DJ Frankie Holmes

I have been amazed with music as far back as I can remember and I have been composing and producing my own songs for about 15 years now. I've been very careful to preserve every single song I've ever written going back to about 1999. What maybe makes my music collection on MadeLoud so interesting, is that you can hear every single one of my songs, there are almost 200 songs here. So you can hear my music skills progressing over the years. What's most amazing to me, is to hear some of my first songs from 10 or 15 years ago, and it's almost as if they are just as good or better in some ways, than the music I'm putting out today. There seems to be some natural ability in me, where I've always had these songs planned out my whole life, and it's not that I get much better at writing music, just that I'm trying to get all of these songs out of my head and into digital music form. I spent the first 20 years of my life playing around on the piano and any time I found a piano I would sit down and experiment for as long as I could. Still, I do not play any musical instruments and cannot read or write music notation. I have virtually no formal education in music, it's just that I've been listening very carefully to all the music I can get my hands on over the years, making mental notes and studying all the different genres or styles of music. I am a virtual artist and virtual musician that works in the digital sound medium. The computer is my music calculator. If I couldn't have programmed my songs with a computer, then I would not have been able to produce any music at all really.

My music is about all the night clubs around the world that I have never visited, all the rave parties I have never been to, and it's about my own experiences in life. All of my music is an attempt to reach out to other people and communicate something about my feelings and my desire for a better world. More importantly, I'm trying to express the joy and times of happiness I've had in my life as a musical waveform, literally. My music is for having fun, making some serious noise, and exploring the mysteries of human experience and consciousness in this Universe. I write music because I like the way it challenges me intellectually and I like how I can communicate all my emotions and create whole new worlds through electronic dance music. The evolution of my music is a spiritual awakening and a high degree of mastery with my audio tools. I have always tried to increase the level of complexity in my songs over the years. My work ethic when it comes to music is very, very strong and I do not give up until I have made a song that I feel is up to the high musical standards I set for myself.

Honestly, I really don't want to collaborate with other musicians much. I have a very specific vision for my music and for each song and I work best by myself. Now, I have done quite a few remixes and some are of major artists, some of them are authorized even. Of course I can't upload those remixes to MadeLoud because of copyright issues and I think that's too bad really because the remixes I have done turned out incredibly good. I've downloaded some free acapellas of a girl from the Netherlands known as 3v3sound, and made instrumentals to remix her vocals. I made three songs with 3v3sound's vocals and these songs really show off my skills in creating an instrumental track for a vocal performance and my ability to make vocal tracks sound really good and shiny. You can hear these remixes on MadeLoud in my "Brand New Singles - 2013 -" album. They are called "Amsterdam Love", "Dreams of Romance", and "Feel My Heart" all featuring 3v3sound of course. I suppose they would be considered collaborations, though only virtually. I have never written any songs with another artist sitting next to me. Listening to my music you would probably think I'm the most happy go lucky carefree person in the world and I'm even amazed when I listen to my own music and hear how happy and positive it is. I guess that's because most of the time I write music to try and cheer myself up as best I can.

My biggest challenge may be a technical one. Just as I was coming into my own and really mastering the art of song writing, I lost most of my music studio gear. I no longer have speakers and a sub woofer, and for the past 3 years the only way I can write music is with a pair of headphones. Actually, half the songs from 2011 and all the songs from 2012 were written with a pair of $20. Philips ear bud headphones. Now that I have a pair of $40. JVC Exxplode headphones, I'm very surprised to hear how well all those songs from 2012 turned out when all I had was the ear buds. It's quite amazing. So I have had to put my studio back together one piece at a time, mostly using free software synthesizers now and drum loop samples that I manipulate for the sake of making my music original and not just using loops other people have made. I try to manipulate all the sounds in my songs to make them my own sounds. Now I take all my songs out to my makeshift car stereo to test the performance of them, because it is really hard to monitor the sound stage and placement of sounds within the mix with just headphones, especially inexpensive headphones like I have. So yes, the greatest challenge for me for a long time has been trying to get a million dollar sound out of my studio when all together my gear is worth less than $3000.

Well, here are the current statistics on my music, as best as I can calculate them. In the last 5 years or so, my songs have well over 100,000 plays and probably around 10,000 free downloads world-wide. I have about 200 different songs online at 30 different websites for a total of 15 hours of original music online. I made it a point to put as much of my music as possible on every single website that allows unsigned artists to upload their music to a website for free. I have spent many thousands of hours in my studio composing / engineering / mixing / mastering / and producing my music. I have also done all the promoting and advertising of my music on more than half a dozen electronic music forums, posted about 100 "tweets" to my 400 or so followers on twitter, and sent out thousands of e-mails about each new song as I put them online. I have very little time to relax and enjoy myself. It takes many hours through the night and into the morning to finish a song usually, and then right after that I have to start uploading to the 20 or so websites that I actively manage my music on. The other 10 websites my music is on, I leave alone and no longer update them or make changes. It can take up to 5 days for me to get a song uploaded to all the websites. I usually finish a song in about 10 - 15 hours, but occasionally I will spend a few days or even a week on one song.