After going through a lot of life challenges, I feel I'm finally putting things together as an artist. One thing those really difficult experiences taught me is that I may not always be here, so I feel I need to share my art while I'm here. I'm not a pro artist, but I do love to create art and share it with people, and that matters, so I want to do that while I'm here.

This year, I'm working on a concept art project called Destiny Art, which is related to an album I want to release by September (maybe sooner!). I think there's power in the human voice, especially with singing, so I want to make it a mostly vocal, stripped down kind of album. I want it to combine storytelling and singing. Hopefully, I can tell some of my stories through songs, especially about how I feel about choosing and creating your own destiny.

The great thing about releasing music today is that you can always add more to it as you go along. If I want more instruments to accompany the DESTINY album later, I can always add that in the future. Right now, though, I want to release the album my way, and I feel really drawn to creating a mostly acapella experience.

The project is continuing here, and I've shared some of it at Newgrounds as well: Destiny Art Project

I wanted to offer some tips on how to mix an audio recording. I've heard a lot of great music here on Newgrounds, and I love how creative it is. You can make it sound even better when the song is mixed well.

A lot of times, when you're new to audio recording, you won't always know how loud the levels should be. In analog recording, if your sound levels are too high, that's not actually a bad thing, depending on the sound you want to create. If you want to have a distortion effect - think Jimi Hendrix or Nirvana's style of music - then you can create that through overloading the sound levels with analog recordings. But this kind of natural distortion is harder to replicate with digital recording.

If you want to replicate distortion in a digital recording, you have to be careful. If your sound levels are too loud, the volume can cause clipping. Clipping happens when a waveform is too loud, so it reaches its peak when it hits the top of the audio track bars (if you're using a visual audio recorder like Audacity or Wavosaur, you can tell when it clips). Once the sound is too loud, you lose digital information, which affects the quality of your recording. So you can imagine clipping as reaching the limit of your digital wavelength - once you hit that limit, you lose sound information.

If the clipping is really severe, you will hear an audible "clip!" kind of sound. If the clipping is minor, it's possible to repair the audio by either making the clipped part quieter (using a limiter to reduce the volume can help with this), re-recording the section that clipped, or using a "clipping remover" software. If there's too much clipping, sometimes you just have to start over and record a new track at a quieter volume.

In some genres, though, clipping is desired as part of the music's sound. If that's the case, keep the clipping in!

I hope these tips are helpful!

Hello, this is my first time joining NewGrounds, and I'm really excited to be here. I hope that I can share some interesting and beautiful art with you, and I really appreciate being here. I also would love to meet other artists and see what they're creating!

I've been making art for a long time, since I was a kid, and I'm continuing to open my mind to new artistic ideas everyday. I enjoy creating concept art, stories, music, and so much more! My favorite part about making art is expressing my inner world and ideas through it. Through art, I can share what I feel and how I see things in my own creative universe.

Thanks for reading, and I'm looking forward to sharing my art!