"If you made me sit down and pick one track out as my favorite, this would be way high in the running along with sonophobia and Inside Out. This is just one of those songs that achieved exactly what I set out to do. Plus, the amount of variation and energy in the track is really what I want to hear in all of my songs. Does the name say it all, though? Keep reading to find out!

The bassline in the track really carries your energy from start to finish, but it's hard to pinpoint one sound as the defining factor in this face paced track. One sound that really stands out right from the outset is the ascending and descending frequencies of the mechanical yell sound that starts out the track. That's actually a mech shout hit from the XP-30 that I loaded into one of the OrionPro soft samplers and tweaked to get it to sound like someone yelling. The other sound fx you hear are all e originals as well, including the fireworks that come in around 1:31 for the first time. I always thought those sounds made that breakdown section lots of fun. The synth itself is actually a conglomeration of 3 synths from my XP-30. I was really into that buzz synth at the time, and it found its way into a lot of my tracks.

The song structure itself was very challenging to write. If you think about it, there's really just one melody for the whole track. The baseline and synths all follow it playing the same rhythm through the whole song. This presented an interesting problem in that you don't want to your audience to get bored listening to the same thing over and over again...even if they know they're tuned into electronic music! This let me throw in tons of crazy hooks, builds and sequence variations between the main section. I don't have a favorite, but check out the intro starting at 00:00, the first build up at 01:27, the break beat section at 03:21, and the bassline breakdown with subsequent build up at 03:58 and the third (!) build up at 05:25. Crazy.

The end of the track actually wasn't written as an ending at all. It was my first attempt to write the outro to one track and the intro to another simultaneously. Now, this is something different than the mixing that DJ's do live. A DJ mix implies that the two tracks are already complete. What I was doing is writing the conclusion to one track and using it as inspiration for the development of an entirely new track. The Hampton Megamix was actually my first successful attempt at this. The three tracks you hear in that megamix were actually written sequentially. The idea for all of that came with 'bumpin'' even though I never completed the second song...yet!

'bumpin'' always makes me look hard at myself as a musician and producer. I'm the type of musician who is never satisfied with a track. It doesn't matter how much time I put into it, there's always one more tweak to make in the mix or one more note to try for a synth. Believe me when I tell you that I have to actively cut myself off from my computer in order to finalize a mix for mastering. It's something I've learned to do quite well, but I still struggle every time. Each time I listen to the final version of a song, I'll get to those parts in the song and say, 'Man, I wish I would've done this.' Even when I find these little abberations in my songs, though, in general the song as a whole always seems have the impact that I want it to. 'bumpin'' is one track that exemplifies this music making process for me. Each time I listen to it, I always would loved to go back and fix the bassline levels to sit in the mix a little bit better now that I have studio monitors, and I think I could make a better lead since my current synth programming is way better than it was back then. In the end, though, this track captured what I thought was the essence of hard trance about midway through the new millenium, and each time I hear it I feel that it lives up to it's name."

e-effect, 12/05/07