The Living Tombstone

Tell us about yourself and how you got into music?

From an early age, I had a love of music, from MS-DOS games soundtracks to watching MTV. Especially listening to cassette tapes containing the many songs written by various well known Israeli songwriters such as Matti Caspi, Arik Einstein, Ariel Zilber, Uzi Chitman and others. the way they compose such amazing catchy tunes, they left a huge mark on me. I wanted my own songs to inspire people in the same way they inspired me to love music in the first place.

I later pursued to try to maybe play an instrument like a guitar, which I still have basic knowledge on playing it, but that took a back seat when I discovered my first DAW, I remember someone gave me a CD of the software eJay, and loving how you can simply arrange loops around to make something cool, as I gotten older, I wanted to seek software that enabled me to do more, I’ve later discovered and used ACID for a while, until I felt that it was too limiting with what you could do with it at the time, and then I switched to FL Studio when I came to discover musicians such as mrSimon were using it, he made a bunch of video tutorials which helped me learn initially. And I’ve been using it since version 5.

Tell us about your presence on the internet?

Before I started out on YouTube, around 2001 I was heavily browsing and sharing various music demos I created on Newgrounds under the alias Koolfox, that site was my basis for self teaching on music creation and self promotion online. It taught me a lot about communities who all created content independently based on ideas they had, like video game and movie parodies made in Flash.

I’ve come to know various animators and game creators through the site who I’ve become good friends with since. When YouTube appeared around 2005, I created an account on the same name and created various remixes and songs based on popular clips and video games at the time. I created a Team Fortress 2 fan made album called Rocking Fortress 2, which gained recognition from fans of the game, and in around 2010 I decided to take a break from the name Koolfox and open a channel called The Living Tombstone, which the name came from an idea I had from watching the anime Black Lagoon, I wanted to create a fictional rock band with that name that would exist in the world of that show. And the name stuck and I produced songs and remixes on the many games, cartoons, movies, shows that I love.

The internet for me since the very beginning was a place to showcase my love towards the many things that I am a huge fan of, by creating remixes and songs for everyone who is a fan like I am to enjoy.

How did you start using FL Studio & what does it mean to your productions?

I remember downloading the demo and playing around the FLP demo files that came with it. I created my first songs by dragging FL Keys in and opening the piano roll and composing stuff. I was hooked, I didn’t know any kind of music theory or any knowledge in mixing or mastering, but I had music ideas that I wanted to express really badly for a long time, and FL Studio enabled me to finally do it, all the different presets in Sytrus were enough to get me going to try and produce my first songs without even touching the mixer panel, dragged it all into the playlist and then exported it into MP3s, I never felt any sort of limit to what I could do with it. If it wasn’t for the friendly fun approach FL Studio has, I don’t think I would have been attracted towards making so much music in the start.

Tell us about your production environment & toys?

For the most part, it’s just a computer, keyboard and a mouse. I sometimes record stuff into FL Studio using whatever sound card I have at the time. I got Beyerdynamics DT 770 for on the go headphone monitors, and Adam S2A speaker monitors back at home, I love LOVE the many built-in plugins that come with the software, so much fun to design synths and basses with Sytrus and Harmor (GODLIKE PLUGIN), the many effect processors are very CPU light on my PC, the only wish I got is that Parametric EQ 2 should get some improvements such is Mid / Side – L / R split mixing at some point, one can dream (Editor: Coming soon).

Oh, and VocodeX is pretty amazing, seriously, I use it on almost every track I sing in.

Do you have any links you would like to share?

youtube.com/user/TheLivingTombstone

twitter.com/LivingTombstone

facebook.com/TheLivingTombstoneOfficial

Yoav.