"Songs tend to come to me in different ways. Sometimes I have to fight tooth and nail to hammer out a track until it feels right, but often times elements of the track just roll right off of my emotions. 'Mind Stopper' was one of those tracks. The melody that starts the track out came to me in its original form as I was driving home one night. The break beat rhythm and accompanying synth lines flowed from there. Spontaneous composing is where it's at!

Like Rave me (pure analog mix) this song was tracked completely within Orion. The instrumentation really came from experimenting with a bunch of different synth sounds. The TB-303 felt like a natural contender for the lead synth of the track, with its squelchy hits being quite suitable for the fast pace of the notes. The rest of the synths were built around and on top of the TB-303. I really experimented a lot with putting many different short synth riffs and fx in this track not only to give it a unique sound, but also to really characterize what the track was about. The bouncing back and forth from this synth melody to that with crazy hooks and multiple accompanying synth hits effects thrown in was an attempt to really make your neurons jump. My favorite part of making the track was putting in that staccato saw wave synth playing 16th notes that comes in at about 00:47-00:48. It was really the first time I got down and dirty with the phaser on a synth, and I was real happy how kicking on the phaser at the end of each measure gave so much character to the track. There was a lot going on in there behind the main melodies of the track, though, so to let you hear all of the different backing synths and rhythms I inserted the middle section. I cut the tempo in half here and played the individual accompanying sounds in a compounding fasion so you could see how everything fit together. With the TB-303 riff and the slow break beat percussion, I thought the backup sounds added a nice dark flavor to an otherwise bouncy rhythm -- two different faces of the same instrumentation.

Overall, I was really happy with the way the track turned out. It hasn't been one of the most commented on tracks from listeners, but the ones who are into it are REALLY into it. One of my buddies exemplifies this since after he listens to one of my new tracks he always says, 'Yeah, but it's no Mind Stopper.'"

e-effect, 11/19/07 (1st edit on 11/22/07)

"Change up."