I posted this on my Instagram account earlier but felt it was appropriate to put it here.

It came to my attention that some users who were once close to me had found my music and talked about it.

These songs were written as part of exercises from therapy sessions to vent my feelings in a constructive way and help me improve myself both personally and artistically. In other words, I wrote them for me - not for attention, or for personal gain.

These songs were never directly shared to anyone besides my therapist. They are only online for my portfolio (I'm a composer for a video game project at my university), and writing/production feedback.

With that, I will ask everyone to please understand that purpose behind "Orange County" and the rest of my music.

As an artist I should be allowed to express myself through any means as long as it's harmless. There is nothing wrong with writing a song describing a personal topic and artists should be free to create them without being mocked for it. Criticism should be directed towards the art, not the artist.

With that said, I'm disappointed to have seen the comments of some users about Orange County and myself, considering they are artists themselves.

world

In 1981, what do you do when an interstellar alien empire invades your homeworld? Form a band and rock on before humanity's inevitable extinction.

The Hotel Arcadia concept album is coming soon ;)

NOAH! officially has a Spotify release! I'm super excited about this! I always wanted to be on Spotify, yet never had the money or the means to do so. I'd like to thank EmuBands for making this possible.

Please check it out!

https://open.spotify.com/track/0HxxIAphCjZr5oL1iVDn5Z?si=ec4fd79ab46b44de

I've gotten plenty of comments pointing out my mixing being off in certain songs. The vocals are a little too quiet, the low shelf is a bit too much, the kick drums are too bassy, etc. But when I was playing the music in FL Studio itself, it sounded fine to me. It wasn't until I started remixing NOAH! that I realized FL Studio ruins the mix of the song as it's being rendered.

I played back certain parts of the song in Audacity and noticed some sounds randomly peaking, like the vocals and the guitars. I compared it to the FL Studio project and it sounded different. The differences were so subtle that it took over 10 replays to realize that something sounded off. I don't know if it could be my rendering settings or whatnot, but this probably explains the mixing issues in some of my tracks.

What do you guys think?

I had to remove my demo of Chain in The Sky from public viewing since it got frontpaged.

I appreciate the person who made the decision, but I prefer not having my demos featured since they weren't finished yet.

I'm perfectly fine with finished, full-length songs, but I might upload demos from time to time just looking for feedback, not frontpaging. Verbal feedback is rare for me and Newgrounds appears to be the only site where I could probably get that.

It's the one thing that determines whether or not I finish a track or scrap it. It's self-destructive, but having my art ignored always made me feel like I shouldn't have posted it at all and save my energy for better things- but I digress.

I guess I'm just afraid that once the demo is frontpaged, the traction it gets would be lost by the time it's actually finished. I'd rather just wait.

Sorry for the confusion, I'll republish the song when it's finished.

I've been a user of SoundCloud for over 8 years, and now I want nothing to do with the site.

Like Newgrounds, SoundCloud is the site that allows you to upload your own music and share it with others-- but differences lie within its community. Unlike Newgrounds, there are no forums on SoundCloud, so there is absolutely no form of communication on the site if you're looking for advise to improve on your music skills. You might be lucky enough to get a response if you comment on a song.

I'm also not a fan of SoundCloud's premium membership. Sure, you need to help pay for the site somehow, but this limits the user's creativity by only having n minutes before they can't upload any more tracks. It especially hurts low-/no-budget creators like myself. Newgrounds has a premium membership itself, but at least it's not required if the user wants to have the best musical experience on the site. Everybody has an equal chance of getting their music out there, without the need to pay for more attention.

Speaking of attention, let's talk about celebrities and record labels on SoundCloud.

Imagine being on the same playing field as professional musicians, who already have the money, resources, and the people to make an instant hit. I'm sure everybody knows about Drake, Dillon Francis, Armin van Buuren, etc. They are on SoundCloud also, and they absolutely overshadow the tens of thousands of creators on the site who try to make it big and fail.

And SoundCloud.

Constantly.

Promotes them.

On Newgrounds, I have 65 followers. On SoundCloud, I have 146.

On Newgrounds, I already have two frontpaged songs, each with over two thousands views. On SoundCloud, I struggle to reach a hundred views on most of my tracks, yet the top songs are covers. On Newgrounds, my best songs are originals.

SoundCloud fails to help me as a creator, and that's why I'm done with it.

Hello everyone!

In the next few days or so, I will be ready to release my next single, "Hello Darling".

It was originally meant to be an entire concept album but I've decided to make it a single song. It's meant to be about a long distance relationship spanning across an entire galaxy.

My friend Cody James is helping me with the vocals again, he previously did some for CALLING ALL UNITS, and I believe he will do a stellar job with the vocals of this single :)

Here's the album art with my new Johan Wendell logo (credits to WikiImages on Pixabay for the background art)!

Welcome, new people!!

I am Zip-Zap-Official, but I go by either Zip Zap! (including the exclamation point) or simply Johan.

I am a German musician specialising in EDM, drum 'n bass, and rock music.

I've been playing around with music since I was a little kid with a video game called LittleBigPlanet 2, but it was in 2013 that I decided that I wanted to produce music when I tried out FL Studio for the first time.

I would end up buying FL Studio in 2015, and it became my main DAW ever since. 

My best songs

Just to show you what kind of music I make, I'll show you some of my personal favourites from my portfolio. Check these out when you can!

Zsolt Marx - Fill Your Pages (Zip Zap! Remix) (2018)

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/786234

This is actually a remix of a song made for a video game, "TrackMania Sunrise", which is what I grew up and fell in love with. So much so that I just had to remix my favourite song from there, "Fill Your Pages" by Zsolt Marx. It's a calmer EDM song that doesn't use too many synthesisers, relying heavily on bass and other low-sounding instruments and a robotified voice from yours truly :D

The Battle of Aragon (2016)

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/705984

It's a mix between techno-like music and epic orchestral music often heard in movies and things of that nature. As it was designed for a video game, the song has no real "ending" and it was meant to loop back to the beginning, which is why the song seems to cut out at the end.

Horizons (2018)

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/817044

My personal favourite from 2018, it's a long space-themed drumstep song. I was inspired mostly by another musician named Vangelis, who was making all sorts of space-themed music since the 1970's. 

johan wendell - YOU'RE MY HERO ft. Eleanor Forte (2018)

https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/840213

This was the first song that I did that was completely inspired by an anime, which is My Hero Academia. It was also the hardest song that I wrote and the longest to make, with over 24.5 hours spent on composing. I had to render the song ten times over because I was so dissatisfied of how it sounded from the beginning, and I did as many improvements as I could. It was mostly due to low-quality soundfonts used for the drums that I tried to make better by increasing the bitrate of the song, but I eventually resolved it by using a different soundfont for the crash cymbals (which were the greatest offenders). It features vocal synthesis of Eleanor Forte from a recently-released app called SynthesisV, which is very similar to Vocaloid. The vocals were also redone multiple times. Because that I rendered the vocals as I composed more of the song, multiple takes were made of the vocals sung at different sections of the song. I redid all nine takes because I wasn't satsified of the vocals' pitch, articulation-- I really wanted this song to be the best it could be, because it was pretty much a passion project, to end 2018 with a bang! I hope you enjoy the song as much as I did making it, despite the troubles I experienced.

Conclusion

This has been my official Newgrounds portfolio and I hope you enjoyed reading and listening to my personal favourites. I'm looking forward to meeting and befriending like artists, and possibly sharing my own ideas with them.

Stay electric~

i finally got out of that terrible art block!

i'll resume making regular music now~

it's good to be back <3