Duckbot

Template:Song "Duckbot" is the third track on the "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" instrumental release by Mike Shinoda.

Background

"Duckbot" 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.

"Duckbot" was a track made by Mike on May 5, 2020 under the working title "5.5 Children's Day." This CoronaJams was done when Mike was still calling the jams "Beat Making Demos" before he changed over to "CoronaJams", but it was after he had switched to Twitch from Instagram Live.^[1]

The demo was titled Children's Day because that was the day Mike did the stream. Wikipedia explains, "Children's Day is a Japanese national holiday which takes place annually on May 5 and is the final celebration in Golden Week. It is a day set aside to respect children's personalities and to celebrate their happiness. It was designated a national holiday by the Japanese government in 1948."^[2] Mike said that his family celebrates Children's Day.^[3]

Mike said, "So I found some cool sounds and that's where we're starting." Halfway through, "Let's do this, we've gotta get this thing really pumping. So there's a Multiband Dynamics, OTT is the plugin. Listen to how nasty that is."

The name came about because Mike was working in Maschine with patterns and said, "We'll call this the duck, the duck bot, the duckbot. That's the ticket." He added, "This is the weirdest jam so far Hey Cupcake says. I think this duck rave is the next level. That's my part right there, the real basic part. You don't usually get a 105bpm, I don't know, what genre has the 105bmp sound like this? Tropical House? Chemical Brothers, oh that's a good call out, I like that."

May 5, 2020 was a day that Mike's Internet was notoriously bad with Spectrum, which influenced him naming the album "Dropped Frames." He said, "I'll tell you what, today we're really testing the quality of the new streaming setup. I changed some settings this weekend and man, today's Internet is garbage. And believe me, I've called the ISP and tried to get a better situation. It's going to take a while for them to do that. However, I did some research and I changed some settings on my broadcasting software and I shut down Periscope and Facebook Live so hopefully it's better. If it drops, it drops, but this is the big test."

Mike held a listening party on Twitch for "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" on July 10, 2020, the day of the album's release.^[4] About "Duckbot", he said, "So this one, I called it Duckbot because of you guys in the chat when I was making these sounds, you thought they sounded like ducks, like digital quacking. Yeah, digital quacks, oh it's so good. This one took me a while to mix. I feel like I did a lot of different mixes on this one just to kind of get it right. But it came together. Somebody said Mr. Oizo... it's totally a Mr. Oizo sound for sure. Flat Beat, Flat Eric is the character's name. Dude it's weird how things like that influence you over time, like, I feel like Flat Eric, the character from that video, I feel like he in the very back of my subconscious influenced Boris. Mr. Oizo looks like Mark Romanek or something, he looks like he's producing indie rock records and directing films on the side."