Neon Crickets

Template:Infobox song "Neon Crickets" is the eleventh track on the "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" instrumental release by Mike Shinoda.

Background

"Neon Crickets" 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.

"Neon Crickets" was a track made by Mike on March 29, 2020 under the title "CoronaJam 3.29.20", making it one of his oldest CoronaJams done via streaming. This when he was still calling his streams "Beat Making Demos" instead of "CoronaJams", but when he had already moved over to Twitch without time constraints on his streams.^[1]

When making the beat, Mike said, "So that drum sound was something I recorded with a Juno and then I printed to a cassette tape loop. And that's a cassette with basically just enough tape to go around once, and it plays the same thing over and over. So that's how it is. And then now we've got some keyboard."

Mike played with some of his new gear on this stream, saying, "I wonder if I should put 808 in. I've only used this a couple of times so far, I just got it, like a remake whole 808 drum machine. I've gotta figure out how to get the tempo first. If any of you guys know this machine, tell me what to do."

On April 29, 2020, Mike revisited four CoronaJams to rework them. The tracks were "KarmaKon" (unreleased), "Babble Bobble", "King Paprika" (unreleased), and "Neon Crickets."^[2] Mike said, "Today we're going to do a couple of things. I realized I had some of those early jams that were either low quality audio because they were on Instagram Live only, so if some of you guys missed those, you can see those today.

The beginning of "Neon Crickets" segues from the previous song on Dropped Frames, Vol. 1, "Session McSessionface."