Tag: music

“Rebel Spirit,” My First Album on Streaming Platforms.

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I had been in my birth country of Honduras at the time of my 2 previous solo rap releases, in 2017 for Musical Alchemy and in 2019 for Expanding our Horizons, and during the time I was there I got the chance to work on some music that didn’t really fit the feel of either one of those two tapes. The beats were more intense than chill, the lyrics more controversial. These odd tracks became the base for what would become the album “Rebel Spirit.”  Some of the first tracks I made for this album were “Mass Mental Manipulation” and the first track “Rebel from the Start”, which I produced the beat for, along with the remix of the track “Rebel Spirit” from the Musical Alchemy mixtape. Since I couldn’t acquire the rights for the initial “Rebel Spirit” beat and I really liked my lyrics and flow on there I decided to make my own beat for it so I could fully release it on my first album on streaming platforms. Being in another country really inspired me to make music, both lyrics and beats. It provided me with a different perspective on life, which travelling always does. I had a simpler life in a way, with more time to dedicate to music, and more privacy to record music uninterrupted as well. I had taken my mic and laptop to Honduras, along with the mic stand. In those days it was easier to move my setup anywhere in the world, since I was still recording on a USB mic and laptop, and had no notion of what an audio interface even was. I was also making beats using only a mouse and keyboard on FL Studio. Regardless of all that, I returned to Canada 5 years later, at the start of 2022, with a good amount of work done for the album, then finished up the rest of the tracks and all the editing, mixing, etc. I also re-recorded some of the tracks with my new XLR mic and audio interface. I had been learning a lot about setting up a studio, something which has always been a dream for me but I just never took seriously, and when I got back to Canada I knew it was time to level up, including the way I made my music. Maybe I never took the studio idea too seriously because I never thought I had the money for it, but now I know that setting up a decent home studio is a lot more affordable than I had originally imagined. You always see studios full of equipment, but you don’t realize that one doesn’t need all of that to make music, only some basic things. I also picked up a great 61-key MIDI keyboard which I use both on FL and on my MPC to get melodies down in a much quicker way, which is also a lot more fun and hands-on than clicking on a mouse. In a way, although this is a kind of debut album for me, being the first I’ve released on streaming platforms, it also marks the end of some things. For one thing, this album only has three tracks that I produced, but on future records I plan to focus on all or most of the production myself. I’ve been making beats for a decade, but only recently do I feel more comfortable using my own productions to rap my lyrics over. These past few years have been instrumental, hah, in me getting into the craft of making beats, both sampled and from scratch. I had been making beats only on FL Studio since the beginning, but when I got into the MPC workflow I started to really see the beauty in crafting a beat, like a piece of art much like a full song, and now with a newfound appreciation for music production I can enjoy making beats on any platform, and I’m excited to see how I can craft the sound of my music more deliberately. As previously mentioned, this album is recorded only semi-professionally, with the other half recorded on my old setup, my USB mic which I had been using since I made my first song ever more than a decade ago. Moving forward everything will be recorded the proper way, and I’ve been learning lots about mixing, mastering, production, and just audio in general. None of this is to say that this album is lacking in quality. As I mentioned, some of these tracks were in the works for years, since 2017 when I first got to Honduras, and they’ve undergone many changes to get them to their current state, ready for release. I really put a lot of time and effort into the songs on this album, as well as a lot of thought into the lyrics, so I appreciate any and all of you who are willing to give it a listen, as well as to all of you reading this. This album, true to its name, focuses on various aspects of life from a rebel perspective, from a perspective that I feel is not always noticed, or is actually actively ignored due to a widespread, sometimes unconscious, fear of facing reality, of accepting positive change.

I hope you enjoy it! You can listen to the album on Spotify, and if you’d like to support me you can purchase the album on Bandcamp. Much love fam.

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DAY 33 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Although I’m not even close to passing my previous record of 81 days straight of writing a thousand words for my blog, I’m actually thinking of cutting it down to 500 words a day. Now, you might be thinking that I’m starting to get lazy or running out of things to write about, but that’s not it. Today I was listening to some of my old music from back in 2012, and I realized that I really need to keep writing raps, constantly, if I want to keep improving and if I don’t want to lose the skill. I finally learned proper recording techniques, I finally picked up an audio interface this year and an XLR mic and I barely record any music at all, since I barely write any new music these days. I guess I just feel like whatever I write has to be really inspirational and poetic, which is kind of holding me back, whereas back in the day I feel like I could write songs in a flash. I’d like to say that it was because I didn’t focus so much on trying to say the right things, but a lot of the lyrics from my old songs are actually pretty good, so maybe it just might be that I’m falling off after not writing consistently for so long. I have a bunch of old rhyme books, some of those lyrics are recorded already and some never got recorded, others will never be recorded. Although I have all these old rhyme books though, I feel like I need to write something new and fresh, and this is what I’m thinking of doing: Instead of writing 1000 daily words for my blog, I’m gonna write 500 words, and I’ll write a full 16-bar verse every day, that way I’ll never run out of music to record and I’ll keep improving my lyric writing skills, not to mention my rapping itself since I’ll be practicing a lot more now that I’ll have lyrics to work with. This will probably also keep me from overthinking my writing, as I’ve been doing lately, since I’ll have to write a daily verse. I think it should be a cool exercise. I’d love to do that but there’s just no time, between making and trying to sell beats, between trying to learn guitar daily, to exercise for a half an hour, as well as writing on my blog and hanging out with my wife, not to mention working, there’s just no time to do both. I could complain for hours about how there’s not enough time to do what we really want to do in our current fast-paced way of life, but I know you don’t wanna hear that and I’ll probably just come across as whiny, so instead I’m just gonna cut the complaining right from the start and split my time across everything I love, strategically. So that’s the basic explanation for why I’m planning to start writing 500 words a day instead of a thousand. Today I’m writing a thousand words though, since I didn’t write a verse today, I barely just thought of the idea. While I’m writing about writing I thought I’d mention something else I’m really excited about, which is the fact that my wife Maria and I have been working on a novel together for about two or three years now. It’s about a couple who meets and falls in love and have some crazy adventures together. Basically the idea came up one day when we were out at the park on a sunny day smoking a joint and she started telling me the idea for the story, about a couple who meets and falls in love and travels the world, kind of based on us and what we would like out of life. I said that sounded cool, and we started chatting about ideas of things they could do on their adventures. I’ve always been inspired by novels that convey philosophical messages to the reader, or that simply provoke philosophical though through the scenarios in the story. Some books like this that have inspired me greatly are Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and “Island.” I thought Maria wouldn’t mind if we threw some philosophical subjects into the mix, along with trippy things like psychedelic-like mind altering substances, maybe meeting some strange monks up on the mountains, and even time travel. Since we had our iPad with us we just started recording, and since then every once in a while whenever we went to the park to blaze we would always record our ideas for the novel, each time making it more intricate, creating connections between the characters and scenarios. Once we had a lot of recordings, about a hundred of them, I started transcribing them into a Word document. Not only transcribing but translating as well, since our conversations were half in English, half in Spanish. The novel touches upon a lot of important issues that I feel are relevant to life in our day and age, and I’m really excited to eventually publish it. Recently I finished transcribing all of the recorded voice notes into the Word document, so the next step is to actually write the conversations, write the detailed descriptions of the places and scenarios that will take place. Right now we basically just have the words we spoke for the voice notes, now it’s time for me to take all of that and write the story out of it, so we’re nowhere near done with it, but it’s definitely in the works. I think I’m close to today’s thousand words so I’ll just wish all of you amazing people out there a great night, I appreciate every single person reading this, since that’s basically my whole point in writing this, getting my ideas out into the world and to other people so they won’t make my mind eventually explode! Blessings to you and yours. Until tomorrow and keep being awesome and pursuing your dreams!

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 31 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

I really wish I had done my writing earlier today, I gotta stop leaving it for the night. I’ve been thinking about that, just because I don’t want to rush my writing, but now I’ve got another great reason to actually write earlier. I sit here with a massive, pounding headache, wishing I could just go to sleep and wake up tomorrow feeling normal again. It just seems like I always end up writing during the last two hours of the day because work and other things take up the rest of the day. Sometimes I try to write an idea down while I’m working, in between calls, but the downtime is usually not too long, so a lot of the time I don’t even bother because I don’t want a cool idea to be interrupted by a phone call where I have to focus on the troubleshooting I’m doing. Yesterday we ended up sleeping at 2am, and this morning woke up at 6 to go walk my wife to the bus stop for work. She works from home also but does have to go work at the office a few days a week. We really need to work on our sleeping schedule, just for our overall health. Time management has always been a big issue for me, it always feels like there’s not enough time. This is probably the biggest reason why I hate the 9 to 5 life, but I get it, I have to learn how to work my own time out, this is just the fast-paced world we live in. I should have slept for a few more hours when I got back from walking Maria to the bus stop, since I didn’t have to work until 10, but I just felt like actually doing stuff I enjoy for a few hours, rather than going to sleep only to wake up and work, so I sat at my desk to work on some music, and made a pretty cool beat. I should mention I also had half of an edible, so about 10mg. The effect was not too intense, even though I just finished my 3 sober days for the week. Before I started cutting down I would eat even up to 150mg at a time to get a decent high, so 10mg shouldn’t mess me up too bad, and it didn’t. I mention this because I don’t know if it might have anything to do with this horrible headache. I never used to get headaches from edibles before, and I’ve been a stoner for years. I suspect I’m suffering from a combination of the after effects of the high, mixed with my lack of sleep last night, and the fact that I didn’t eat anything until about 2pm, on my break from work. In the morning I was just way into the beat I was making, so I didn’t wanna stop to go make food, and when I started working i felt ok so I didn’t bother to eat. I finally made some spicy noodles on my break, and they were pretty good. By the end of my shift at 5 though I was starting to feel the headache coming on. Good thing it didn’t hit hard while I was still taking calls, because that would’ve been pure hell. Maria got back home and unfortunately I couldn’t really chill with her like I wanted to. I told her about my headache and we decided to try and sleep a bit. I thought if I just slept I would wake up feeling much better, but that wasn’t the case. I woke up with my head pounding just the same. I did the Win Hof breathing method twice, once before sleeping and again when I woke up. It helped a bit but not enough, this fucking headache wouldn’t go away! I heated up some good and woke Maria up to eat, but the even with nutrition it didn’t go away. I’ve given up at this point, I know it won’t go away until I sleep the whole night and wake up tomorrow. It sucks because I can’t joke around with Maria, i feel irritable as hell, and also I have to write these words and post my daily beat up on Beatstars. Anyway, now that I’m halfway through this post I realize it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Writing is actually helping quite a bit to distract me from my headache. Posting my beat up, on the other hand, I don’t think will be so great. I have to put my headphones on, I have to master the beat, I have to put my producer tag on it, then post it up on Beatstars and YouTube as well. I’ll try to do it as quick as possible, since I really don’t feel like hearing any music right now to be honest. Well, at least my headache has provided me with some writing material of the day. Kind of random, but it is what it is, every day can’t be amazing. I’m a bit scared to eat edibles now, it feels more intense now that it’s not an everyday thing, even with such a small dose, and I can’t help but feel like I could have avoided a lot of pain today if I would have stayed sober like the past few days. It could also be that the weed is making me more sensitive to the consequences of not taking care of myself, like not sleeping well and not eating anything from. 6am until 2pm. If you get anything out of this post it might just be a reminder to watch your habits and health, to make sure you’re taking care of yourself and sleeping and eating right. I also didn’t drink much water during the first half of the day, so there’s that also, i just thought of that. I guess the next goals I’ll be setting will have to do with sleeping a certain amount of hours a night, and maybe drinking a set amount of glasses of water per day. Much love to you all, stay healthy and hydrated, and remember to get enough rest.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 27 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Not sure what to write about tonight, really. I guess I’ll just write about everything going on right now. I’m uploading daily beats, I’m writing my daily words, I’m trying to exercise every second day, whether jogging or doing yoga. It feels weird doing everything sober though, since I’m so used to being stoned all the time. I’ve been feeling weird sensations in my chest when I move, as well as a general shortness of breath, nothing extreme but just annoying. At first it was making me go crazy with anxiety, but after researching for a bit I’ve become convinced that it has to do with me cutting down on weed since I see a lot of posts from ex-smokers of many years who share similar stories. It makes sense also because the discomfort started pretty much a few weeks after I first started my goal of cutting down on bud. I’ve been smoking weed since I was basically twelve, and I’m 27 now, so I have a lot of readjusting to do. I’ve learned some new things from my research, such as the fact that THC is a bronchodilator, meaning that it expands the airways in the lungs or something like that (I’m not the best at explaining medical terms) so quitting quickly can have the opposite effect on the lungs and cause bronchospasms. I haven’t smoked weed in about a month now, but my idea wasn’t to completely quit, just to switch to edibles and to cut down on my consumption in general. I guess what I’m experiencing is a combination of my lungs starting to heal from all the constant smoking over the years, as well as me feeling the effect of no longer having the bronchodilator effect of THC so often. It should pass with time from what I’ve read, but I’m definitely never going back to smoking the same way as I did before. In fact, I’ll only smoke once a month or something, if even that, and just eat way smaller doses of edibles, maybe just 2 days a week. It’s crazy, I never even knew this kind of thing could happen from quitting weed, and although I’m not blaming weed in any way, it just goes to show how nothing is meant to be abused, and everything has to be done or used in moderation. I was definitely abusing weed for so many years, it was good for everything and wasn’t harmful like other drugs. It made everything way more interesting and chill, so I just rolled with it. Ever since I’ve gotten really into spirituality, years ago, I’ve been planning on cutting down just because I realize that we have all we need within us, and that attachments are what cause suffering in life. A classic example is how a drug addict feels shitty I’d they can’t have their drug of choice, which in my case is weed. I now have to readjust to real life, and get back out into the world, leaving my peaceful inner world on the side for some time. This is actually why I finally made the decision to cut down, because I was planning to go hard with my music and to finally get serious about it make the dream happen. I for sure didn’t expect to have this kind of reaction though. Anyway, I’m not trying to complain, I just think that too many people, assuming that weed is all good and can cause no issues because it’s natural and relatively safe for recreational use, don’t bother to do any research, and end up abusing it in order to mask their real feelings and escape from uncomfortable realities that may cause anxiety of depression. As I’ve been learning from Carl Jung, anxiety is with us for a reason, so that we may analyze the way we are living and make a change, but if we just mask our anxiety and never face it, then what will happen when we finally decided to put that mask away? Will we be able to deal with all the unacknowledged anxiety that has been building within us? Well, it’s tough but I know I can do it, I know I got this. I just have to keep focusing on what I’m doing, creating dope music and expressing my deepest ideas and feelings through my lyrics, which is what I’ve always been inspired to do with my raps. I have a beautiful loving wife who supports me through all of life’s ups and downs, and I have a good family I can count on as well. I’m still healthy, thank God, apart from the aforementioned issues, so I gotta focus on exercising as often as I can and eating healthier as well. I know that everything will be okay in the end. Other than that, I’m just really excited about life and where this music thing will take me. I’m almost done my next album, Rebel Spirit, which will be released on all streaming platforms, and I’m really feeling how all the tracks are sounding so far. Oh, something else I’ve noticed during my sober days is that I’m getting really tired and sleepy at times. When I used to get high all the time I would sometimes stay up until 3 or 4am, just fascinated by whatever ideas I was learning or whatever music I was creating. Now I actually feel tired, as I do right now while I yawn, and I know that means it’s time to go to sleep. I guess it’s because things don’t seem so interesting anymore, even things I love with a passion, like philosophy and music, but I know this will pass with time, it’s just part of withdrawal from being used to constant weed stimulation. I’m not sure what else to write for now, but I suspect I’m close to finishing today’s thousand words, so I’ll just end this on a positive note. I wish everyone out there the best in life, stay balanced and healthy, and I pray you have the power to break any chains and attachments you feel you need to grow from. It’s not easy, but moving on to a new stage of life often requires painful sacrifices, leaving behind some of the things that we strongly identified with in the past. It’s time to grow, to become new, stronger, wiser people.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 26 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Day 26 of writing on my blog, nice. It’s also my fifteenth or sixteenth day of posting daily beats on Beatstars, and now that I have a decent catalogue of beats I have to start looking into marketing strategies to try to generate sales. One strategy is simply messaging artists and letting them know that I sell beats, probably including a few free beats they can use, obviously with a link to my beat store. I have to start searching for artists who are up and coming and whose beats match the ones I make in order to build solid business relationships so they keep on buying beats on the regular. In a way I’m happy because it feels like I’m finally starting my own business based around something I actually enjoy doing, making beats and just music in general. I’m tired of putting work in for already established companies that have nothing to do with my interests just to survive, so I know I have to put in the necessary work if I want to put and end to it for good and actually enjoy what I do for a living someday. For that reason I’m super excited to make this work. On the other hand, although I love hip-hop, from the hard beats to inspirational and thought provoking rhymes, I can’t say that I’m cool with a lot of the low effort noise that passes for rap these days, commercialized garbage promoting materialism. Unfortunately in order to promote your beats these days you have to pass them off as beats you can see some famous rapper spitting over, because if you just post it as a chill beat of happy or emotional or hard rap beat, you simply won’t get many views. This is why YouTube is super saturated with so many ‘type beat’ channels, where the title includes the name of rapper who would rap on this type of beat, along with a picture of the rapper. This is basically what I’ve been doing daily for the past two weeks, posting a beat in this format on both YouTube and Beatstars, and now I have to start marketing. The problem is that, although I do like my beats, I really would rather not post them in this way, but if I think about it for too long it feels like I’m just going back to my problem from years ago. See, I have a huge folder in my hard drive full of beats from as far back as 2011 when I first started making beats, and even thought they’re old now a lot of them are really dope, but I never released these beats in any way because my idea was to rap on them myself, not to get random rappers to rap what they want on them. See, I’ve always approached music, even my own music, as art, and I don’t like the idea of art being sold off, I’ve always wanted to release my music on my own. Unfortunately I never wrote enough rhymes to keep up with the insane amount of beats I made, and I almost always used other producers’ beats for my own tracks instead of my own, not because I didn’t like my own beats, but because the beats that fit my rapping style and content best are chill, jazzy sampled rap beats, like the ones I rapped over on my Running Rebel mixtape, whereas the beats that I produced for most of my life making music sound modern and electronic. I’ve always enjoyed making melodies from scratch, selecting the instruments and drums, and it’s only recently that I’m getting seriously into sampling instead. So my beats just sat there on my hard drive for so many years. I just got to thinking this year, I guess because I’ve grown increasingly annoyed and depressed with 9-to-5 life, that it really is time to start making a living from my music somehow, and I figured selling beats would be the most realistic way, since my rapping is not what’s most popular these days, I try to make it philosophical and inspiring, and I’m not willing to compromise that. I’ve come to peace that I might not make it as a huge success in the rap industry, and that’s okay because I enjoy doing it and I’ll keep at it no matter what. If I make it then great, if not then at least I shared my raps with whoever was willing to listen. Rap is based off of images these days, and I feel like I have too many complex ideas in my mind to just dumb myself down to be an image. The beats, on the other hand, can be made by anyone, it’s usually not a big deal since the producer is more of a behind-the-scenes person. It’s less likely that I need to sell out in order to make money on the beats side, and I’ll still be doing something I enjoy, so if I can make money making beats and that gives me the necessary time to really focus on my rapping without the need to compromise the truth, then that would be more than good enough for me. In a small way, this is why I feel shitty about putting my beats up with these random rappers’ pictures. I don’t even listen to them or like their music, so the beats are probably not even actually type beats for the artist names I post, it’s just kind of random names I choose based on what’s popular these days. Yeah, it feels wack, but no views means no sales. Hopefully as I start gaining traction I won’t need to be uploading my beats with these ridiculous names. In the meantime, I continue improving. I’ve got my new Arturia Keylab 61 mapped perfectly to FL Studio, I’ve mastered my MPC One at this point, and I’m making dope beats every day. I’m also doing daily guitar lessons so that I can eventually record myself playing and incorporate the live guitar sounds into my beats. Shout out to Justin Guitar for the super informative and easy to follow online courses, not to mention free. I really love the sound of the acoustic guitar, and that’s a big reason why I decided to learn to play it. Some of my favorite albums are Nick Drake’s albums, especially Pink Moon, and Norah Jones’ “Come Away With Me”, really acoustic albums, and I can’t wait to be able to create my own chill melodies in the guitar. It’s all about consistency and never quitting. If I keep up my daily practice and put the effort in I know I can’t fail, and I’m applying the same to my beat business and every new project I take on from now on.

much love,

~ rebel eye

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DAY 23 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Kalvonix and I have been making music together since way back when I started rapping. Back in high school when I was first starting out I was just making my own music by myself, but when I heard of a school group about rapping I was interested to see what it was about. To be honest, as a young kid with a wild imagination I imagined a full recording studio with a recording booth and all the equipment needed, but that wasn’t the case. I’m not complaining, I just mention that because it’s funny how kids’ imaginations are. The group was Access Denied, and it was made up of a few different people, mainly Calvin, aka Kalvonix, and his cousins Ohwell and Nizzl. In those days he was called “the rapper of the school” since he loved showing everyone his passion for rapping. I guess at some point he and Mr. Begg, the school English teacher, had come to an agreement to work on a school rap group, and so Access Denied was born. I joined later, but we quickly made a few mixtapes together. We usually recorded right in the classroom, after school hours so no one would be there, and our music was educational and touched on lots of different subjects, without getting too serious about them, but just getting the main message across. Those were fun times for sure, and we even did a show for the Olympics here in Vancouver, and also ended up on the newspaper front cover. “Rapping for a reason” was the title of the newspaper story. They also did an interview with us which was on TV. Of course, all of this wasn’t because we were incredible rappers, it was mostly because it was a school project and we were rapping about positive things. I didn’t mind it at all because I was writing and rapping, which is what I loved doing, but outside of Access Denied I was always working on my own music as well, which wasn’t always the most positive, but it was real to me, since I wasn’t living through the most positive times in my life either. Kalvonix was also doing music on his own, of course, and after he graduated from high school a year before me, we kept meeting up at his house to record song remixes here and there. We eventually had an idea, to release a mixtape together, since we were starting to make more and more songs together. We titled this mixtape “The Come Up.” Back then we weren’t the most professional, we were young and we were really making music kind of in a rush, to be honest. We were having fun though, so we just wanted to move on to the next track and complete it. I spent a lot of nights at Calvin’s house, rapping all through the night up in his room. The good thing is his house was pretty big so I think his parents couldn’t really hear us rapping the night away. Since we were making so much music, we eventually made the Come Up 2, and at some point we decided to turn in into a recurring thing. By the time we recorded The Come Up 3, we had decided that we were getting better and we had to get our music out to more people. That’s when we decided to go around his neighborhood knocking door to door selling CDs of The Come Up 3. I definitely don’t regret it, but the music isn’t really as good as we thought it was in the moment. Over the years we recorded the Come Up 4, 5 and 6, before lots of things in my life changed and I ended up moving away to Honduras, my home country, and eventually meeting my wife Maria, then waiting three years for her residence papers to be approved, and eventually returning here to Canada in February 2020, right before the whole COVID pandemic really started getting crazy. During all of those years we didn’t really make more music together, and maybe we didn’t even think about it. Calvin had success with his own music, always being super active with it and showcasing it to the world, and in my case, I was way into living a spiritual life, to the point that I had decided not to pursue music anymore because I didn’t want fame, because of the possibility of it corrupting me and the beautiful family I had formed with Maria. I remember actually telling Calvin I was quitting music, and he was questioning whether I was sure of my decision. In that moment I was one hundred percent sure. I never wanted fame, but I have always wanted to share my music with people, and to share inspirational messages through it. Fast forward some more time, spirituality-wise my thoughts changed in a way, and I basically decided to start pursuing music as a career again as I grew increasingly frustrated with 9-to-5 life, which I believe is corrupt, soulless and exploitative. I told Calvin I was back into music, so we put together The Come Up 8 and 9, mostly from a few of the last songs we had recorded together, as well as some songs from his albums that I was featured on. As I started getting serious with music again, and Calvin was getting more professional than ever and constantly releasing music on streaming platforms, we decided to make The Come Up 10 an album, with no remixes, just original tracks we could post for streaming. Since life is a lot busier now for both of us, it took us about to years to finally complete this album, but I’m really proud of it, and it’s really symbolic in a way. We’ve come a long way from our early days recording the first Come Up. Our flows have improved a lot, our writing is more impactful and our sound is overall more professional. It’s also been maybe a little over ten years since we started, so the number 10 is kind of symbolic in a way as well. We released The Come Up 10 this year on August 12th, a few days before his Calvin’s birthday. Kalvonix has always been a big inspiration for me, not only because we share the same passion for music and rhyming, but also because he was born with cerebral palsy and faced a lot of struggles growing up, yet he never let that get in the way of his passion and his dream, and nowadays he’s found a decent amount of success, and I’m super happy for him. I’ve always been all over the place, lacking the dedication to make my music thing happen in the way he has, but life is a learning experience, and I can say that now I’m more focused than I’ve ever been, so I’m excited about what the future holds. I’m constantly working on new beats and songs, and Kalvonix and I don’t plan on stopping our work together either, so The Come Up 11 is already in the works. For now though, give The Come Up 10 a listen, I’ve embedded the Spotify link below so you can listen right on here if interested. I appreciate anyone who takes the time to listen, since we put a lot of effort into this album.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 19 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

I’m sort of rushing this because I have a half an hour left until midnight. I know I can make it happen though, so here I am. I’m also rendering the YouTube video for my daily beat, as well as setting up my new Arturia Keylab 61 to work with FL Studio. I basically got carried away and left everything for the last minute, since I was having so much fun just playing on my keyboard. It’s funny because it’s supposed to be the main thing producers work with, yet for so many years I was just making beats by simply clicking notes into FL’s piano roll. Anyway, since I just got it I’ve been having fun setting it up to go with my workflow, seeing how I can integrate it with FL Studio as well as my MPC. I guess I was just having so much fun that I didn’t really feel the time going by. Time really flies, and if things aren’t organized properly it can easily slip away from us. If we really want to have goals and set deadlines for ourselves we should focus on that first and then do other things we want to do. It can be tempting, for sure, to do what we really want to do in the moment, but over time we’ll probably regret not doing the goals we had set for ourselves, so we might as well do them. I guess what I’m trying to say is that long-term satisfaction is worth more than satisfaction in the moment. If we have a clear goal that we know we want to keep going then we should stick to that, rather than assuming that we’ll have time to do it later. I was just so excited finding the right set up for my gear that I decided to leave my goals until the end. Now I’m literally racing against time to write down enough words. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s not a life or death matter, but you all know just how shitty it feels when you’ve been succeeding at a goal consistently for quite a while, only to fuck it all up really quick and have to start all over again. It can get exhausting. So again, the wise decision is to take care of our long-term goals first. Amazing things require consistency in order to be carried out. Without consistency, everything falls apart before it can even come to life. This is why we must use our time wisely, we need to plan things according to importance, because if we develop a habit of procrastinating it can be extremely hard to break. Not to make excuses but I’ve also had a weird sensation in my chest since the morning, and I’m a bit worried since anxiety always makes me question every small sensation in my body, so for a while in the morning I was doing all sorts of things in order to feel better, so I wasn’t really in the most productive state of mind. Either way it doesn’t matter, because I did have a some extra time I could have used to work on my goals. Goals can only be reached with discipline, the discipline needed to put in the necessary time and effort into our work. Once you have a discipline going then it is easier to follow the road that’ll get you where you want to go. A lot of times we look for excuses because it’s easies to justify ourselves than it is to own up to the fact that we should be getting more serious about our goals, our dreams. I know we all live very different lives, and we all have different things that make us happy as well as things we suffer from. I remember being a kid, it felt good to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, living life in the exact way I wanted to without regrets. Everything changed when I grew up a bit more though, because I started to realize that life is an interconnected web, and that there’s a lot more to it than just fulfilling our own desires. There’s things that require our attention, we need to constantly work on ourselves as well as on our relationships. With everything we have to focus on as adults, it can be extremely difficult to find the time, consistently, to set goals and to make them happen without failing. I admit, sometimes I’m overwhelmed by how little time there is to do so much. Then I remember that time is just a construct, and that I don’t need to stress out about everything in life. I just have to prioritize, to do whatever’s most important first, then move on to something else, and so on. What gets done is the most important, and if there’s no time to do everything, then maybe those things that were left out weren’t meant to be done just yet. If we do something while thinking about the next thing we have to do, then we’re less likely to do whatever we’re doing well, because our focus is split between two activities, between the present and the future. We might already be planning in our heads just how we’ll execute that next task, visualizing it and perhaps getting excited about it. Excitement is good when it comes to our goals and projects, but we should be aware of too much excitement as well. Sometimes what is needed in order for us to make dreams happen is for us to balance them out with a bit of reality. Rather than working with the fruits of labor in mind, it would be wiser to just do what we’re doing as best as we can, and to later do the same thing when we do the next thing on our list. It’s good to dream and to be optimistic about the future, but be alert! Always be aware of everything you can do to make sure you succeed, and make sure to be actively working on these things so that you have the highest chance possible of making your dreams come true.

much love

~ rebel eye

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DAY 16 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt) – Dream Journal

My wife Maria and I went to sleep about an hour ago, at about 130am. I woke up just now because of a dream I had. It was really vivid and It kind of shook me, to be honest, although it wasn’t anything extremely crazy like a gruesome nightmare or anything like that. If you’ve read my daily post from yesterday you might know that it was a post about my MPC One. Guilty of having left my daily writing for the last hour and a half of the day, I decided to quickly write about the MPC, since I’d been having so much fun just messing around with it the most of the day, and since I usually spend my free moments on it anyway. So this short dream revolves around my MPC One also. Basically I was sitting on my desk, in my room with Maria, although she was sitting on the edge of the bed right beside me. The desk is right beside the bed. I look down at my MPC and hit the button on the back to turn it on. It doesn’t turn on though. I press it like crazy a few times, worried that it’s died out on me, and suddenly a keyboard that I have below the MPC flashes as if it’s turning on. I wonder how in the hell the power button on my MPC just turned on the keyboard instead! Now, the set for this dream was all very common, not super weird like other dreams, I mean the setting was literally what I was doing while I was awake just an hour or two ago, with Maria sitting almost in that same exact position on the bed, the room looked exactly as it would in real life. I really thought this was real life and couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I told Maria but was surprised to find that she barely seemed to care and just barely mumbled something while looking down at the Plants vs. Zombies game on the iPad. It seemed so weird, and I kept frantically explaining to her that the MPC is fucked up, trying to get her to understand the seriousness of it, all while pressing the power button on the thing non-stop. It finally turns on but the icons and letters on the touch screen are big and distorted so I try to shut it down and turn it back on. It usually takes a few seconds for the MPC to power on when I press the power button, so right when I press it I turn my head around for a second to tell Maria what I’m gonna try. When I turn my head around again to look down at the MPC though, I see that the drum pads on it are missing! Not all of them, it was as if someone had just yanked out like three of the drum pads. I felt a chill and I started crazily looking around for the drum pads, not so much to put them back in, but more to see if I could even find them or if they had vanished into thin air. Sure enough, they were nowhere to be found. My mind was racing since I was sure I had done nothing treat could have accidentally removed the pads from the MPC. Some weird shit was going on, I was sure, some supernatural shit. I was getting super creeped out and was about to tell Maria about it, when I woke up feeling really disturbed, but after a moment really happy that it was all a dream and that my MPC is safe from harm. I decided to write this dream for a few reasons. One is that I’ve always been super interested in lucid dreaming and astral projection, but have only been able to lucid dream a few times, involuntarily. I know that one of the things that can help out a lot with lucid dreaming is to keep a dream journal. Unfortunately, since I’ve been a huge stoner for years I don’t have dreams very often, or I should probably say I do but I don’t remember them. It’s common knowledge that one of the symptoms of weed “withdrawal” are really vivid dreams, and I can definitely confirm this. Now that I’m finally cutting down on bud I’m getting more dreams, or at least remembering more of them, and they feel very very vivid and real life-like, just like tonight’s dream. Dreams can be scary but I always appreciate them. At the end of the day they’re trippy experiences for me, that I like looking back and reflecting on, sort of like psychedelic trips or meditation sessions. I think this is one more motivating factor for me to continue my goals of cutting downMy wife Maria and I went to sleep about an hour ago, at about 130am. I woke up just now because of a dream I had. It was really vivid and It kind of shook me, to be honest, although it wasn’t anything extremely crazy like q gruesome nightmare or anything like that. If you’ve read my daily post from yesterday you might know that it was a post about my MPC One. Guilty of having left my daily writing for the last hour and a half of the day, I decided to quickly write about the MPC, since I’d been having so much fun just messing around with it the most of the day, and since I usually spend my free moments on it anyway. So this short dream revolves around my MPC One also. Basically I was sitting on my desk, in my room with Maria, although she was sitting on the edge of the bed right beside me. The desk is right beside the bed. I look down at my MPC and hit the button on the back to turn it on. It doesn’t turn on though. I press it like crazy a few times, worried that it’s died out on me, and suddenly a keyboard that I have below the MPC flashes as if it’s turning on. I wonder how in the hell the power button on my MPC just turned on the keyboard instead! Now, the set for this dream was all very common, not super weird like other dreams, I mean the setting was literally what I was doing while I was awake just an hour or two ago, with Maria sitting almost in that same exact position on the bed, the room looked exactly as it would in real life. I really thought this was real life and couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I told Maria but was surprised to find that she barely seemed to care and just barely mumbled something while looking down at the Plants vs. Zombies game on the iPad. It seemed so weird, and I kept frantically explaining to her that the MPC is fucked up, trying to get her to understand the seriousness of it, all while pressing the power button on the thing non-stop. It finally turns on but the icons and letters on the touch screen are big and distorted so I try to shut it down and turn it back on. It usually takes a few seconds for the MPC to power on when I press the power button, so right when I press it I turn my head around for a second to tell Maria what I’m gonna try. When I turn my head around again to look down at the MPC though, I see that the drum pads on it are missing! Not all of them, it was as if someone had just yanked out like three of the drum pads. I felt a chill and I started crazily looking around for the drum pads, not so much to put them back in, but more to see if I could even find them or if they had vanished into thin air. Sure enough, they were nowhere to be found. My mind was racing since I was sure I had done nothing treat could have accidentally removed the pads from the MPC. Some weird shit was going on, I was sure, some supernatural shit. I was getting super creeped out and was about to tell Maria about it, when I woke up feeling really disturbed, but after a moment really happy that it was all a dream and that my MPC is safe from harm. I decided to write this dream for a few reasons. One is that I’ve always been super interested in lucid dreaming and astral projection, but have only been able to lucid dream a few times, involuntarily. I know that one of the things that can help out a lot with lucid dreaming is to keep a dream journal. Unfortunately, since I’ve been a huge stoner for years I don’t have dreams very often, or I should probably say I do but I don’t remember them. It’s common knowledge that one of the symptoms of weed “withdrawal” are really vivid dreams, and I can definitely confirm this. Now that I’m finally cutting down on bud I’m getting more dreams, or at least remembering more of them, and they feel very very vivid and real life-like, just like tonight’s dream. Dreams can be confusing and scary, even terrifying, for sure, but I appreciate most dreams, if not all. They’re trippy experiences for me, experiences I like looking back on, analyzing and reflecting on, just like psychedelic trips or meditation sessions. Who knows where dreams come from, I’ve always been fascinated by them, and just being able to remember more of my dreams is even one more reason to continue with my goals of cutting down on bud. So, I’ve killed two birds with one stone, I got my daily blog post in for the day, and I got to write down one of dreams, and a really trippy or at least vivid one at that. It’s good that I work at 1pm tomorrow, if I worked earlier in the morning I probably would have been too lazy to stay up for an hour or so to write and post this, and maybe that dream would have been forgotten. Anyway, time to go back to sleep and hopefully once again into dream land with some pleasant dreams this time.

~ much love

rebel eye

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DAY 14 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Day 14 of writing a thousand words. I’m enjoying this exercise for sure, and it’s getting kind of easier to get my words done once I start, I feel like I flow through the post more naturally. Before I used to feel as if I had to come up with something super profound in order to inspire the reader, but over time I’ve come to realize that people may find inspiration in the most trivial things. We never know the extent to which any of our ideas or experiences might inspire others, no matter how small or insignificant we may think those ideas are. For today I thought of just writing a bit about some of my favorite songs of all time, songs that I could listen to forever and never get tired of. Some of these songs give me goosebumps when I listen, and others just transport me to a dreamy, sleepy state of mind which is super relaxing and even meditative. One of those songs, and maybe my favorite of them all, is Bob Marley’s “Is This Love.” Yeah, I know, I know, big surprise, a huge stoner’s favorite songs is a Bob Marley one! Who would’ve thought it? But Bob Marley music is special, for lack of a better word to describe it, whether one is stoned or sober. Bob Marley and the Wailers had an amazing way to mix the classic relaxing reggae rhythm with powerful vocals and equally powerful, philosophical, uplifting lyrics that really make you think and feel. I know Is This Love, although popular, isn’t Bob Marley’s most popular songs, others such as Three Little Birds or One Love being more well-known, but to me Is This Love is such a beautiful song, super chill and reminds of a beautiful love, like the one I feel for my wife Maria. In fact, we danced to this song on our wedding night since I put it at the top of our wedding playlist. Whenever I’m stressed I know I can probably put this song on and just forget about the worries of life for a moment. Number 2, my second favorite song ever is probably Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” I saw a recent post that Gilmour’s guitar solo on that song was just voted as the number one guitar solo ever, and I completely agree, I was even telling my wife the same thing a few years ago! Second place, for me, goes to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” which is also one of my favorite songs, the way it progresses from an eerie, slow ballad into an insanely powerful, complete rock classic, complete with the crazy, energetic screaming of the lyrics at the end, is just amazing. The lyrics are really thought-provoking as well and they evoke powerful images in my mind. I like to listen to Stairway to Heaven when I trip, although sometimes it gets way too intense, due to the crazy energy it gives off. I think I didn’t write enough about Comfortably Numb though. It’s hard to find such a beautiful and spacey song, and the guitar feels like some sort of victory, like a triumphant vibe. That reads kind of weird, but it’s the best word I could think of to describe this amazing song, or at least the instrumental side of it. Another song which I really love is Eminem’s “Sing For the Moment.” I love the way Aerosmith’s track was sampled, and Eminem’s lyrics, especially about the reason why he raps, for kids who are inspired by the lyrics, who might not have much else in life to relate to or to just vibe with. Whether listening to Eminem or most other rappers’ lyrics is something healthy or constructive for most of the youth is another topic entirely, one that I can’t ever come to a concrete decision on. I know there’s a lot of negativity in rap music, even in the “good” rappers’ songs, but I’ve never really been able to stop listening to rap. When it’s done correctly it can be such an inspiration, and powerful messages can be delivered way more powerfully and efficiently than with any other genre of music. A perfect example of this is 2Pac. I love so many of his songs, as you can tell that he was a person who was trying to figure life out, trying to inspire others, and to express himself through poetry and music. I’m not saying he was perfect by any means, but his lyrics are definitely inspirational. Out of so many great 2Pac songs my favorite one has to be “Better Dayz” from his posthumous album of the same name. The lyrics touch upon such real things, about the stresses of an unplanned pregnancy amid a shitty financial situation, for example, or about the death of his homies and seeing his family after them and giving them the simple message “to keep the faith, and pray for better days.” We can’t expect musicians to be perfect, but I certainly appreciate it when artists try to incorporate a powerful message into their music. At the end of the day, music is amazing and beautiful, but making a positive difference in the world is ultimately the best thing one can do with one’s time on earth, and if your passion is to write, whether it’s music or anything else, it’s really inspirational to me to see people using their talents to try to put these positive ideas into the world. I honestly can’t be bothered to listen to any of the new rap that’s out nowadays. It’s all commercialized garbage created to keep listeners ignorant and chasing a shallow lifestyle they’ll probably die or end up in jail trying to live. We need more rappers like Pac, but I honestly think hip-hop is unfortunately beyond saving. There’s too much money to be made by promoting a lavish lifestyle, selling what the people want, illusions of money and power, of financial success. Anyway, I definitely went off on a bit of a rant there, but I have to draw the comparison in order for you to understand why I love songs like “Better Dayz” or “Changes” or “Thugz Mansion” so much. There’s a few more songs which are at the top with these ones, but for now I’m at a thousand words, so I’ll just leave it here. Hopefully I can get some people who haven’t heard these songs to check them out, or even to get some people who haven’t listened in a while to revisit these musical masterpieces. I’m jamming to them myself at the moment.

much love

~ rebel eye

IS THIS LOVE, IS THIS LOVE, IS THIS LOVE THAT I’M FEELINNN!
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DAY 13 (1000 WORDS, 3rd attempt)

Day 13 of a thousand words. I figured I would write about one of my favorite songs of mine, It Is What It Is. This is a song I wrote and recorded way back in 2012. It was released on my February 2012 mixtape Running Rebel. To this day, I consider this mixtape to be my masterpiece. I was trying to make a project with a unique sound, but more specifically, with the jazzy, old-school type of sound that I love so much, the sound that inspired me to get into hip-hop in the first place. This track was the most popular off the tape. In my lyrics I reminisce on old times, which even though were filled with problems, still represent the good old days for me. In 2012 I was only 18 years old, but I really felt like I had grown up and matured. I know what you might think, that at that age there’s not much that I could possibly be looking back at. That’s not the case for me though, since the craziest times of my life actually started when I was about twelve or thirteen, and although I had a lot of fun, I also got into a lot of problems. Thankfully, these problems didn’t escalate as much as they could have. I feel like I’ve always been blessed with good common sense, even when I was acting up I was never completely like a lot of my friends. I always knew there was something deeper to life, and I guess I was trying to find exactly that in the countless experiences I was having, but never finding anything. By the age of 18 I had realized that this life was not what I wanted any longer, so I wrote this song, It Is What It Is. The last part of the hook says “But we all gotta grow, yo, it is what it is,” and I feel like that sums up my mindset at the time, I was done with my old type of life and was sad to let it go, as I did have a lot of fun, but I realized that it was time to move on, to grow into a new phase in my life. There’s a lot of details in the song, about old times, old moments I lived through with close friends, some of which are no longer here with us. Overall, it’s just such a nostalgic song for me, and the amazing chill beat by Dela definitely went along with my lyrics to emphasize the nostalgic aspect of the track. I also like how he incorporated a sample into the beginning of the beat, from one of my favorite rap songs “Moment of Truth” by Gang Starr, where Guru raps “Sometimes you gotta dig deep, when problems come near, don’t fear, things get severe for everybody everywhere.” At the time I felt like I was really thinking deeply, I was finally making a decision about my life and the direction I wanted to take it. Unfortunately, it did take me a few more years to completely let go of my troubled past, so throughout 2013 to 2014 I was back into making gangsta rap songs with RRG. It took me a few years to completely free myself of who I used to be and the toxic lifestyle I was living for so long, and over that time I also quit smoking cigarettes completely, quit drinking for the most part, and quit doing all the drugs I was doing. By 2017 I released my Musical Alchemy mixtape, where I incorporated a lot of what I had learned into my lyrics, from the 7 Hermetic Principles to the Four Noble Truths, from Bible verses to quotes by great philosophers. I wanted to creative something philosophically inspiring, but I feel like I ended up being a bit all over the place on that album. I hope to be able to make an album as good as my 2012 Running Rebel album some day, but I just don’t know if I’m even the same person these days. Even if I never do though, I’m glad to have created a classic, and even though my album barely got more than a thousand downloads, since I’m still basically unknown, I’m glad to have made something I can enjoy, and which documents my growth in life. Unfortunately, now that I’ve started posting my music on streaming services, I haven’t been able to post any of the songs from my Running Rebel mixtape, since the beats I used were just picked from different websites and YouTube videos, in order to match the sound I was trying to achieve. To anyone who might be reading this blog and who is already familiar with my music, I truly appreciate you! And if you’re reading my blog and are not familiar with my music then give this track a listen, I know you will enjoy it. To be honest, I think a lot of what has prevented me from “making it” as a musician has been my own fault, I’ve never been great at promoting myself, it’s never been something I enjoy doing. It feels like I’m trying to show off or something, so I’ve always preferred to have people find my music organically rather than sharing it to everyone. However, I’m now at the point where I realize that this just doesn’t work like that. As a creative person it’s imperative to be able to market oneself. You might be super dope at what you do, but if no one knows it then it isn’t gonna do much for you, so let the world know! There’s way too much wack music about nothing out there these days, so I shouldn’t feel any shame for promoting my own music when I know that it’s dope, and that people would appreciate it if only more people got to hear it. I appreciate everyone reading, as always, and I’ll leave a link to my song, It Is What It Is, in case you’re interested in listening.

much love

~ rebel eye