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Belthagor
Writer, Musician, and Animator of simple-drawn things.

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Newgrounds Musician Interviews: stratkat

Posted by Belthagor - December 6th, 2015


I am glad you decided to fill out this interview: stratkat (of Daydream Anatomy) and let us know more about yourself.
Well I'm 25,  a male, total nerd. Generally a mixed view of myself as a person, I have good intentions, but I'm a recovering alcoholic.  Like I was a real alcoholic, wake up to sleep, if I didn't have it I'd be physically sick.  I have generalized anxiety and adhd, both would be at their extremes during withdraws, so I did some not so great things to get my fix.  I got medically detoxed, and went rehab for 28 because of my habit, but in 6 months (may 8th 2015, to date this) I haven't went back to liquor.

On a much lighter note, I'm a total gamer and anime weeb, check out stratkat on myanimelist to see my list of watched shows, it's quite a long list.  Steam name's stratkat too if you wanna see my games and how much time I spend on my pc playing games alone. PSN is stratkat.  You get the idea, you see stratkat, 7/10 times it's me. I'm starting to get more serious work with video-games, and have made music for vidya and animu abridged series.  I play the occasional roleplaying game, DnD 3.5 campaign going right now, got my own full set of overpriced dice.  I love certain western (english) cartoons, adventure time (gone downhill since the lich arc imo) rick and morty, gravity falls, and quite few more, too many to name.  In games I recently beat the Bloodborne dlc and am trying to beat all of payday 2's heists on deathwish difficulty.  Souls games and indie games (especially if they're pixelated) are my favorites, even if the pixel indie market is saturated.  Sometimes I stream/record lets plays with my friend Karzie, you can find his channel searching stratkat and karzie.

 

How did you make up your username?
I saw it on a Fender guitar shirt when I was 14, luckily I don't regret it, and it's not copyrighted or trademarked by fender, in music strat works for it's association the stratocaster guitar, it's the same first four letters of a famous luthiers (Stradivari,) online in games it's short for strategy, there's stratosphere, I've found a lot of meaning in that name.   Daydream Anatomy just sounded cool to me, with ADHD I daydreamed a lot, and the name shortened to DDA is ADD backwards.

 

When did you start making music, how did it happen?
When I was 14 I picked up guitar, there was always one in the house, but this is when I decided to pick it up and toy around enough until my father who's a guitar player could teach me. Honestly I picked it up at first because I was awkward, and thought it'd get girls to notice me, learned later that not many non-musicians really think it's all that cool.  After about a year I had to self teach myself, and learn music theory on my own.  I wrote my first original songs when me and some local kids formed a metal band in 2006, we played one live show, it was an amazing experience, learned a lot.  Around 2008 I tried FL studio, being in a rural area, I'd run out of musicians to form metal bands with, and seeing kids on newgrounds make music on their own (dj nate, f777, etc. Trance Crafter was a HUGE influence for a long time,) made me really think that I could figure it out if I tried.  I adopted the name Daydream Anatomy in 2010 and decided I wanted to try to reach out to an audience and make a living, or at least supplement income from making music in a DAW.

 

Is there a certain message you want to give your audience in your works?
It's cool to be a nerd.  Also I leave up all my very early work to show people how bad I was when I started, on Newgrounds you can find stuff from 2008 and maybe earlier.  No shame.  I think that's a good message, that, well pretty much everyone, comes out and isn't amazing at making music when they start out.  But many artists change their name or delete their old work out of embarrassment.  I have no shame in my early attempts at creating music.

 

Would you have any difficulty composing a certain type of music or genre?
Dubstep's given me quite the headache before, I can't do any of the newer stuff in that style.  Bluegrass and some folk stuff would also be hard to do, not only because of my medium but also because I'm not well practiced in either.  Specific scales are hard for me to follow, the non-major ones, it takes a lot of focus for me to follow something like say the arabic scale, or asian scales.  I've been practicing orchestral music, people say I'm getting better, but I'd love nicer sound banks.

 

What programs/instruments/other things do you use?
FL studio, 8, don't want to upgrade, did to 9, went back.  I play guitar, I currently don't own one, but I had a les paul quilt top, the headstock snapped off, instead of paying to have it repaired I sold it for booze money, don't get addicted to drugs if you like having gear.  Komplete 8, z3ta+, sytrus, kontakt with NI banks, shreddageX, fmsynth2601, psg, and sylenth1 are my main vsts.

 

Do you see music as a career?
It can be, but to make a living it's much easier to be as diverse as possible if you want to work for other people, getting famous making what you want to make is harder.  You can like everything you make, but sometimes clients will want you to dive into a genre you normally wouldn't listen too, but you can still make something you like personally.  Networking is also very important, in my experience connecting with artists, promoters, and content creators is as easy as 1-3 emails, remember sometimes persistence is seen as dedication, and if it's annoying, who cares, it's just a few emails, some miss them, some will respond just to get you to stop, but you'll still get them to notice you.  I'm not near a living wage with music, but I wasn't making a living wage washing dishes either.  It's becoming easier to do your own thing with things like youtube fanfunding, and patreon.

 

Are you working on anything right now? Tell us about it.
A Megaman X fangame, it's challenging emulating snes sound, but it's fun. The beta feels really good, it's on an original engine, not one ripped from a game, so it's awesome, even though it's bare bones art and design wise. It was one of my favorite games as a child.  I can't say much more than that.  There's a few paying videogame projects in the pipeline that I'm hoping work out.  I also made 1 or 2 tracks that might show up in yandere simulator at some point, but that game's a musician free for all right now, so who knows.
I'm saving most of my originals for game stuff, but I release a lot of remixes to fans, I try to upload one to youtube at least once a week.  I was working on a project I didn't know if I was gonna call clockwork calamity or boss blitz, but the project files were lost and I went on hiatus for a while since my hard drive was trashed, as well as my pc.  I'm close to getting my studio to it's former glory.  The last album I was very proud of was Cloud kicker, and that came out 3 years ago, losing those projects hurt my motivation for a long time.  Now I'm too busy using originals for projects, but those will come out as OST soundtracks eventually.

 

Other comments? (This section is for anything else you would want to write)
Check out my music at
bandcamp: http://daydreamanatomy.bandcamp.com
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCujJwknig-p65ZP_voZYzzw
soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/daydream_anatomy
picarto (somtimes make music live) https://picarto.tv/DaydreamAnatomy
Check me out on spotify, iTunes, and any other major music outlets too.


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