Studio Report: Digging for "Devil Shyt" & Rezoning the Archives
It’s been quiet here on the blog because it’s been loud in the headphones.
I wanted to drop a quick update on what’s currently cooking in the lab. If you follow my updates, you know I rarely stick to one lane. Right now, my creative brain is split down the middle between chasing a brand new, gritty sound and taking a massive nostalgia dive into my back catalog.
I’m deep in the engineering trenches right now, bouncing between FL Studio and Sound trap, trying to bridge the gap between future beats and past ghosts. Here is the lowdown on the current projects.
The Hunt: Untitled "Devil Shyt" / Phonkwave Album
The main focus right now is my next full-length project. It doesn't have a title yet, mostly because the vibe is mutating every day.
I’m leaning heavily into that darker, raw phonkwave sound—what I’ve been calling "devil shyt" in my project file folders. I want this album to feel like a cursed VHS tape you found in a gutter at 3 a.m. But more than just the aesthetic, I’m using this sound to exorcise some real demons.
The Themes: This isn't just about horror movie samples; it’s about real life. I’m focusing the concept around the darker, often unspoken realities of homosexual sex, the spiral of addiction, and the constant noise of mental health struggles. I want the music to sound like that headspace—manic, repetitive, and intense.
The Sample Game: To match those themes, the "digging" process has been intense. You can’t make authentic phonk with pristine, store-bought loops. I’m spending hours scrubbing through obscure media to find textures that fit this narrative.
I’m looking for dialogue snippets that sound paranoid or desperate, brass hits that sound blown out, and drum breaks that have natural dirt on them. I'm trying to find samples that mirror the chaotic energy of a mental break or the haze of a comedown. It’s tedious work, but when you find that one 2-second clip that anchors the emotion of a track, it’s worth it.
The Revamp Series: Vaporwave, Signalwave, and Drift
While the new album is about looking forward into the dark, my second project is about disassociation and looking back through a foggy lens.
I’ve been listening to my older albums—stuff I made years ago—and realizing they have good bones, but they need a different aesthetic to match where my head is at now. I’ve decided to compile and completely re-engineer these older tracks into a series of themed releases:
Vaporwave/Mallsoft: Taking the cleaner, melodic tracks and slowing them down by 30%, drowning them in cavernous reverb. It’s about that numb feeling—making the tracks feel like elevator music playing while you're having a panic attack in a dead mall.
Signalwave: These are the more experimental edits. I’m taking snippets of my old beats and layering them under heavy AM radio static and channel-surfing noises. It represents the "noise" in your head when you're struggling to focus—less about the beat and more about the atmosphere of a lost transmission.
Drift Phonk: Some of my older trap beats were too clean. I’m bringing them back into the DAW to aggressively compress them, add heavy distortion to the 808s, and throw Gross Beat on the hi-hats.
The Engineering Process: FL Studio vs. Sound trap
Pulling off these two very different vibes requires a specific workflow. I’ve been utilizing a hybrid setup that surprises some people.
The Sketchpad: Sound trap Believe it or not, a lot of these heavy ideas start in Sound trap. Because it’s cloud-based, I can lay down a basic drum pattern or chop a melody loop on my laptop when I’m not at my main desk. It’s perfect for capturing a mood instantly. If I'm feeling a certain way, I can throw a sample into Sound trap just to see if it loops correctly before the feeling fades.
The Heavy Lifter: FL Studio Once the skeleton is there, I export the stems and bring everything into the mothership: FL Studio. This is where the real sound design happens.
For the Phonkwave/Devil Shyt stuff, it’s all about Edison for precise sample chopping and the mixer. I’m using heavy compression on the master buss to glue the grimy samples together, and bit-crushing plugins to degrade the audio quality intentionally. The cowbells need to cut through the mix, so a lot of EQ work goes into carving out space for those high frequencies against the muddy bass.
For the Vaporwave revamps, the process is almost the opposite. It’s subtractive EQ—taking out the sharp highs—and using tape saturation plugins (like RC-20 or Reel-to-Reel emulators) to introduce wow and flutter. I’m using automation clips on reverb tails to make the tracks feel like they are breathing in a large, empty space.
What's Next?
I’m hoping to drop the first volume of the Revamp Series next month to hold you over while I finish the "devil shyt" album.
Stay tuned. Back to the lab.
Dhyrek
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