Summary

The Void is a hard rock instrumental album and the third original album by MR4. This album features heavy use of guitars both clean and heavy alongside electronic synths. Officially released on November 26, 2019.

Liner Notes

When the original demo tracks for The Void were first created from 2009 to 2011, I knew almost nothing about music production. This was also the same time I began working on songs for Social Phobia. Tracks that sounded too heavy and were mostly comprised of guitars were excluded from social phobia with the intention of creating a hard rock album. My goal with this project was to be heavy on the guitars and let the synths support the music rather than drive it. This was also the first project of mine that included lyrics, but that component was eventually scrapped. The only remnants of this vocal endeavor are the names of the songs. This project collected dust for many years while I focused my attention on Social Phobia, Game Covers, and living life. In 2017, I finally dusted off the tracks with the intention of finishing the project, but much like the development hell of previous albums, I ran into problems. Problems consisted of bad file management and a potato of a computer that resulted in the loss of original recordings. I had bounced down all my individual instrument tracks with horrendous audio processing due to my lack of proper mixing experience, and no longer had access to original guitar recordings and synth sounds. My task going forward was to polish a turd because I refused to re-record all the tracks. 2017 mostly consisted of me altering arrangements and modifying the composition. 2018 was a non-stop mind-numbing venture of mixing the album again and again and again. I learned a lot during these years through the power of failure and in 2019 it was time for the final go of it. I removed all mixing efforts that were employed the previous year and had one final go of it from scratch. The audio improvements from the old mixes compared to the final version were well worth my endless hours of suffering. I feel the end result came out fairly decent considering the development hell that this project went through.