MILESTONE – PART I: T.O.D.’s Upcoming EP — “REACH”
November 25, 2025
Leaving Outside Noise… Outside.
At some point in this whole career-pivot madness, I remember feeling genuine terror at the idea of anyone finding out I was getting financial help from family.
At my age. At this stage of my life.
It felt like a stain — an invisible weight I carried even in front of my daughter. Like an impostor trying to blend in while hoping nobody noticed the mask.
But something shifts when you handle that assistance with respect — when you understand it as an investment: into new career opportunities, emotional stability, and showing your kid what rebuilding from scratch actually looks like.
When the work finally starts materializing, the mask stops mattering altogether.
Sure, I only started uploading my portfolio a couple of months ago and the main course is still in the oven… but the drafts, the sketches, the endless nights wrestling against DAW ambushes — that work has been piling up on my hard drive for years.
The idea that the time was wasted? Never once felt true to me.
To an outsider, I probably look like I haven’t moved an inch since day one… but the lessons, the information digested, the pain of brutal trial-and-error — that is the ladder. The ugly climb no one sees.
Side jobs and the support I mentioned kept life moving, sure — but that doesn’t go on my résumé. What does define me is the work I’m finally choosing to stand behind.
Stepping out of the inventor’s cave has also meant reclaiming my narrative — pulling it away from guesswork, from coffee-table talk, from gossip disguised as concern, from the Netflix-level fiction people invent to fill the silence while you spend years in the lab forging your future.
In this era of Instagram stories and algorithmic perception, your online presence is basically your business card. Without it, you’re invisible.
That has been the mission from the start: Build my business card around my true ambitions.
And it feels good to finally walk in my own skin again.
One step closer to where I’m headed.
This finally sounds portfolio-worthy.
I just finished designing the cover art for REACH — and on this one I went full artsy-fartsy. Used an X-ray of my own veins to create an ageless, enigmatic tree:
Still standing proudly in a dying landscape. Refusing to fade. Reaching upward despite the wasteland around it.
Then I listened to the music again — and for the first time, the visuals and the sound feel like they belong to the same world.
The clarity is finally emerging. My production levelled up. And the new musical direction even helps widen its own… well… reach.
There’s still a universe of improvements ahead, but as a starting point, this is solid.
Four years ago, I chose Death Metal as my training ground — a brutal tutorial zone.
My logic was simple:
If I can tame distortion, blast beats, growls, aggressive frequencies, and pure sonic chaos… then everything else becomes manageable.
And it wasn’t just the music — I had to learn the entire ecosystem around it:
distribution
promotion
metadata
mastering chains
platforms
The whole digital tornado.
Frequency Spectrum
Shows the tonal balance of the track — healthy low end, strong midrange presence, and a smooth controlled roll-off in the highs.
RMS Level Over Time
Displays the loudness consistency across the song — stable and competitive RMS with minimal fluctuation, ideal for modern metal.
Waveform
Visual representation of dynamic density — heavily compressed by design for modern metal loudness, with intro/outro dynamics intact.
Even dealing with hackers, who’ve been unusually active lately. Go figure.
Fast-forward to now:
I’ve reached a milestone that once felt impossible.
For the first time, a finished song for the upcoming EP meets professional standards. Not by taste. Not by “sounds good enough to me.” But by hard numbers, references, and actual technical readings.
This was the goal for closing 2025:
Close the production chapter with a clear direction and enough technical skill to defend my island with growing confidence…andgrowing strength in the air. 😉 (Those who know, know.)
This sets the stage for 2026 — walking into the year with a clean slate to begin the Iron Sword vertical slice, where the heavy part begins.
REACH drops December 2025.
Getting this done while life felt like an artillery bombardment makes the victory that much sweeter.
Amazing how a wounded person moves through the world one way… and someone who’s finally learning how to heal moves another.
And this moment marks that transition:
From learning to building.
From noise to direction.
From proving something… to creating something.
In Part II, I’ll close out my audio-production entries with a brief summary of the EP’s thematic backbone, the production obstacles that cost me the most work to overcome, and how the support of old college friends has helped strengthen this project on all fronts.
I’ll end by outlining the upcoming focus on scoring the Iron Sword vertical slice — a process that will take up a good part of 2026.
Let’s see where the other half of the story leads.
