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maxxpump
I am a musician from the south of the UK, I like making music and playing with my synths. I've made game music and electronic music professionally in the past. I aim to keep on designing delightful and complex music for many years to come.

Age 32, Male

wood turner

Angmering high school

Brighton, UK

Joined on 10/26/15

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maxxpump's News

Posted by maxxpump - April 11th, 2018


"I want to marry you?" This is my new commecial grade release, I hope everyone likes it, this one is well practiced and has taken me a while to develop and it apart from "Time Will Go On (Complete)" is some of the best and fluid work I have ever done. 

I hope to do some songs like this for my new album which I am in the process of delivering to you guys as another free project of maybe 12-15 tracks. But I still need some direction. So if you have enjoyed this track and "Time Goes On (Complete)" from a few weeks ago, give me a word and I will get on with this new project (I am still going to do this thing anyway as I need a hobby, as well as a sideline project to do alongside my recent album I am releasing with Diamond/Parlo. 

I hope everyone is having a nice week and I hope you guys like this new direction of Electro-pop which I am producing right at this moment of time. 

Thanks anyway guys and gals, your my reason for being. Yours, Stu (Maxxpump)

"Will You Marry Me?": https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/800326?updated=1523448532

"Time Goes On (Complete)": https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/788035


Posted by maxxpump - March 28th, 2018


New piano ballad! I attempt to sing again, but this time I absoultely F'in nailed it!

So last night I release the new version of "Song One Alt", also known as "Love is Lost". I released the latter song about a year and a half ago, it was a rap song with fast paced lyrics, which I wrote about falling out with my best friend and lover. It didn'rt really go down that well, A.) It was pretty explicit, one of the most prominent things I learned about when I did my music production course at Uni (which included a lot about music writing, composition,writing lyrics, arranging, mixing and mastering (as well as the full business aspect of how to actually make money or even stand a chance in the music industry...), I did a survey which found out what the most major turn offs were, when people listen to popular music. One of the most major things, why people are most likely to dislike and skip a partcular track...is swearing, general nastiness and explicit nature. 

If you guys ever listened to that track, you would know it was quite explicit, over all it went down like a lead balloon, I got quite a bit of flack over it (people thought my rap vocals where actually quite good, but most people didn't like the fact that I was singling out someone which I had fell out with, was to be honest pretty nasty and there was at least over a dozen usages of a selection of pretty nasty swear words). But even though it, plus another track which I produced at the same time and released here called "Relationship Issues", wasn't recieved well on Newgrounds very well, it was released on a four track album, which as it stands, I have sold roughly, over six hundred copies, and according to iTunes and my old labels analytics, "Love is lost is the most popular song on that specific release? Weird I know, but I guess this was not the website to release that kind of music on (but I know before that release, the majority of my music on here was Electronica and most faccets of EDM styled instrumental tracks.

"Song One Alt" was the name of the piano piece which I used to rap over and the finished piece was the mentioned song "Love is Lost". I really like that particular piano piece and had being wanting to make a song which would be better recieved. So I made a new song in a Pop Ballad style, mainly usign Piano and string sounds. I went through about three different backing tracks including the original track. I made quite well thought out lyrics, which I re-wrote a few times and practiced singing the song myself, which playing piano chords and having a play around with the timing. The practice song was at about 128 BPM, The final track was just under 90 BPM. 

"I Love Everything you do" is the new track, which I put quite a lot of emotion into the vocals, were practiced repeatedly and has taken, many takes to record to anywhere near how I wanted it ot sound, without even slightly being embrassed when I happened to listen back to the vocal takes, several days later.

I hope people like this rendition of this song, like my vocal attempt. I hope to intergrate this kind of style into some of my future works, possibly into a short album and maybe even go for doing this kind of song (either this or something like it) in a live setup. 

If you do like it please tell me what you think as this really took me quite a while to produce to this level. 

Anyway until next time, see ya around..... 


Posted by maxxpump - March 26th, 2018


Hello everyone how is everyone's day going so far...well I guess if your in the EDT time zone your day is only just starting. I have run into a slight roadblock really as my music is concerned! I have maybe seven to nine chord sequences I think sound cool when played on the piano/string synth (I'll tell you about my new toy which I picked up a couple of weekends ago in a couple of paragraphs...The major reason for my block is down to creative direction, those of which follow my channel, know that I create all kinds of music in all shapes and sizes. I at the moment, want to work on album number sixteen, and really want to hear from everyone, mainly to tell me what musical direction I should go in, mainly as I want this album to be a specfic genre, instead of a mish mash of different styles, a compilation as it were. 

My strong point is Dance/Trance music, I have tried Drum and Bass, Rock, Metal, Numetal/Industrial, Cinematic pieces as well as alot of different fusion styles (those of which have never gone down that well on here, so it I won't go down that route). 

What do people think? What genre should I work on for my new album, what should I do for it sound wise, what do poeple generally think is in style at the moment. Leave you comments below and I will consider anything really and try to accomidate as many people as humanly possible. 

My new toy which I want to share with the world is a Hohner String Harmony which I got funnily enough at a car boot sale for £20 (which is about $35), in not working condition (I've been wanting one ever since watching a guy on Youtube called Kebu, which uses one on a cover/rendition of Giogio Moroders The Chase. Kebu uses one at the during most of the song, but he uses it with a Electro Harmonix Small Stone Phaser, which is a cool little phaser pedal). I have owned a Sovetek Small Stone (which is the original unit, mine being from the late 1970's). I have always wanted a Eminent Solina, I have a emulation VST called Solina V3, which is made by Native Instruments and also have a cool sounding one in Predator 2, which sounds kind of like one, but as I found out by comparing it side to side with Fireball01e's Solina, it isn't completely accurate, which is a bit of shame. To be honest the NI Solina V3 hasn't got the warmth of the original, but it is really cool non the less. The Hohner Sting Harmony needed work on the contacts and it needed all new capacitors in the power supply, it was a quick fix which cost me about £10 and now it is in my studio, and will be featured on its own test track which I will get around to at some point in the near future.   


Posted by maxxpump - March 23rd, 2018


Some interesting songs in my internal NG list which have not been released...

As some have seen I have just released the single from Heartless called Erased from existance, which is a very heavily inspired track from some of Gary Numan's later work, i.e: Jagged and Splinter, its still a song in development as I'm looking for a singer to redo the vocal. 

I have a few more songs including a remake of song one alternate mix which was a piano/dance track which I'm currently doing a vocal for, I've done the vocal four times now, still not happy with it so this may take a few days before I will put it up on Newgounds. But its got fairly well thought out lyrics and the styles pretty cool. Also I have remastered the track, so it sounds much better.

The big news really is the fact that I have just upgraded my studio monitoring system, to a 2.1 surround setup...I purchased myself a KRK 8S Subwoofer which should allow me to do better mixes with regards to making bass heavy Dance and Drum and Bass tracks. I am currently experimenting around with some bass type sounds and am working on a few new tracks which I develop in to a new D&B mix which will most probably be better than anything which I have done in the past...

 


Posted by maxxpump - March 4th, 2018


Hello everyone, how is everyone doing and I hope this message ultimatley convers my near total, satisfaction with my new Soundcard and recording interface, even though its been a complete andf utter pain in tha ass to get working effectively.

So about three and a half weeks ago I turned 30 and my partner bought me a new 2nd hand Sound-card/Interface, which is capable of recording upto 176Khz at 24B Bit, which my Presonus Sound-card I owned previously could only muster about 48Khz at 16 Bit and it did that badly , so I ened up reocrding and running all my projects in 44.1Khz @16 Bit. This soundcard also effectively has six inputs and six outputs (four physical ins and outs), it has two XLR/1/4" TRS connections with "A" class Phantom 48v microphone pre-amps, it has seven faders, ttansport controls, jogg wheel and caapablity to select and mix upto 12 channels, it can sipport upto 4 monitors (speakers) and subwoofer. it has direct monitoring foldback for channles 1-2 and 3-4, it USB3.0 and its got two headphone ports with volume controls on both of the sides.

Unfortuneately its been a bit of a pain, as my Intel i5 3.Ghz 4th Gen (quad core), 16BGB DDR3 1866Mhz and 256GB SSD PCIe card, is a bit too slow for this card and it took me quite a while to configure it in such a way it could run more than three VSTi's at the same time without either completely locking the computer up, or crashing my computer. It was a fairly simple thing to actually sort out but it ened up with having to sacrifice som eof the ultra low latency that this interface, which was bit annoying as I purhased said card with the knowlage that it could do down to 2ms recording latency and 3ms playback latency. The fix ended up with njust over 8ms and 11ms of latency respectively. 

So after a session with a few VST's, compltely custom soundsets and my MIDI/USB keyboard, I took it upon myself to create something which may have been able to show of this new bit of kit and also as a bit of comparision and see what people thought. So far the song I produced has done fairly well on a few released platfforms, namely Soundcloud, Newgorunds and YouTube. But as per usual I haven't had a ny comments to tell me if it sounds at all cleaner, or if people even liked what ended up being a seven and half hour project (mainly mixing and tweaking was required to get this track sounding how I wanted it and this time went to great lengths to make the soundsets in such away that all the synthesis sits in the song correctly. I also did a bit of light mastering and it seems to have been able to play back on quite  afew of my test systems with out distorting at all and sound farily good on my mobile comparing to similar tracks I've made in the past of simplar complexity. I had also for quite a while (actually about two years wanting to make a follow up to my track "March of the Sequentials", I never specifically set out to purposely make the second part to this song, but this time made it by happy accident and thought it fits the name in this case absoultely perfectly! I mainly tried to use the analogue lab collection of VST's and with the exception of Xpand! and of course the usage of custom voicing in Vanguard, for thinkgs like bass and SFX. 

I started by listening to Oxugene 8 by Jean-Michel Jarre, and used a basic variation of his chord sequence and built my own leads and arpeggiation, riffs, raffs and what not to filll in the gaps. The result doesn't sound to too bad and I personally think I did fairly well with this song. I did use the same chrod sequence throughout the whole sequence which I know some people will say is repedative, but following the standard mapped out by nearly every Dance musican in the past, I changed the sequnce and patterns. leads riffs and hooks every eight bars and it has tons of variation in the piece.    

The majpr sound which I start off with right at the beginning of the track is Solian V and a custom arpeggio which I made using sounds from Vanguard. Strings were provided by Synclavier, the main lead was Serum and that was again created using the initial patch which loads up with serum and I added just more layers and played around with the source sttings and the ADSR, as well as portamento and glide settings. I also used a thunder clap/rain SFX which was from HalionOne SE, Serum was used for build up SFX before the drop sections (which was not really loud enough in the final mix). Xpand was used for a acoustic style Piano and as a organ sound as well. The Solina V pad was loop returned through a Sovtek Phaser called a "Small stone phaser" from around the early 70's. 

If you want to listen to my new piece"March of the Sequentials MK2" it can be found here: https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/793309 if you like this track please.can you tell me either here or on the track, what you loike about it, if I shoyld further develop the song, or if I should carry on this path and possibly make a album which will be based off a very simlar style (This will again be a free album, exclusive to Newgrounds and will probably be about six or seven tracks in a JMJ style. I will also use only the analogue VST's and will possibly spend at leasta  substantial amount of time on each track like this one. 

If anyone has any ideas, of how I could proceed with this musical lark please let me know, just tell me what music of mine you ppossibly like, what sounds you lioke and a view to creative direction I could follow, it would be very appreciated, because without any constructive comment on any of my pieces for quite a while, its nearly like  I'm operating in  the dark here and its really ahrd fiuring out what people want to hear and what could make the next big piece of music.

I'm currently working on a few vocal Dance pieces, with all kinds of vocal effects, like autotune and vvocoders, I am also doing  acover of Chris Issak's Wicked game, Mad world by Gary Jules and Tears for Fears, I can't help falling in love with you. These when completed wiill be released on my YouTube channel, as Iknow I can't rekease any opf these covers on Newgroundsm, undee pain of death or something nasty like that happening to my accoundt, as I know it is just nopt allowed, which is a bit of a shame as my singing on Wicked Game has been described as really good, I've been practicing quite a lot and I think I am ready to share this style of singing with the worl, even though I know that my singing hasn't particually gone down too well in the past. Mainly as I haven't really practiced and done most of my vocals on the fly, following peopels pretty harsh comments in reagrds to my sionging, I have made even more of a ocncerted effortto make sure that it might go down better that trying to fly a leadf balloon, instead of a parachute when jumping out of a plane! 

Anyway I hop eevryone is well and this message, even though quite long, finds everyone well. I also want to take this time to thank all my fans on Newgrounds and the support that somepeople have shown me in the past couple of years.

Anyway enough of me waffling and I'll let everyone get on with there finite time on thsi planet...


Posted by maxxpump - January 2nd, 2018


This is how I created my new composition "Time Goes On".

The reason I composed the piano in this way for this piece is that I hate this time of year; christmas that is. I don't like christmas as I have social interaction problems as a result of my AS and always found large family gatherings hard. As a result this has made me feel extremerly lonely and isolated. I made this piano riff which you hear at the beginning of this piece, which after I recorded it I thought it sounded pretty sad. I showed this piano piece to Davis Loman when I visited him in december, and he immediately told me to record it in, he was actually pretty emotional at hearing this and he told me he found it erie. We recorded the bass and strings in a 80's style on the tyros and I filled in the gaps with the extra piano chords in the verse. I wrote lyrics for this, but as yet have not recorded the vocals, as I fear I can't express what I want to convey. Daniel, turned up at christmas eve and we recorded the dance stabs with the Alesis A6, and then recorded the drums using the Roland V-drums and chopped/looped them. We finished off with a bass sweep we found in serum and we recreated a similar sound using the Pro 5 and a Behringer filter pedal. We then added horns, and then the string synth sections using the Solina String machine, with a Small stone by Sovtek which is a really good phaser pedal.  This was recorded through a vintage Neve/Helios small format (16 channel) console. It has some pretty cool EMI/EMS pre amps and is a valve powered and uses valves for preamps and output stages. We thought about recording with Pro-Tools or possibly using Logic, but went with a combination of DAT recorder, reel to reel (2 inch) and a Tascam Digital recorder. 

I hope everyone likes this and if you think you want to sing or spit some bars to this get in contact with me.

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/782657   


Posted by maxxpump - January 1st, 2018


Hello everybody and hope everyone had lots of cool celebration for Christmas and the Newyear.

I am working on some really cool upbeat musical projects for 2018, this year im going to be only releasing songs im 110% happy with. Hopefully there will be lots of guest singers and synth players. I'm about to release a piece I have been working on for aound two weeks, with Davis Lomax and Danial (Fireball01e), in Lomax's studio. There will be two versions a clean one with no vocals and one with vocals with heavy processed vocals. This new song is called "Time Goes On". Its a dancable pop song, with nice flow and lots of orchestral rock elements. I'll update when I'm about to release. 


Posted by maxxpump - December 17th, 2017


I've been taking a bit of a break recently, too mainly play with new ideas, train my mixing skills. I've also had prroblems with finishing my songs as I was finding creation very mundane and slightly depressing (its most probably because my new recording contact and the work load for that). 

My new song is a vocal song with dance elements, which is a bit pop and bit light rock. The mix has come out really well on all my test devices and really am happy with this new creation. I also have been practicing vocals for this song for while in few different formats and this was the best arrangment and vocaI could come up with. Still not amazing, but palitable, I hope peeps get on with it and tell me what you like about it. Anyway I hope everyones had nice weekend and hope to post more interesting original compisitions very soon. https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/779979


Posted by maxxpump - December 7th, 2017


So I purchased myself a Alesis Andromeda A6 synthesiser, which is a synth which was produced between 2000-2001, as a short run. They became a bit of a legend after people like Tiesto made them a very popular bit of kit. I also got myself a copy of Legend and a free VST called PG-8X, which is very good at JX style synth emulation. I have a custom plate reverb which I am building in the works and will include spring reverb tank as well. 


Posted by maxxpump - November 8th, 2017


So I have had a few weeks off from NG to think about my groups direction, work more towards my contract with Parlophone, and just finsihed a collaboration project with the near legendary Dan Haigh's which is part of a group called Gunship. 

So I decided to take a while off from posting to solidify my solo music career, and after nearly half a million views on my video on YouTube for Tchernobyl, I decided that was the ultimate sound direction I want to go in. I've been also making a new album which will be released next spring under Parlophones Diamond Electronic studio label, and already have one concrete song called "Michael's Song", part of the piece you can hear in my newest release "Martins Song" which I released earlier. The difference with this song is after scoring it, instead of making a song out of it, it's already gone through fifteen iterations. I want to make this piece as perfect as possible and I have already spent a combination of three weeks making new sounds, using my new VST package which was given to me by my new producer, Dave Martins. This new VST suite is called "Analogue Lab 2 by Arturia", Im also was given a exclusive license for a VST called "The Legend MK2", which I've already extensively played around with, which I've found is excellent for creating very deep bass sounds. I also at the the same time bought the full version of Kontakt, by Native Instruments, as before I was only using Kontakt Player, which is somewhat limiting in it implimentation. I was also loaned a Apple computer with Protools, a Digidesign HD system and a software bundle, so I've been slowly teaching myself to use Protools, but to tell you, I'm still a Cubase boy and don't really like Protools as much. 

Anyway I went to a second hand synthesiser shop in London three weeks ago on the way back from a meeting, where I went to look at a Sequenctial Circuits Prophet five, as I already own a Pro-1 and have in the past played with the Pro-5 and been really impressed, so I want to purchase a unit, obviously if the price was right (unfortately they wanted £4000 for it which they are worth £1500 tops, so I didn't get it), but I bumped into a guy which was called Alex, he was purchasing a bunch of vintage gear, and after getting talking to him he said he was puchasing the gear after their sucessful album under a group name called "Gunship", I at this point never had heard of them (I have now and think there music is excellent). I exchanged details after having a small synth jam, and then went home. A couple of days later I had a email from Alex and his band mate Dan asking if I wanted to do a collaboration, with I agreed apon, we then sent stems backwards and forwards and have at this point made four songs, but been basically been told thats it as they are currently working on a new album and they might have any spare time to collaborate until next spring time, where they said they would invite me up to their studio, to do a project together. Which all in all its a great honor, and I've had fun and look forward to doing something in the future with them. 

I'm currently doing a bit of a album with Fireball01e, called Genesis, which is going to be a classical rock album, which is sounding fantastic so far, I think he's going to do it as free album, which I really reckon from what I've heard so far, he might actually be able to make record sales out of it.

In other news, I am playing ten gigs with Exedist in December, but we are going under the new name The fireball Projekt, as we have had some legal issue with a group called "Dot.EXE", even though my earliest copyright and trade mark for our group, back in 1996, is not enough and it seems that we got told not to fight it by our lawyers as they are represented by Sony, and even we technically would be okay with taking them to court, we don't have the money. So Exe.Dist or  formally known as Unchained ExeDist, is nowlonger our name, as we really can't face up to Sony's legal team. Parlo said it was a good name, but it was their studio Lawyer, which told us otherwise. 

In the next week I will be releasing new versions of unreleased legacy files, which I will be doing using new technology, VST's and the like.
There is eight songs, all are really good and been played live on different circuits, but they are not good enough I feel to warrant a place on NG, so I will be redoing them. 

There maybe unfortunatly less live playing as my MIDIkeyboard keeps on reseting itself for some reason while working in Cubase and everytime (completly randomly by the way) it does it, I have to save up and reset Cubase, which has been a huge hassle and is getting to the point that I will have to record all live stuff outboard and upload stems into Cubase. This is a an absolute pain in the ass, and I'm really not sure what to do about it at the moment. also unfortunately the backup keyboard (CTRL49) has a broken mid "C" key and is pretty much unusable as a subsquence, both keyboards are both M-Audio and under six months old, so lesson learned M-audio products are not very sturdy and I unfornenatly can't get my money back only a repair of the product and been told would have to wait upto three months to get it back.