Music, Distributed
Robert F.P. Ludwick
Playing “Video Games”
If you know me, you know that I’ve been playing video games my entire life. So it should come as no surprise that video games holds the key to how I started to create my own music in the first place. In my sophomore year of high school, a friend of mine by the name of Jenner got this “game” for his PS1 - MTV Music Generator. We quickly started to really enjoy playing this “game” on his PS1. I’d go over often and we’d mess around creating all sorts of music and beats. I really started to dig making music on it though. This was my first introduction to producing music.
I can’t recall much of the music that we made on his PS1. It’s been too long since then. However, I know that the first version of a concept I named “Danger” I wrote on Jenner’s PS1 MTC Music Generator. It came together like kismet for me. I created the right beats, I found the right sounds, I applied the right effects… The song sounded, indeed, like danger. It was excellent, and I got hooked.
Early Producing On PC
Because I enjoyed making music so much with Jenner, I ended up getting a copy of the “game” for my PC during my junior year of high school. I was unable to bring over my original “Danger” composition, so I wrote a new version called “Danger Remix.” It’s quite similar to the original (spoiler: it lives on today simply named “Danger” and is also the title track of my first album “Danger”).
I spent my junior year writing up 13 other songs to go with “Danger”. They ended up running the gamut of different styles of electronic music, though I really tried hard to use some of the built-in guitar riffs (the results of which are mixed, at best). MTV Music Generator could export to WAV files, thankfully, so I ended up acquiring a license to use Goldwave so I could convert the WAV files into MP3. I packaged these songs up as MP3 files and shared them around with my friends, and also eventually stuck them on my Dell DJ (yes, I had one of those before an iPod) to listen to on the go. I made music I liked, even if I recognized it wasn’t amazing music.
My senior year was spent working on songs which would become my album Ultimatum. I ended up writing “Terror” which is the third song of my “Danger” concept, and even to this day I think it holds up quite well. My favorite track on the album became “Mountain” and has a remix of one of my high school marching band’s drumline cadences on it. Late in the production of this album I realized that I wanted all of my song names to be a single word, so I went back and renamed everything I had written (including “Mountain”, which was originally named “Mountain Peak Rising”). The renaming didn’t really matter because my music was never actually distributed anywhere.
In early college I switched up and started to try to use Acid Pro instead of MTV Music Generator, by suggestion of another friend Damian. I only ended up writing five songs and lost interest, in part because I was trying to focus on my college courses. I didn’t have as much success making good songs in Acid as I did in MTV Music Generator. I kept my songs around, of course, but as music eventually switched to streaming subscriptions I didn’t end up listening to it very much over time.
Intervening Time
Unfortunately, I lost the original source files for my first two MTVMG-created albums, as well as the EP I created using Acid. All I had left were 128kbps MP3s; not even the WAV files. I’m not totally sure how and when this ended up happening, though I assume it to be when I had archived a lot of things to a hard drive and then that hard drive was accidentally erased when I was archiving other things.
You might think that I’d have distributed this music when I worked at CD Baby. Unfortunately, the remaining format I had of my original music was in a non-distributable format. At the time, I didn’t think too hard on this. I just knew I couldn’t distribute 128kbps MP3s using CD Baby, so I never really pursued that. I thought that would probably be it for my music production.
Fast Forward to a Humble Bundle
I’ve been on the Humble Bundle marketing email list for years now. As noted before, I’ve been playing video games my whole life, and I’ve been a Humble Choice subscriber for a few years now. They are one of the few marketing emails I allow because often they have game bundles I want to get. Well one day in late 2023 there was a bundle for FL Studio and some music packs. I had very briefly used FruityLoops (FL Studio’s original name) back when it was first introduced years ago. I saw the bundle and thought “Well that’s a good deal… Sure, I’ll get it. It’s been awhile since I’ve made some music; maybe this will strike a nerve.”
It took a year and a half for that nerve to strike. In the middle of 2025, my oldest daughter told me that she wanted to record a song. She’d written one and didn’t know how to record it. I remembered that I got the FL Studio license from the bundle and we decided to record her song. The first one we put together was a quick 26 second song named Combination just to try out the software and to collaborate together. A few weeks later we teamed back up and recorded her song, Fire in the Sky. Truth be told, I didn’t do a very good job in producing these two songs. I’d only really just started to figure out anything about FL Studio. It wasn’t too difficult to produce them, because I still remembered what it was like with MTV Music Generator and Acid Pro back in the day. But the vocal levels aren’t consistent, I didn’t make any pitch correction, I didn’t mix balancer levels at all on the instruments… and more.
After we made these songs, my daughter wanted her friends to be able to hear them on streaming platforms. I agreed that we could distribute them, and we ended up coming up with the artist name of Fizzbert (Fizz is one of her nicknames, Bert coming from the second half of my first name.) So I finally got the chance to distribute music using CD Baby, where of course I no longer worked (better late than never, I suppose). I did not have the same problem with this music as my older stuff because I could export it into a format which was distributable by CD Baby. So after a couple of weeks for the inspection to pass, the kiddo and I were actually a distributed musical artist!
What If
This whole process in distributing music reminded me that I felt like I hit an unbreakable wall with my older material. I decided to do a bit of research to see if it was possible to get my lower-quality MP3s out there. I still had my Goldwave license, so… why not… I got the latest version of Goldwave installed and told it to convert my MP3s to the correct format, sample rate, bitrate… It seemed to work. When I played them in VLC, they sounded just like the MP3 versions. Surely it couldn’t be that easy?
It was that easy. The whole time it could have been that easy. I converted all of the MP3s to FLAC and submitted for distribution of the two albums and the EP with CD Baby. After three weeks, all three distributed to all major streaming and download services. I chose the artist name Bertie Wick, which is a character I made up when my wife was pregnant with our oldest. That’s a story for another time. So all of a sudden, all of that electronic music I wrote when I first became an adult was distributed. Anybody could listen to it. Anywhere.
Producing Once More
I’m a little hit or miss nowadays in how much time I spend producing my own music. I have four songs in FL Studio which are all largely arranged and just need some mixing, minor tweaks here and there, and mastering. I have maybe 10 more song starts or patterns/riffs I want to potentially develop. I’m collaborating with my good friend Isaak, who distributes some music as the artist Adventures by Moonlight; emo stuff which usually isn’t my style but I like his style, so he gets to be an exception. I’m listening for inspiration from a bunch of different electronic sources. Heck, I’m even thinking of branching out into kids music or just comedy in general, thanks to hearing lots of Parry Gripp lately. My oldest has laid down vocals for a new song which is still awaiting some actual production effort, not like what I did for her first song with vocals…
Speaking of production effort. I opted to get a course on Udemy to really dig in and learn FL Studio. So far so good - there is a ton of content so I pick at it a little bit here and there. I’ve already learned so much through the course and I’m only maybe 25% through it. Crucially, I’ve learned how to normalize audio volume and pitch, as well as other tips and tricks to mixing a song well with differing instruments and ranges. So I’m not rushing to get my new stuff out there (there’s one song in particular which is excellent, titled “Menace”) because I want to really learn how to produce it well. I want anything else I distribute as Bertie Wick (or my daughter and I as Fizzbert) to be noticeably better than my early stuff. In some songs already you can tell where I’m experimenting with different concepts like automation, and sidechaining.
I’m looking forward to sharing my new stuff with everybody once it’s ready. I hope my older stuff doesn’t make you cringe too much.
A Note on Spotify & Apple Music
With one exception for Isaak’s music (I could only find it on Apple Music), I’ve linked to Spotify for all of the rest of the music in this post. This isn’t because I like Spotify; it’s because I know that most people will be able to find and listen to music from Spotify’s web player even without a subscription. My family and I used to use Spotify awhile back, but then they signed Joe Rogan so we switched over to Apple Music (we bundled it with Apple One). So I’d prefer if you listen to my music on Apple Music rather than Spotify, if possible, but I understand if you’re a Spotify subscriber.
Another Note, on Tiny Anthems
I need to give a shoutout here to Tiny Anthems. This is a whole other story I may blog about some day, but Tiny Anthems is an artist you can commission. TA has made four songs for me - three about my wife and one for my mother. They’ve also made a short jingle for my current team at my current employer. I absolutely love TA’s musical talents and, provided they continue to take commissions into the long-term future, will ask them to write at least nine more songs for me over the course of the next 16 years. If you have a loved one or friend you want to immortalize, so see TA at their website.