Crystalina

Template:Song "Crystalina" is the second track on the Dropped Frames, Vol. 2 instrumental release by Mike Shinoda.

Background

"Crystalina" 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.

"Crystalina" was a track made by Mike on April 24, 2020 under the working title "4.24.20 Crystaline Jam."^[1]

Mike introduced the session by saying, "Today we're going to do something different. Sometimes when I'm cooking, when I'm in the kitchen, I think because I've been doing so much instrumental music here on the stream, I've been listening to a lot of instrumental music. I was listening to old DJ Shadow, hence the kind of droning minor key piano thing. And Dilla, Uncle. And I thought, "Let's do something like that." Like there was a moment in the 90s I think when hip hop, like electronic DJs and producers started going into hip hop and taking elements and making it almost like this psychedelic soundscape. So if you haven't checked out "Endtroducing..." by DJ Shadow, one of the classic records, incredible. My personal favorite is the record after that, which is called "The Private Press." It's so dope. There were groups like, going from that to like, it influenced Portishead, it influenced Massive Attack. Actually, they were more influences. So Portishead, Tricky. So I wanted to just kind of vibe on this and we'll go off on this thing to something else I'm sure."

About the session, Mike said, "Here's our session today. This isn't just a piano, there's also a Reaktor patch, or rather a Reaktor sound going on underneath it. There's this plugin called Rounds. So this guy is nice for creating a little inconsistency. So if you've got something droning or consistent, this one is cool because you can make like a weird number of steps in the sequence and change them to be less consistent. So if you can imagine, we've got like an 18 step or 16 step thing and then I put a 17 step thing over it, it's going to angulate in a more inconsistent way. Your ear won't be able to follow it I don't think. So you put that underneath something that is more droning and you create a little more inconsistency. So we'll start with that. I also made this little drum loop thing, which we can get a little vibe with. So that's kind of the start of a good thing, I thought. And then we do 808s. I was also thinking like maybe doing it non on a like a four count, maybe like a six count or something like that. I don't know if our loop is going to work great over that, but we'll find out, won't we? Also let me open up another loop thing actually, we'll go back to some of the sounds.com stuff. Maybe we need a fill actually. "