Apollo Euphoria

Interview

Musical Style

I really enjoy Electro/Complextro tracks in or outside of Audiotool—along with some occasional progressive house, melodic Dubstep, etc. However, my personal production style seems to be more geared toward Chill Progressive/Trance. I'd like to, however, begin making uplifting progressive house/trance and electro in the future, as that is my ultimate goal with production.

Musical Background

I think I have a quite extensive musical background. Growing up, I remember listening to country music. Perhaps it was my surroundings that accounted for that. Regardless, it didn't stick around for long. After my parents separated, my mom moved to literally the other side of the country in California. When I moved there with her, I didn't have much technology, so I turned to the radio for music. There happened to be one station that played music from the 70s and 80s that I really liked (also, mostly because I refused to conform to the contemporary standards of Top 40s music). A few of my particular favourites that I could actually recall included Earth Wind & Fire, Billy Paul, Rick James, you get the gist. Not long after, and completely contrasting the contemporary, my mom gave me and my sister this CD that had music on it from as early as the 1930s. Big Band, it was called. It was the music my grandfather used to listen to, and it really spiked my attention... it was just good-natured, great sounding, upbeat music that I found myself clinging to for awhile. Afterwards, Pandora relatedly got me into more jazz-like music. Michael Bluble's modern renditions of Frank Sinatra and whatnot. Following that—and actually one of the most pivotal points in my life, I got my hands on the pirated version of Minecraft. The game I absolutely loathed one day, and came to become an extreme enthusiast of the next. I can remember loading up a new world on my school laptop; when the music started playing, I already knew what the game had to offer. It took me a good while to stop playing the game altogether, but during my addiction to it, I learned as much as I possibly could about it; and getting to know C418—the musician behind all of the music in the game, documentary, etc.—and his background in music from the 2012 Mincecon Stream really enlightened me to become what I am today. As I look back on it, truly, if I hadn't gotten into Minecraft, I likely wouldn't be into producing either. From then, and after finding the SoundCloud platform, I started listening to some really generic dubstep just by searching the tag through the site. (Back then, they didn't even really have tags) Nonetheless, I found myself starting to become more engaged with music itself. With prior experience with various genres, SoundCloud became an outlet for me to find artists such as AdhesiveWombat, Sparx, and Sanixels, who—still to this day in my opinion, are some of the best electronic producers out there. Lastly, as you know, being into Minecraft I was pretty involved in the YouTube community regarding that select part of the platform for gamers. I often watched quite a few of CaptainSparklez's videos and he always has an outro with a really interesting track. So, one day, I deceided to find out who was the artist of the track. As it turns out, it was Stephen Walking's "Top Of The World" signed to a label called Monstercat that I began listening to promeniently for a good year or two. Only now am I trying to diverge from its confinement and listen to other artists, try finding them on my own. It's difficult, but worthwhile in the end.

Started making music

I've been producing music since—really when I purchased a horrid toy keyboard after receiving a gift card for my birthday. I think I was about 7 or 8, but I remember messing around with different songs, chords... just very basic... crap in general. Soonafter, however, being extremely curious and enticed by what I was hearing, and wanting to improve it, I began trying to make my own music. Looking up free ways to do so online, I found Soundation and started dabbling with that. I probably won't go into too much detail about that, but I mean, if you really want to damage your brain, I guess you could check out the site and search "MineatronOrigin" (Which was my Minecraft name). My mom started picking up on my ear for music and tried to harness it, putting me in piano lessons early on. Unfortunately, I didn't take most of the opportunities seriously and ended up loosing them. As life goes I suppose. However, it wasn't until last year that I started being pretty much 100% dedicated to production, on Audiotool especially.

On Audiotool

Right after getting fed up with Soundation, I searched a little harder and found Audiotool... That's really all there is to it. Nothing too extravagant. Of course, when I first discovered Audiotool though, I didn't even know there was a community to interact with, so most of my first tracks went unnoticed as I didn't bother to tag anything.

Side Projects

GenesisNetwork is my Audiotool-based music network that is working everyday to find and showcase other artist's talent on the platform and bring out the best in each artist providing feedback and in-depth analysis of their tracks. Of course, the network is still in it's early stages and we're still establishing the groundwork. However, once we're fully up and running, I would have also acquired a team to maintain it (I'm currently the only one working on it at the moment). How it works is artists submit tracks to us through email or rabbit and we determine whether or not they made it in. If they did, they will either be in the current or previous wave. If they didn't, we will do our best to provide constructive feedback on the track they submitted, and they can try as many more times as they'd like. Each wave in Genesis consists of about ten artists and each artist must release at least one track of their own (not including collaborations) before the wave is complete. Once a wave is finished, previous artists that joined are not allowed to release through Genesis again. There will be a reunion for those who released previously. At the end of a wave, there is a remix competition of every track released through Genesis to determine future artists and to engage the community.

Message to the community

Keep working hard and help each other out. I believe there are amazing people out there waiting to be heard, they honestly cannot do it without your help. Not only that, but I believe we can make this community more connected and a powerful resource for producers across the globe. It already is, in some ways, but there's always room for improvement. You don't have to do something huge to help out either, it could be as simple as giving helpful feedback on a track, regardless of the quality mainly because you don't know really who's behind it. They may just be wait for the opportunity to become something better. I remember being that person.