Skull Smith

Skull Smith is your everyday eccentric composer, buzzing around at all hours of the night, fiddling with synthesizers and synthesizing fiddles. With music constantly playing in his head, Skull has spent this past year devoting his time to transferring this music–some of which has been circulating up there for well over a decade–into the real world as accurately and professionally as possible. He figures he can’t be the only one out there who would like it.

With a penchant for catchy melodies, electrifying synth riffs, Earth-shaking power chords, and copious amounts of reverb, it should come as no surprise that Skull grew up listening to 80s music. Though he himself was born in 1995, much of the work of his main musical influences–Phil Collins, Thomas Dolby, and Peter Gabriel, to name a few–predates him by at least a decade. Armed additionally with elements of classic rock, new age, and the soundtracks from his early 00s PC games (most of which he still plays regularly), Skull’s synthesizer-driven, organ-laden sound captures moments of every decade since the 1970s while being uniquely specific to the 2020s.

Addressing relatable human themes with jocular allegories, Skull’s defining characteristic as a songwriter is his position as a detached narrator with no emotional investment. “No feelings, no drama, and the music should never take itself too seriously.” His compositions follow the same mantra, generally favoring Mixolydian and Dorian modes over traditional major and minor scales for a more “objective” sound (subjectively to his own ears, of course). Some of his pieces follow strict modal guidelines, while others take a more experimental approach, but one truth flows through all of them: there’s no mistaking a Skull Smith song for anything else.

He composes, records, mixes, and masters all of his tracks within Reason. As in, he uses Reason, the music software for these tasks (additionally, he doesn’t take risks that he doesn’t deem necessary).

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