Summary

Generation 4 is an electronic album by MR4. The album comprises thirteen electronic instrumental tracks that mostly resemble the stylings of soundtrack music. Some tracks make use of orchestral samples while others are strictly electronic in their instrumentation. Officially released on November 26, 2020.

Liner Notes

All the original demos for Generation 4 were created in 2011, the same time Game Covers and The Void were started. None of the songs would be touched until many years later. Once The Void was finished in 2019, I went through all of my remaining demos to see if any of them were worth salvaging. There ended up being several really cool tracks that I felt were worth my time to complete, so I selected thirteen of them that would eventually become Generation 4. The title of the album comes from this project being my fourth album of original music. Every album up to this point has been a learning experience in its own right. For this album, the learning experience was switching to a new DAW that I will be using for the foreseeable future, Studio One. I have been using Pro Tools since 2009 and the only reason for that was because the software was considered an "Industry Standard". My experience with Pro Tools was always negative. It was a bit too proprietary for my liking and I spent just as much time trouble shooting the software as I did composing music. After a decade of putting up with it, I felt the industry-standard argument no longer had any relevance to me. After some research on possible options, I ended up going with Studio One. It is the youngest of all the common DAW programs and appeared to be very innovative. After using the program extensively, I'd say it was the right choice. I exported everything I had out of Pro Tools and into Studio One. In 2020 I set a final deadline for the 26th of November, because that just seems to be the day of the year that I like to release projects. There were still a lot of changes and additions being made to the structure of the songs. I was now making use of Studio One’s virtual instruments along with manipulating the already recorded tracks that were created with Pro Tools. After the creative process was complete, it was time to move onto the dreaded mixing stage. The mixing process went by a lot smoother than previous projects because I had learned what not to do. This album was by far the easiest for me to finish compared to the nightmares that came before it. This is the first album I’ve created that I’m able to listen to without feeling a sense of failure. Although this project started off as a B-sides type of ordeal, it has ended up being my favorite album to date. Generation 4 also represents the end of everything I first started working on in the early 2010s.