Chapter 10: The Birth of a Name
Monday, May 18, 2015
Michael woke up with a cracking sound in his neck. He had fallen asleep in his chair, his head resting on the desk. Morning light filtered through the blinds, drawing streaks of dust in the air. For a moment, he didn't know where he was.
Then he remembered it. The song.
He sat up, his heart pounding with a mixture of anxiety and excitement. The first thing he did was put on his headphones and look for the file from the night before. He needed to make sure he hadn't dreamed it.
He pressed play. And there it was. His voice. Raw, broken and absolutely real. The emotion was still intact, a perfect recording of his catharsis. He felt a wave of relief. It had not been a hallucination due to fatigue. It was real.
'Okay. I got it.'
Now came the part I'd been waiting for. The union. The moment when all the pieces came together. With renewed confidence, he activated the other tracks on the project: the ghostly guitar, the limping beat, the 808 bass.
He pressed play, waiting to hear the magic, the finished song.
And what he heard was a disaster.
It was a chaos of sounds that clashed with each other. The voice, which alone was so powerful, now sounded thin and dry, sitting awkwardly on the instrumental like an unwanted guest. It didn't fit.
The beautiful, ethereal melody of the guitar, which he had worked on for hours, was almost completely buried, drowned out by a muddy rumble that he hadn't noticed before.
And the low 808... he was the worst of all. It was not a clean and deep blow; It was an uncontrollable tremor that made everything else vibrate and sound confused.
He took off his headphones. The song in his head and the cacophony coming out of his laptop were two different universes.
The harsh reality hit him. Recording the parts was not the end. It wasn't even halfway there. He realized, with a bleak clarity, that now he had to make all those pieces live together, breathe as one. I had to "mix". And I had no idea how to do it.
The euphoria of the night before faded, replaced by a new heavy wave of frustration.
'Great,' he thought, staring at the screen full of clues that didn't talk to each other. 'I have all the pieces, but I don't know how to put the puzzle together.'
Michael leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. Frustration would be of no use to him. I had a problem, and like any other problem, I had to break it down into smaller parts.
One problem at a time, he thought, his inner voice cold and practical.
He leaned over the laptop and muted all the tracks on the instrumental. The guitar, the bass, the drums... everything disappeared. Now, in the project, there was only one active clue: that of her voice.
He pressed play. His raw voice filled his headphones, isolated from the rest of the world. It sounded honest, yes, but it also sounded... amateur. He could hear every little flaw.
He devoted himself to the most tedious and least glamorous task of production: cleaning.
He zoomed in on the blue waveform until the jagged line became a mountain range of peaks and valleys. I could see every breath, every little click of his mouth as it opened before he sang a line.
With almost surgical precision, he used the cutting tool. Snip. The sound of his breathing before a verse disappeared. Snip. The faint thud when he accidentally brushed against the microphone vanished.
He spent more than an hour in this process, going through the song second by second, removing every imperfection that wasn't part of the emotion. It was a cleaning job, like polishing a piece of jewelry in the rough to reveal its true shine.
When he finished, the vocal track was much cleaner. But it still sounded dry, as if I had recorded it in a closet... which was exactly what he had done.
He opened YouTube. In the search bar, he typed: "how to make voices sound ethereal ableton."
The first video was of a producer in a calm voice explaining the concepts of echo (delay) and reverb. Michael absorbed the information, fascinated. It was not about changing the voice, but about changing the space around it.
He went back to Ableton and searched his folder for pirated effects. He found a reverb plugin and applied it to the vocal track. At first, it was completely overdone. He turned the "size" knob all the way up.
He hit play. His voice, suddenly, sounded as if he were screaming in an empty cathedral, the echo was overwhelming and chaotic. 'No. Too much.'
He reduced the settings, again and again. Changed the "type" of reverb from "Cathedral" to "Big Room". He played with the control of "Wet/Dry," mixing the dry voice with its echo until he found the right spot.
It was no longer a cathedral. It was a large, empty room. A subtle echo that gave his voice a lonely and ghostly quality.
Then, he added a slight delay. He adjusted the time so that the echo repeated the last word of each sentence, like a whisper fading into the distance.
He heard the voice again. Now yes. It was no longer just a recording. It was an atmosphere. It was the sound of a ghost talking in an empty house. He had solved the first part of the puzzle.
…..
With the vocal track sounding like a ghost in an empty room, Michael felt a small surge of victory. Satisfied, he turned the instrumental tracks back on to listen to the full song.
And the frustration suddenly returned. It was a disaster again.
The voice and the guitar fought for the same space. Sounded... Muddy. Like two people trying to talk at once in a small room. Although he had cleaned up his voice, now he was lost in the melody of the guitar, and the guitar lost its clarity because of the voice.
'It doesn't work,' he thought, stopping the music. 'They're competing.'
He leaned back in his chair, his hands on the back of his neck, staring at the screen. I didn't understand the problem. Did I have to turn the volume down on the guitar? He tried. Now the guitar sounded too weak, without strength. Raise your voice? Now it sounded like he was screaming over the instrumental.
He returned to his routine. Their only source of knowledge. He opened YouTube.
This time, his quest was more specific: "to make the vocals fit into the ableton mix."
He clicked on a video. It was from a producer with a calm voice, explaining a concept Michael had never heard: subtractive EQ.
"Don't think about what to upload," the man said in the video. "Think about what to remove. If two instruments fight, it is because they are occupying the same frequencies. You have to decide which is the protagonist and make a little space for him in the other."
And then, he understood. It was not a question of turning up the volume of the voice. It was about lowering the volume of a part of the guitar. Create a space.
It was a concept so simple yet so brilliant that he felt like an idiot for not thinking about it.
He returned to Ableton, with a new energy. He opened an EQ plugin, not on the vocal track, but on the guitar track. He played the voice alone and looked at the spectrum analyzer, seeing which frequencies were the most prominent.
Then, with the mouse, he drew a small, narrow downward curve on the guitar's EQ, right in that frequency range. A small invisible valley.
He held his breath. He hit play to listen to everything together. He closed his eyes.
And there it was.
The difference was subtle, almost imperceptible, but it was everything. His voice was no longer "on top" of the guitar. I was inside her. The melody of the guitar seemed to embrace the voice, give it room to breathe without disappearing. For the first time, they sounded like one thing.
'God... it works.'
A new energy, born of pure discovery, ran through him. He no longer felt like an amateur guessing. He felt like a sculptor who had just discovered a new tool.
He spent the rest of the day in that trance. Coupling the base, instrument by instrument. He applied the same logic to the 808 bass and kick drum, cutting a small frequency in the bass so that the "hit" of the kick drum would be cleaner and more defined.
He adjusted the volume of the hi-hats, lowering them until they were just a rhythmic whisper that added texture without distracting. It was a dance of decibels, a game of millimeters.
He didn't realize that the afternoon turned into night. The light in his room changed from the orange of the sunset to the pale blue of the laptop screen. He did not eat. He did not rest.
I was completely lost in the process, listening to the same four-second loop for half an hour, adjusting over and over again a single note.
I wasn't just mixing sounds. He was building a world. And for the first time, I felt like I had the tools to do it right.
…..
Night fell. The only light in the house was the pale glow of the laptop monitor, painting Michael's concentrated face in shades of blue and gray.
I had lost track of time. The world had been reduced to a four-bar loop of "Ghost Boy" playing over and over again on his headphones.
He adjusted the delay of the voice. Listened. He returned it to its place. I listened again. It raised the volume of the hi-hats by a single decibel. Listened. He lowered it again by half a decibel.
I was trapped in a maze of tiny details. After so many hours, his ears were tired. The bass drum, which had sounded perfect to him an hour ago, now seemed too loud to him. Or perhaps too weak. I could no longer tell him apart.
'Sounds better? Or worse? I don't know anymore.'
He realized that he had lost all perspective. It was too close. Like a painter who tries to see his mural with his nose pressed to the canvas.
With a frustrated sigh, he stopped the music. The sudden silence was almost painful. He took off his headphones and stood up, his muscles protesting that he'd been in the same position for hours.
It needed a reset.
He went to the back porch and opened the sliding door. The cold night air hit him in the face, a welcome shock. The only sound was the chirping of crickets.
He sat down on the concrete step and pulled a cigarette from the crumpled pack in the pocket of his hoodie. He turned it on. The small flame lit up his tired face for an instant.
He stood there, in the dark, smoking quietly for ten minutes. He didn't think about the song. He didn't think about the mix. He just watched the smoke swirl under the porch light and dissipate into the night. He let his mind go blank.
He finished the cigarette, crushed it against the concrete and went back inside. The study room felt different now. Less like a torture cell and more like a workshop.
He sat back in his chair. This time I wasn't going to adjust anything. This was the final test.
He put on his headphones, took a deep breath, and dragged his cursor to the beginning of the song. He pressed the space bar.
The ghostly guitar began, with its almost imperceptible vinyl crunch. Then the beat came in, clean and defined, the 808 bass pounding with melancholy depth.
And then, his voice.
It was there. Not above the music, not below it. I was inside her. He floated in the space that had created him, telling his story.
For the first time, Michael didn't hear "the voice," "the guitar," "the bass." He didn't hear EQ cuts or reverb settings.
He heard the song.
A wave of emotion swept through him, so intense that it made his hands tremble. It was not a shout of victory. It was a silent euphoria. A deep, quiet feeling of "I made it."
When the last note faded, the silence that followed was not a vacuum. It was the silence of completion.
He stared at the screen, Ableton's timeline now full of clues and colors. He had taken the chaos and shaped it. He had taken a feeling and turned it into sound.
I was completely exhausted, physically and mentally. But underneath the exhaustion, I felt a buzzing, a vibration of pure satisfaction.
He had succeeded.
…..
With the song finished and exported as an MP3 file on his desktop, Michael opened the browser. Tiredness had been replaced by a last surge of adrenaline. It was the moment of truth.
He opened SoundCloud. He clicked "Create Account." The page asked for a username.
His fingers moved over the keyboard. He wrote "Michael." A small red message instantly appeared: "This username is already in use."
Sighed. He tried "Michael G". He was also caught.
He thought of Gray. 'Michael Gray.' He wrote the name and stared at it. But something felt wrong. 'No. It sounds... normal. It sounds like a Facebook profile. It is not this. It's not the name of this music.' He erased the letters.
I needed something more. Something that meant something. Something that represented what he was doing, this strange task of reconstructing echoes.
He leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling. His mind, exhausted, was blank. And then, like a blink, a memory of that first night. His father's dark studio. The neon cyan light.
He recalled the name of the System. The name I had assigned to him.
User: Michael Demiurge
'Demiurge.' The word rang in his head. He remembered its meaning from a philosophy class he had taken in his afterlife. The creator. The craftsman who takes pre-existing chaos and shapes it, creating a world.
His gaze drifted to the screen of his laptop, to the complex network of clues in Ableton. He had taken silence, pain, and memories and turned them into a song.
'Fuck, yes. That's it.'
It wasn't a thought of arrogance. It was a moment of cold, logical clarity. The name fit. It described the work.
He returned to the SoundCloud page. His fingers moved with a newfound certainty.
Michael Demiurge
The system checked. A small green check appeared. The name was available. He took it. He did the same on YouTube. In the silence of his improvised studio, at ten o'clock at night, that's how Michael Demiurge was born.
Now, the last step. On SoundCloud, he clicked "Upload." You selected the file from your desktop. The orange progress bar began to fill up.
The page asked for a title. He wrote ghost boy, all in lowercase. I asked him for an image. He chose a dark, blurry photo he'd taken with his phone on a foggy night.
I asked him for a description. Some labels. He left those fields blank. The song would have to speak for itself.
He clicked "Publish." The bar was completed. A simple message popped up: "Your track has been uploaded."
And that was it. His first message in a bottle, thrown into the vast and silent ocean of the internet.
He stared at the link for a second. He didn't feel the need to share it. He didn't wait to see if someone liked him, if anyone listened to him. He was too tired.
He closed the laptop. The click was a sound of finality. The humming of the fan stopped. Silence returned to the room.
He rose from his chair, his muscles protesting. He walked to his bed and dropped face down, with his clothes on. The world vanished instantly.
He fell asleep before his head touched the pillow. The first piece of his new universe was in place.
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