Session McSessionface

Template:Infobox song "Session McSessionface" is the tenth track on the "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" instrumental release by Mike Shinoda.

Background

"Session McSessionface" is a song by Mike Shinoda made during the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic.

In March 2020, the global pandemic created by the COVID-19 coronavirus caused communities to quarantine at home. During this time, Mike Shinoda decided to start live streaming online and inviting fans to watch him create new instrumental music.

"Session McSessionface" was a track made by Mike on April 20, 2020 under the same working title.^[1] This CoronaJam was made with new sounds Mike had found from Native Instruments.

Mike introduced the session by saying, "I got a couple of new plugins, a couple of new things. I'm using a couple of those sounds today, shout out to Native Instruments. I might try some other things in some other days, you know how it is. So I started with this little thing here, got that little compression. What I'm doing there is I put this kick, I side chained it to a compressor on the whole group of sounds on this page. So the orange one, these are drum sounds and the yellow batch of stuff is basically keyboard sounds. The keyboard sounds, the whole group of them, I put a compressor on that and side chained it, so every time that kick hits you can hear the sound kind of sucks out of the other track. so that's a technique you guys can use. You can use it a lot in EDM but I don't know if that's what J. Dilla and guys like that would have used but you can hear, whether it's over compression and turning the kick up really loud, or whether it's really side chaining, you can get that kind of Dilla effect."

He added, "I figure we'd do a little sloppy beat like this. I put the quantize on automatically, so you can set Maschine to automatically quantize. If you want to turn that on or off, you can go to preferences, turn it on or off while you're recording or playing. It's actually interesting, while you're playing, it does it - I have that turned off. But there's a little grid icon down here in the corner, you can turn that off and you can play without the quantize on so it won't put your stuff perfectly on the beat. I don't want it perfectly on the beat today."

The title of the track "Session McSessionface" is from a suggestion by a fan to Mike. This style of name is a popular online meme of naming new things. In March 2016, an online poll for a British research vessel quickly grew attention due to the popularity of the name "Boaty McBoatface." While the British didn't elect to name the ship with that name, the meme grew over time to influence such names as "Horsey McHorseface" for a horse in Australia, "Trainy McTrainface" for a train in Sweden, "Ferry McFerryface" for a ferry in Australia, and so on. Mike now has added his take on this meme with the title "Session McSessionface." He said, "Yeah I really did call the session "Session McSessionface." You guys put that in my head, you guys came up with the name. I really did it."

April 20, 2020 was a day that Mike's Internet was notoriously bad with Spectrum, which influenced him naming the album "Dropped Frames." He said, "My Internet today is not good. I shouldn't say today - right now, this morning, it's garbage. But we're going to just roll with it. I figure I'll just start and if it gets terrible, then it gets terrible."

Mike held a listening party on Twitch for "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" on July 10, 2020, the day of the album's release.^[2] About "Session McSessionface", he said, "My favorite name of any session that we've done is Session McSessionface. It's my favorite name."