About us
Everything there is to know about donkerbot, as well as everything else.
Table of Contents
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Introduction
donkerbot is an anonymous indie artist/song writer/producer from North-West England. We make electronically generated music, but we're combining it with different genres. You may find rock next to dance music. The name 'donkerbot' comes from the Dutch word donker, meaning dark, and the English bot, short for robot, because all the music is electronically generated.
Our main tools of the trade are SunVox, an awesome modular tracker program, reminiscent of tracker software from the 1990s. We write all our music using SunVox, and we also use it to mix the tracks. Some minor additional editing is done in Audacity.
If we require vocals to be sung, we use Synthesizer V, but in some cases we hire real singers to do the dirty work for us. On some songs, we use spoken word as lyrics, for this we mainly use LibriVox recordings, because these are in the Public Domain.
donkerbot is not to be taken too seriously. We don't, so why should you? We're more of an art project than anything else. Our goals are to make music that people will enjoy. To spread happiness and love and give people something to smile about. We're not here to become absolutely filthy rich. We don't agree with that idea. If we would make a substantial amount of money from distributing our music, then that will be reinvested in our community. As musicians, we understand the happiness one can get from making music and writing songs, and we will help spreading this joy with others. That's one of the reasons why we want to collaborate with others, the more opportunities there are for people to be happy making music, the better.
But we also encourage people to have fun creating other things with our music. We give permission for anyone to play our songs live, as long as donkerbot is credited as song writer. We also give permission for people to use our music in online video productions, as long as donkerbot is credited as artist. We would love to see a community of people enjoying our music, working with our music, and contributing to the community and to our music.
The reason we wish to remain anonymous is because we don't want to be associated with work we do outside of donkerbot. This is a standalone project and must be seen separate from anything else. We're not an artist to be seen, we're here to be heard. Well, our music anyway, that is.
History
donkerbot's early history goes back to 1994, when we began making music. With limited tools and knowledge, not much came out of this initially, but the seed was planted. In the years following, donkerbot would go on to create dozens of songs. In the early 2000s, some of these were played on a local radio station, and the original song files for the tracker software were uploaded onto a GeoCities website. Unfortunately, when GeoCities was shut down, this website was deleted and all files were lost. Efforts to retrieve the files have not yielded any results.
In those early days, the name donkerbot was not in use. We were not anonymous, and published our music under our real names. The name donkerbot was not invented until many years later.
With the level of music production quality, and the lack of resources, writing music did not seem like a logical step forward in donkerbot's career progression. We chose a completely different career, and were busy trying to make a name for ourselves. This is what ultimately led to the original music files being lost to the Geocities deletion. We simply were not active in that field anymore, the website had been abandoned and it just didn't seem all that important to try and save the files. We also didn't use the same software anymore, so it wasn't an issue.
It wasn't until the first half of the 2010s that donkerbot began making music again. At first under a different name. This was already a pseudonym by this point, but it was one with an extensive online history. At this point, we were making music with tracker software called SunVox. The earliest song written was Ballade of suicide, which was completed on 4 May 2015.
Ballade of suicide was written for a different purpose though. donkerbot was writing a story at that time, which included a scene in a pub, where they played what was described as 'the worst possible song ever made'. Intrigued by this idea, donkerbot imagined what this song would sound like, and so we started writing the song. Its original title was Womble Nation, a play on the artist name Zombie Nation because donkerbot was inspired by their 1999 song Kernkraft 400 when programming the synthesizer module. The lyrics came from a public domain reading of the G.K. Chesterton poem A Ballade of Suicide.
This song was so different from our other songs, that we decided not to release it straight away, and indeed, we continued releasing music under our regular pseudonym. However, we found the process of writing a song with such a simple structure quite enjoyable, and so, on 7 May 2015, the second ever donkerbot song, I wish they all could be Worcestershire girls, was completed. This song was named after the Beach Boys song California Girls, even though the two songs have nothing in common.
History (In Stereo)
As donkerbot was quite happy with these two songs, it was clear that we wanted to write a full album of similar songs. The idea was simple: write a song with the simplest structure, easy chord progressions and underwhelming melody. It seemed it should be easy to produce twelve such song, enough to fill an album. The third song to be written on 11 May 2015 was originally named 'Paco Bell', a play on the composer Pachelbell and the American fast food chain Taco Bell. With lyrics from another public domain recording of the Edward Bulwer-Lytton poem When Stars Are in the Quiet Skies, this song was renamed Stars. This song wasn't released in this form, it was later edited and given the new name Stars 2.
On 1 October 2016, we finished our song Vertical deflection. The first time we wrote our own lyrics. But as we can't sing, and we didn't know anybody who could sing, we had Apple's text-to-speech read the lyrics. This worked, but we later learnt that it probably isn't legal to use Apple's voices for commercial productions, so on 1 April 2020, not long before our first album was released, we changed the voice to that of Google's, which does allow commercial use
At this point, we were still releasing music under our own name, so it took a while for things to start rolling again. It wouldn't be until 4 March 2017 that we last worked on the song titled 'Running Furrows'. This song, however, has not been released. The version from 2017 is incomplete, but we have a newer version which is finished and may be included on our next album to come out in 2022.
On 11 April 2018, we finished our song Bubbly girl. Its title was slightly altered, we can't disclose the original title for personal reasons. It was written after we had been chatting online for half an evening to a woman. It was apparently significant enough of an event to write a song about.
Our song Zoo in Chester was finished on 6 June 2018, after we had visited a certain zoo in Chester a week prior. For legal reasons, we can't confirm or deny which zoo specifically the song is about, it could be any one of them. There are various different versions in existence of this song, the main difference being the vocal track. As stated earlier, we can't sing. Although we had success in getting Google to speak our lyrics, when we tried editing this track, and applying a vocoder filter, we got some rather unusable results. It wasn't until we discovered Synthesizer V in 2019 that we managed to produce a vocal track we were happy with. It is unfortunate Synthesizer V only had the one English voice, Eleanor Forte. If they'd had a decent male English voice, and maybe some other male and female voices, we would've likely purchased a license. It is also unfortunate that since the software has updated, Eleanor Forte is no longer available, and a trial version of the new software is also not available. This has consequences for our future use of the software, but we aren't there yet, we're still in the past.
We felt that the songs were gaining some complexity. We wanted to make something simpler, and we wanted to add some variety to our album. So, on 20 July 2018, at 200 BPM, Liverpool Lime Street was born. It used field recordings we made whilst on a train to Liverpool Lime Street. The song is originally only half its length, but we doubled it, to make it more annoying.
Then, it took until 22 January 2019 for the next song, In mono to be finished. The original title is In Mono (Where Available), but on uploading the song to our publisher, the last part was stripped for unknown reasons. It changed the meaning of the title, so while officially the song is called In mono, we would prefer it if it was known amongst fans as In Mono (Where Available).
With a good few songs ready for our first album, we started compiling it, and finishing some loose thread songs we had lying around. We also took the opportunity of writing a song for the SunVox 2020.02 Compo. We finished at 22nd place (out of 46 submissions), incidentally. This was the instrumental version of our song Wild rocket.
And so, in May 2020, a full five years after we wrote the first song for the album, we had managed to gather twelve tracks to be released under our official new name, donkerbot. And with one last-minute addition of the song Protect the NHS, on 5 June 2020, our album In Stereo was officially released.
For the sake of completeness, it must be noted we initially had planned to name the album Wish Upon A Star, after two of the songs on the album, which would be the 1st and last track respectively. Things changed.
History (Save Chester Zoo)
When the album came out, the year 2020 was in full swing. And as the UK had entered a lockdown, people began to hear stories that businesses were beginning to struggle with the lack of customers. One such business was Chester Zoo.
The news that the zoo's future might be at risk actually came out at nearly the same time as the release of our album. As we are animal lovers ourselves, and as we have enjoyed visiting Chester Zoo in the past, we wanted to show our support. And we did that by offering all proceeds from our album to be donated to the Save Chester Zoo fundraiser, for as long as the pandemic lasted. We announced these plans on 5 June, the day our album launched, in a YouTube statement.
Sadly, not a lot of people cared that we took five years of work and decided we would not reap any rewards off of it for as long as would be necessary. In the first year, we made $2.52 on the album. Not even enough to be withdrawn.
However, we will keep our word. The pandemic still isn't over, so we're still counting. And when we reach a point where we can say things have gone back to normal, we will still donate the full proceeds of our album to Chester Zoo. However little it may be.
History (The singles)
As the pandemic lingered on, so new rules and guidelines were implemented. One of these was the requirement to wear a face mask when going to shops. This led to many people buying different designs of face masks. We saw people used it as an opportunity to still be fashionable. And we imagined what it would be like to fall in love with someone, simply based on what face mask they were wearing.
This fantasy led to our first single, Face Mask Love, being released on 4 October 2020. After having worked with Synthesizer V as vocal generator, we really wanted a male voice on this track. Eleanor Forte is a female voice, and while we had experimented with lowering the voice on our track Wild rocket, we weren't overly satisfied with the results.
So we took the opportunity to experiment with something we hadn't used before, Fiverr. Fiverr is a website where people can offer whatever service they can do, and people in need of that service can then hire these people to do that for them. In our case, we needed someone who could sing our song for us. And the person we chose was Oussama. We believe he did a great job, and we're very pleased with how the track turned out.
After the album came out, we had plans to quickly write an entirely new album. While the country was in lockdown, we technically had time for it. This album was going to be called Christmas In Lockdown. However, things changed. We had ideas for Christmas themed songs to include, but we couldn't quite find the right sounds. So we ended up with two complete songs and some unfinished ones, we decided to just release what we had as a single. We changed the title to be Let It Be Known—It Is Christmas Time, and the track Christmas In Lockdown became the B side. We went back to using Eleanor Forte from Synthesizer V as our lead vocalist.
We also edited a Radio Edit of the song, which we sent to various stations across the region, as well as BBC introducing. We're still waiting to hear back from them.
Funnily enough, the B side was what we made an official music video for, rather than the A side. The single was officially released on 12 November 2020.
As 2020 came to an end, a new competition would be held on the SunVox forums, the SunVox Compo 2021.02. We didn't have a lot of time, as since December we actually had regular day jobs to worry about. So unfortunately we didn't get to write the best possible song that we could. We submitted an 'instrumentalish' version of our song Karen Does A Puzzle. It didn't do too bad, as it finished at the 33rd place (out of 65 entries). On 22 April 2021, the single was released. The B side is a lower tempo song Be With Me.
Due to the fact we've included a Radio Edit, as well as an instrumental version, the single has four tracks in the release, which makes some music services believe it's an EP release. This is of course not the case. There are three different versions of the same song, and one B side. We refer to the release ourselves as a single release because of that.
As the song was hastily composed, little thought went into writing the lyrics. We literally wrote about the first thing that came to mind, which happened to be a young woman named Karen, who likes to do puzzles, and posts videos of herself doing these puzzles on YouTube. Of course we can not disclose the full identity of this woman, whether or not she is even named Karen, and if she even is a woman at all (not that we'd assume anyone's gender anyway). She may even be entirely fictional. As such, there is no point in discussing her identity, and we would urge everyone not to attempt to contact anyone who they might think is the person in the song.
We could give more detail about for whom the B side, Be With Me was written. However, this song is not about one person. We wrote it with various people in mind; people that we know, or knew, in our daily lives.
September 2021 onward
The present is ever-changing. We could keep updating this page to include more and more history, but it's a better idea to call everything before September 2021 the past, and everything since September the present. From this point, history will be written on our website donkerbot.neocities.org. If you need to know anything that happened after September 2021, check our News Archive page.
Our current plans for the future include the following. Nearer the end of this year, probably in November, we will be releasing a new Christmas single. The current working title is Christmas Again, but this might change if we decide to push another song as the A side. Either way, the song Christmas Again is one that will be released for Christmas 2021.
Another song we have ready to be published is titled What They Say. For this song, we hired Fiverr artist Fede Elías as vocalist. We're pleased to say he did a brilliant job, and delivered absolute quality. The plan is to release this song as a single, but also as one track of a new album.
We're currently working on a music video, which as proven to take a bit more time than initially planned. And now the submission deadline for our Christmas single is getting closer, there is not enough time to release What They Say before our Christmas single. It is likely the single will be released early 2022, with the album hopefully early in the second half of 2022. We do have several more songs ready to be included on this album, but a little more work will be needed before they're ready to be included.
Future plans and goals
We have several ideas for the future, but it must be said that none of this is set in stone. As experience has taught us, things change.
As Synthesizer V has seen a new release, that currently doesn't have Eleanor Forte available as voice bank, we're stuck with an older version of the software. No English male voice exists either. Although a moderately successful male voice can be approximated by lowering Eleanor's voice, it requires additional EQing, and we're left with a somewhat unconvincing male voice. Vocals produced in this way are also not always intelligible, so we're often struggling to increase their quality. This, of course, is not productive.
At the moment, our one alternative is to hire a vocalist on Fiverr, but it is too costly to attempt to record an entire album this way, or even to release singles this way. We're not earning nearly enough money on streams to justify the use of Fiverr artists.
There is other software available that has vocal synthesizers. These appear to be of much higher quality, but they aren't available to be used for free. If we would use it enough to save on hiring Fiverr artists, it could be a good investment. It is likely this is something we will be looking at in the near future.
Finally, we're also very interested in working together with others. There may be musicians and vocalists out there who wish they could perform a song on YouTube without getting copyright-striked. We would be more than happy to work together with these people. If you're a singer and you want to sing on our songs, and be able to perform those songs on your own YouTube channel, don't hesitate to contact us, so we can work something out.
Frequently Asked Questions
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What sort of thing do people often ask you?
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