or learn more about making even more kinds of music! Or draw or something. When I’m not doing anything creative I can also just get stoned and read some philosophic or spiritual books and my mind just travels to faraway places, my curiosity and imagination make it fun for me to just sit there and think. Without weed that just isn’t the same. What I’ve come to realize is something super basic – just like everything in life, balance is the key. As I mentioned, weed can be beneficial, it can help you bring creative ideas to life, to provide a different perspective on things, to stimulate the imagination, and it’s good for many other things. However, at least for me, it doesn’t make me wanna go out into the world and network, and make things happen. Instead, I tend to enjoy doing things alone when I’m stoned, or just hanging out with my wife at home. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, of course, but it all depends on what you want out of life. Personally, I’ve realized it’s time to step out of the comfortable bubble I’ve been living in for over a decade. I know that if I continue in the same way I’ve been living up until now, my dreams run the risk of never coming to fruition, and that’s too high a price to pay for just getting stoned. Don’t get me wrong though, my intention is not to quit completely, by any means. Weed has become a big part of my life, for better or for worse, and nowadays I mainly just eat edibles rather than smoking. Yeah they get me higher for longer, which I really enjoy, but the main reason I switched to edibles is because of my lung health. I know it’s not cancerous like cigarettes or whatever, but no smoke can be healthy for our lungs at the end of the day. I still smoke a joint occasionally, and I find that’s much more enjoyable than smoking every day, multiple times a day. Anyway, it’s tough for me to write about this, I feel like an addict coming clean to you all about my addiction, and I guess that’s really what this is. Anyway, I hope this can maybe help some of you who might be in the same situation. Analyze your goals, think deeply about what you want out of life, and balance your weed use so that it doesn’t interfere with what you really want to achieve!

Much love

~ rebel eye

DAY 5: Eternal Words (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Featured

Day 5 of writing a thousand words from my mind. I’m glad I’m sticking with this goal so far, it’s only been five days but I’m feeling really motivated to keep this going this time. The second time I attempted to do this daily I got up to Day 81, then when I failed it I basically didn’t post anything else on here for like two years. That was from August 2019 to now. I can say I’m finally getting back into writing, and it feels good. Writing is weird in a way. It’s such a simple thing but it can get really complex. How do we know when it’s good or bad writing that we’re reading? It’s all subjective isn’t it? When is a piece of writing finished? Couldn’t we always find another fancier word to convey our message? Writing a novel is complex, every little word matters, every choice makes a different to the overall story. Writing can be complicated in such a way, or it can be simple. Free writing is basically just thinking, but writing down what we’re thinking, or as much of what we’re thinking as we can before our mind is invaded by the next thought. So what exactly is it about writing thoughts down that makes them special? Wouldn’t the same ideas be just as brilliant if they hadn’t been written down? Ah, but that’s the thing, how would we have ever encountered these ideas in the first place, had they not been written down? Often times I feel really inspired by something I read in a book because it deeply resonates with a thought or emotion of my own, maybe one that I hold deep inside and would struggle to put into words if I tried, so I just don’t try. It’s cool to find that someone else has thought about the same thing as you and agrees with you, even if most of the planet might not necessarily see things in that way. Some of the ideas in my mind can get so complex and confusing, and sometimes it feels like I’ve been going over an idea for quite a while without reaching any conclusion. Suddenly something I read shines a light on that whole subject and shows me that I can look at the situation in a completely different way from anything I’d even considered. Whether it’s reinforcing an idea that I already have, or providing a new perspective for me to consider, it’s crazy to me how powerful written words can be, how the correct combination of words used to transmit an idea from someone’s mind can resonate so much with another person, even thousands of years after the writer has passed away. As Marcus Aurelius stated “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” What we do means everything we do, including whatever we write. It’s insane to think that his famous book Meditations, was never even meant for others to read. It was basically like a journal of sorts for him, he just wanted to write some ideas down, and here we are, reading them and listening to them thousands of years later. What if he had chosen to simply think these thoughts, but didn’t ever think to write them down? All religions have their holy books, which are presumably thousands of years old. What would religion be without those words? Now, I won’t get into a date on whether life would be better or worse without things such as religion, but if there was no religion because there was no writing, then you can be sure that there would be a lot more missing in the world, like music and art, even basic education. What would we be? We would be nothing like what we are today. That’s why, as a writer and a musician, it can be hard for me to write sometimes. For any generic radio rapper the task might be really easy, it’s common knowledge that sex, drugs and violence are mostly what sell. It doesn’t take much effort two write a few half-assed bars about how much money you have and how many women you’re having sex with. Yeah, these rappers are what society would call “successful” and who can argue? They have big mansions and luxury cars, every high school boy wants to be them, to be as successful with women as they are, to have everyone look up to you. Are they properly calculating the cost of that success though? Everything has a price, and everything requires some sacrifice. If you essentially sell your talent and allow the industry to tell you what to make music about, yeah, you will get the financial reward, the peace of mind of not having to worry about money anymore, but what about your impact on the planet and on those who are listening to you? What will come to you as a result of all of this? What are trying to promote with your words, positivity or negativity? Hope, or anger and resentment? Do you want the world of the future to be more focused on humanity, on empathy, on how to move forward and help one another to grow? Or would you rather have the young men of tomorrow measure their success by how many cars they own or how many women they can sleep with? Doesn’t this also imply that women are no more than sexual objects, possessions to be acquired? I don’t think any of this is right, but sadly this is where we’re headed as a society, every day we are falling more in love with materialism, and forgetting how to love and uplift one another. So what can you do? What can I do? Well, some of us are fortunate enough to be able to provide help to others who are not in the best situations. If you have no money though, what’s stopping you from writing? I’m simply writing my thoughts here, just like Marcus Aurelius decided to do when he wrote what would later become Meditations. I don’t know what you’ll take from this post, what anyone who reads it will take from it, but I am sure you will get more out of it than if the ideas were just left to float around in my head. I appreciate anyone who’s reading this, I believe that we were meant to connect in this way. Remember, put your heart and soul into all that you do, and if your intentions are pure, most likely you’ll be influencing the world in a positive way.

Much love

~ rebel eye

Featured

DAY 4: Getting My YouTube channel started (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Day 4, 1000 words once again! Lately I’ve been super busy working on different things, and I also can’t slack off on my daily blog post! The main thing I’ve been focusing on lately though has been my YouTube channels. I have two YouTube channels. One of them is my original one, which has just a little over two thousand subscribers. The other one is brand new, and only has five subscribers. I would have kept working on my main YouTube channel forever if I had the chance, but I lost the option to ever monetize that channel because pretty much all the tracks I posted when I was first starting out were over random beats that I liked, so they’ve all received copyright claims. They can still play but all revenue goes to the beat owner. The project I’m super into now is starting this new YouTube channel which will mainly focus on music tutorials. It’s also the main channel when all my official releases get posted from DistroKid and SoundCloud Repost Network whenever I distribute music through either one of them, so all of my music on there will be original. I intend to upload my beats on this new YouTube channel as well, after having distributed them through streaming and opted them in for YouTube content ID. That way I avoid having any of my beats stolen, which is something I’ve always been somewhat paranoid about, and I can also make money off any tracks that might be recorded over my beats and posted on YouTube, just like there’s copyright claims on my tracks now because of the beats I used. I can also upload the beats on my old YouTube channel which has a bit more subscribers, and since I can’t monetize that channel, I’ll just get the money content ID instead, due to the copyright claims which will be placed on those videos. It’s good that DistroKid and Repost Network both have whitelist functions so that I can add the link to the video from my new channel on there in order to avoid copyright claims from myself, so that I can eventually monetize this new channel, unlike the old one. Over the past month or two I’ve been putting together the basic equipment that I need in order to start making videos for my YouTube channel, now I just need to organize my ideas and make sure everything looks like a professional presentation. One thing I’ve been thinking about is dividing my videos between my two channels. The new channel would be the really professional one, where I’ll post my super polished tutorial videos, and on the other one I can just make videos showing the myself making beats, detailing my process, maybe making beats of different genres within different set time limits. I’m almost at the point of making a final decision on all this, and as a matter of fact I rendered my first video today. It was the second kind of video, I basically strapped my GoPro up to a shelf on the left of me, showing me making a rap beat on my MPC One in front of me. I also recorded the screen of my computer using OBS Streamlabs. I did this because I was using my MPC One in controller mode, so I wanted to showcase how what I was doing on the MPC was reflecting onto the MPC Beats software running as a VST within FL Studio. All of the audio was recorded as professionally as I could, I didn’t use the audio from the GoPro. Instead, the audio from my MPC is being recorded into another instance of FL Studio, where I also have a recording coming in for my voice, which is being recorded on the Rode NT1 microphone into the Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 audio interface. This way I can edit the sound of my voice and of the MPC audio separately, having the GoPro audio completely muted. This allows me to record my voice in great quality with the NT1, and my MPC audio is recorded right in FL Studio through the Focusrite Loopback system, so basically it’s recording whatever audio is coming from my computer. This includes my voice so it’s not really the isolated MPC audio, but I can just add my voice audio on top of that one to make my voice louder, which is usually what is needed. I also add some EQ and compressor to my voice after, just to make the audio as clear as possible. Since I have the MPC audio being recorded in this way it’s much clearer than if I was playing it off my speakers and using the GoPro audio of that. Hopefully whoever watches recognizes the work that was put into my videos because of the quality and wants to subscribe because of it. Overall, I just hope to be successful with this YouTube thing because it’s definitely what I’ve been the most focused on lately, other than just making music and learning about music in general. Every day I’m watching tutorials about everything from MPC and FL Studio, to Ableton, to guitar, to music theory, to midi and all sorts of connections, I feel like there’s no end to it! I don’t mind though, I’m enjoying all the learning to be honest, and it’s cool because it’s something I really see myself getting deeper into, I’ve even been learning about the world of modular synthesis, basically playing with voltage to create synth sounds and all kinds of trippy variations of those sounds. Music is just magical, how sounds can evoke feelings within us, without words, just with melody and rhythm. Even single notes evoke some feeling within us. Music is a universal language, and I guess I’m just trying to get as fluent as I can in it, speaking as honestly as I can. I can’t wait to see where this journey takes me over time, and I pray God will bless my endeavors, with this YouTube thing and beyond. I hope we all succeed, and I hope we all have the courage to start chasing our dreams. I know I’ve waited too long, and I hope it’s not too late. I’ll make sure it’s not too late.

DAY 3 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Featured

Writing 1000 words, day 3. Free flow. It’s late, only an hour and a half left until 12am. Throw on a relaxing 432Hz mix by OneMindUniverse, a mix I’m super familiar with, to help me concentrate on my writing. I’m trying to allow whatever needs to come out of me to flow onto this blog post. I got so many things on my mind at any given time, it can’t be that I have nothing to write. Something that’s weighing heavy on my mind lately is a deep sadness surrounding the violence and injustice, the crazy amounts of cruelty that go on in this world of ours, which is especially targeted towards those who clearly have no way to defend themselves. My wife’s good friend was recently murdered in Honduras, my native country. I just got back here from a long stay there two years ago, as a matter of fact, when my wife and I were married there. The news reports about our friend’s murder state that she was killed by a Canadian who was in Honduras, and who she was working for, providing translation services. The coincidence is trippy because, although I was originally born in Honduras, my parents moved here to Canada when I was ten, so of course I came along. It wasn’t until much later, when I returned to Honduras, that I would meet my amazing wife Maria, who is also from Honduras, and we would fall madly in love! I couldn’t imagine ever hurting her, something happening to her is probably my worst nightmare, so hearing about this similar yet completely different situation completely breaks my heart. What I mean is, a Canadian visitor meeting a girl in Honduras. Of course, maybe the situation was different, maybe they didn’t take time to get to know each other like we did, otherwise maybe she would have noticed some red flags about this guy. There’s no turning back time though. Maria’s friend Rixy was a hardworking woman, and she will leave behind three orphan children. My wife is a very sentimental and emphatic person and she is devastated by these news, and we are planning to help her children out in whatever ways we can moving forward. The strange thing about everything is that, although the initial police and news report mentioned that her body was found at this Canadian visitor’s house and had signs of blows to the body and head, the forensic officer later stated there were no signs of violence present. This is all super fishy, and in a country such as Honduras, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if there was some kind of corruption going on. Foreign money is worth a lot more there, and police and government can easily be bought, it’s just something everyone knows, sort of like a joke. Anyway, I guess one can only leave it all up to God at this point, which I intend to do, and I truly I hope that justice will be served. It’s extremely really sad how little some people value human life. It was crazy seeing videos of loads of people marching through the streets of the small village of Trujillo to protest her death, to demand justice. She will be missed by a lot of people. I wasn’t exactly very close to her, but from the few times we met she always seemed like a great person, super friendly and humble, a hard worker doing her best to move along with her small children, even in a country such as Honduras where resources are severely lacking. On top of everything a woman in a country like that has to worry about, here comes a man who isn’t even from there, and all of a sudden just beats her to death and takes her life away at only thirty years old, leaving her poor children all alone growing up in a third world country where no one gives a crap. Well, in reality no one gives a crap anywhere, but in an underdeveloped country there is truly no help to find anywhere, there’s nowhere to even look. It’s even common knowledge that the police can’t be trusted at all, and the government and politicians are the worst. It’s so sad to me how evil people can be, how little regard for another human’s life some people can have, how some men can beat women up, knowing they’re stronger than them, knowing they’re supposed to protect them in any way they can, not hurt them and abuse them. Some cultures even glorify this kind of behavior, look at people like super loser Andrew Tate for example. Materialistic people who think that money can buy respect. People who know what life is truly about have no respect for these kinds of people, no matter how much money they might have, no matter what kind of fancy lifestyle they may showcase for the world to see. Hopefully when I truly make it with this music, or YouTube or writing or whatever it may be, I’ll finally have the chance to help a lot of people back home who are desperately in need, like the kids who used to come up to me as I walked down the street, asking for a lempira (5 cents of a dollar) or a bit of food. I can’t wait to be able to help Maria’s family as well as my own, the ones who are still back home, so they don’t have to live in such a dangerous place anymore, so they can have more opportunities, since I know them and I know they’re hard working people who excel at whatever they do. One quickly finds there’s no better way to carry oneself back in Honduras, you have to do what you have to do to get by, and crime isn’t a reasonable option because gang life is truly nothing to play with over there, once you’re in there’s no getting out alive. One time my buddy Danny, who’s from the States, and I were almost killed back in Honduras just because of our tattoos, because everything has a meaning over there, and we forgot we weren’t back in the States or Canada. We were kind of forgetful since we had done a bit of smoking and drinking, so we were being loud and stupid. We were saved since some of our tatties were in English, and we were speaking English to them to prove our innocence. What I’m trying to say is it’s a jungle out there fam, and although I love my birthplace to death, I’m grateful to God, and to my parents who brought me here when I was a kid, for the opportunity to be sitting in this room right now, working on my writing and on my music in Surrey, BC, Canada. Yeah, yeah, Surrey gets a bad rep, and there’s definitely safer places in Canada, even in BC, but there’s just no comparison between here and Central America.

Stay tuned for Day 4 of 1000 words from my mind.

Much love fam

~ rebel eye (eli)

REST IN PEACE RIXY

DAY 2: 1000 WORDS (3rd attempt)

Featured

Day 2, 1000 words, let’s go! The main topic I wrote about yesterday was my music and how I’m slowly but surely becoming a much more professional musician, and what I’ve been doing to make that happen. I mentioned a few things such as mastering making beats on the MPC One, apart from FL Studio, which has always been my go-to program for beats, and leaving days off from getting stoned so that I have a much clearer head, which might not always be necessary for coming up with funky rhythms while in the zone, but is definitely needed at this point in order to try to promote my brand effectively. One thing I didn’t mention on my first post though, was that I’ve also started learning to play the guitar. When I was in high school my mom signed my brother and I up for guitar classes at the recreation center since she knew I was into music. I bought an acoustic guitar and we went to a few classes, but it didn’t materialize into anything. I just didn’t have the discipline back in those days, my mind was on a bunch of other crazy shit. I kept the guitar though, it’s just been sitting there in a storage room for all these years, so recently I had the idea of picking it back up and just finally getting down to business and learning to play it. After having watched tutorial after tutorial in order to learn the ins and outs of the MPC, which is basically a DAW inside of a groovebox, and eventually becoming quite comfortable with it, feeling like I’ve mastered it, I’ve become amazed at how much I enjoy learning about music, and how easy it is for me to learn as long as I enjoy what I’m learning. For so long, my idea of myself as a musician was that of a rapper, and a producer on the side, although I’ve always been able to pump out a lot more beats than songs. I’ve made trip-hop beats, techno beats, but never really released them, or even most of my hip-hop beats, since I just always preferred to promote the image of myself as a rapper. I never really look into things like mixing and mastering, or into getting the best quality equipment I could, I just stuck with what I knew, my laptop and USB mic, and FL Studio for beats. As long as I could rap good and it sounds good that’s good enough, right? That’s not necessarily the case. There’s a joy in learning and improving, and even though my music might be already good, there’s no telling how much better, cleaner or fuller it could sound with different effects and sounds, and with more experience with music in general. Music is a never-ending learning journey, just like life is, and I’m really excited to be immersing myself into it fully, like I should have done years ago. These days I no longer care about promoting myself exclusively as a rapper, as a producer, or as any other specific label. I’ve come to realize that I just love music, all kinds of music, and want to create as many different styles of it as I can! I’m a musician, a writer, and an artist, not just a rapper or producer. Recently I’m completed two instrumental albums which are basically ready for release now, just playing with some new mixing and mastering tricks I’ve been learning and they should be ready to go within a month or two. One is a techno/trance album which will be titled “life in color”, and the other is a chill, trip-hop type of album, titled “dawn of a new day.” I’m slowly releasing singles from both of them and they should drop around the same time, within a few months. I’ve also got my own solo rap album on the way, Rebel Spirit, and, having recently released our newest joint mixtape together, The Come Up 10, Kalvonix and I are already hard at work on our next project, The Come Up 11, with no signs of stopping anytime soon. Stress has always been a big part of my life, unfortunately, but it’s great to get back into doing things I love, to discover a newly refreshed love for music in all its forms. These days I usually make a beat or two, maybe one in FL Studio and one in the MPC, or I might even connect the MPC to my PC on controller mode and open up the MPC Beats program inside FL Studio, which allows me to combine sounds from my MPC and my computer to create a complex instrumental. I might be writing some rhymes to some of my beats, or practicing guitar, or watching tutorials on gear I don’t have (yet), preparing for my future in music. With God’s blessings and with all the positive energy I can possibly pour into this endeavor, I hope to go far now that I’m finally taking this seriously. A final message to anyone out there, it’s never too late as long as you’re willing to put in the work and get yourself back on your feet and back on track! Today I was experimenting with different possible setups for filming my YouTube tutorial videos. I need a camera facing me and a camera facing down at the MPC screen, since I’ll start the channel off with MPC tutorials. Unfortunately, the GoPro mount that I bought and just received today wasn’t long enough to film properly above the MPC screen without obstructing the way for me to play the pads, so I thought of using my phone to record the MPC from above, and to use the GoPro with the mount to film myself from the side. All of the audio, both from the MPC and from the Rode NT1 microphone, are going into the Scarlett 4i4 audio interface and being routed into FL Studio, so I only need to figure out the video side of things now and I should be good to go. I’m excited about this new venture, my YouTube channel, since it seems a bit more realistic than blowing up as a musician might be. Not saying I won’t make it in music, but if YouTube is an open door then there’s no point in not taking the risk, and hopefully it drives some viewers to my music as well, whether it’s on Spotify or Bandcamp, or even right on YouTube.

To be continued tomorrow on Day 3 of 1000 Words.

Much love

rebel eye

Featured

DAY 1 (1000 WORDS: 3rd attempt)

1000 Words, Day 1 once again. My last post of the 1000 Words a Day series was Day 81, back in August of 2019, so it’s been three years! Wow, time sure flies by. I hope I can stay on track and keep on writing for a much, much longer consecutive period of time this time around. I also plan to write in a bit of a more stream-of-consciousness fashion, just to get more ideas out of my head and onto the blog. I feel like I have a lot of cool or important thoughts floating around in my mind, some of them for quite a while now, that maybe I just don’t know how to adequately express, so I just kind of avoid writing about them, and I feel that if I don’t stop to think so much anymore about having everything all organized and about the exact structure of a post and about where everything should be written or if it’ll all make sense, that I might be able to let more of these ideas out into the light. I have to keep resisting the temptation to read back on what I’ve written so far, and just keep on writing! Before I get into today’s main topic I just want to quickly apologize to anyone who may have been following this series of mine a few years ago and then I suddenly stopped writing. I know it’s probably not many people if any at all, but I just thought I should mention that just in case. So the main thing I want to let you guys know about today is what I’ve been up to for these past three years, since it all comes down to something I’m currently super excited about and hope to share with the world. I’ve always loved music, I have some music reviews on this blog, and I especially love creating music, since I was about 10 or 11. I started with rapping because I liked the flow and the beats and everything about it, and also because I felt really inspired by some of the lyrics, mainly 2Pac lyrics. I started making beats on FL Studio early on as well, just to have my own beats to go along with my rhymes. I have a bunch of my music out everywhere, but to be honest, I never took it as seriously as I should. I mean, I thought I was taking it seriously, but recently I’ve realized that I wasn’t. I was always partying too much back in the day, and even when I completely stopped partying because I started getting into philosophy and spirituality, I was still not doing all that I could for my music. I’ve sure learned a lot throughout the years because I’ve kept making beats and rapping, but other than making a lot of music, I really should have promoted myself a lot more and got my music out there, plus I’m not making as many songs as I used to back then, at least on the rapping side. I’m still relatively young, but I know I definitely would have had an advantage if I went hard twelve years ago when I first started actually recording music at fifteen. Some of my favorite raps of mine are even from back in those days. Anyway, that’s just to provide some history, not to whine about the past. What I’m excited about now is that I finally decided to change that. Nothing is getting in my way this time, I’m no longer constantly immersed in a weed high, I’m setting goals not to get baked a couple days a week, and I’m not partying or drinking at all, or even hanging out with anyone at all, really, other than my amazing wife. I know it’s not necessarily the healthiest, not to hang out with any friends, but at this point I feel like I really just need to make this happen while I still have a bit of time. For a while I was actively avoiding even promoting myself, because I felt like, and I still feel like, fame is not necessarily the best thing that can happen to someone, especially if you have a lot of personal problems to solve or demons to face. My mind changed simply because I’d rather spend a lifetime doing what I love, which is creating music, writing, sharing ideas, than to be stuck at a 9-to-5 job forever, so I absolutely have to make it happen. On a deeper level though, I’ve been feeling like it’s important to put positive ideas out into the world, that if I have positive things to say I shouldn’t keep quite, I should say what’s on my mind, even if it might interfere with my peaceful happy life. So lately I’ve been writing rhymes, but not quickly like before, I’m trying to write inspirational rhymes, taking my time so that what I write and record is something memorable and motivational, not just another rap about all the trash most modern rappers are always yapping about. I’ve also learned the MPC workflow on my MPC One pretty well so far so now I’m creating my own beats in FL Studio and on the MPC. I put time into learning the basics of studio equipment to make sure I’ve got a clear sound, and I upgraded my gear and I’m finally recording on and audio interface with studio monitors and everything, rather than a laptop and USB mic like back in the day. If you believe in yourself you have to invest in yourself. The main thing I’m excited about though, is that with all this learning I’ve been doing, I’ve come up with the idea of making tutorials to show others how to set their equipment up and even how to make beats also, so I’ve got this whole idea for a YouTube channel unfolding. So yeah, big things are on the way! I’ve also recently started making music with my bro Kalvonix again, now that I’m back in Canada, and we recently released a mixtape together on all streaming platforms, The Come Up 10! It’s a continuation of our old mixtape series The Come Up, which we started about 11 years ago when we first met in high school. I’ll be going into everything in more detail as I keep on writing, and I appreciate anyone reading, I hope you’re as excited as I am! Much love fam.

~ rebel eye