Do you know the code?

Do you know the code?

i got it, mate

Your music is pretty cool! I don't tend to download much ambient stuff for my own pony music collection (I prefer either vocal stuff I can sing along to or more dramatic orchestral stuff) but I still enjoy listening to your tracks on YouTube.

 

It's been bothering me since I first got into brony music this spring that there was never much of a music scene within the BIONICLE community. Bronies have been amazingly productive on many levels, of course, and are a much larger community than the adult fan community for BIONICLE ever was, but it still bothered me hearing so much music at Cloudsdale Congress and realizing that for as long as I've been going, Brickfair never even touched on that kind of creative expression. There was rarely any music at Brickfair except when someone brought an iPod or was playing a Brickfilm, and certainly nothing that was both LEGO-inspired and fan-generated.

 

Have you ever thought of writing any BIONICLE music? Since a lot of your MLP music has been inspired by certain locations, and BIONICLE was certainly not short on amazing settings, I'd think you would be able to find SOME inspiration there. But I dunno. I don't have any musical talent myself so I wouldn't know what it really takes to create amazing music like I hear from the brony community. If you can give any insight into why you think the LEGO community has such a dearth of musical expression, I'd love to hear. The best explanation I've heard is that the inherent creative nature of the LEGO brand cancels out the need for any other form of creative expression, but it seems the many fanfic writers, fan artists, and video editors here in the BIONICLE community never really got that memo...

Your music is pretty cool! I don't tend to download much ambient stuff for my own pony music collection (I prefer either vocal stuff I can sing along to or more dramatic orchestral stuff) but I still enjoy listening to your tracks on YouTube.

 

It's been bothering me since I first got into brony music this spring that there was never much of a music scene within the BIONICLE community. Bronies have been amazingly productive on many levels, of course, and are a much larger community than the adult fan community for BIONICLE ever was, but it still bothered me hearing so much music at Cloudsdale Congress and realizing that for as long as I've been going, Brickfair never even touched on that kind of creative expression. There was rarely any music at Brickfair except when someone brought an iPod or was playing a Brickfilm, and certainly nothing that was both LEGO-inspired and fan-generated.

 

Have you ever thought of writing any BIONICLE music? Since a lot of your MLP music has been inspired by certain locations, and BIONICLE was certainly not short on amazing settings, I'd think you would be able to find SOME inspiration there. But I dunno. I don't have any musical talent myself so I wouldn't know what it really takes to create amazing music like I hear from the brony community. If you can give any insight into why you think the LEGO community has such a dearth of musical expression, I'd love to hear. The best explanation I've heard is that the inherent creative nature of the LEGO brand cancels out the need for any other form of creative expression, but it seems the many fanfic writers, fan artists, and video editors here in the BIONICLE community never really got that memo...

 

I've since lost too much interest in bionicle to gain the inspiration to base any music off of it. It would certainly be interesting but I've been so out of the loop for so long that I'd need some serious catching up and reminders about everything that's happened.

 

As for why bionicle has never had a music scene (if there was one, it certainly wasn't big enough to grab attention, maybe there have been one or two songs here and there at some point) and why MLP has a very strong musical presence, I would have to credit that to MLP having both great music you can sing along to and a great BGM to accompany the time spent inbetween songs. Bionicle has never really had the need for music so there wasn't any sort of spark to inspire remixes or original songs. It's far more geared towards construction with their sets. I've seen characters from MLP made out of Lego bricks and I must say they pale in comparison to what's here on BZP in both quality and quantity.

 

Also, the brony fandom is what I like to refer to as a second degree fandom. This means that it's not necessarily the first fandom people join but the second (or maybe even third or more depending on the person). People in the brony fandom will have talents like music production that are carried over from their previous interests. By the time they're in the brony fandom and found the inspiration from the show's songs or characters or whatever, they would already have maybe 5-10 years experience in music compared to a first degree fandom like bionicle where, if there were a strong source of musical inspiration, musicians years old would be fairly new to music (as they would typically be younger) and wouldn't be quite as talented and not as many would be quite as inspired by other members to make music.

 

All in all, there's little to no musical inspiration coming from bionicle itself and there's pretty much nobody coming into the bionicle fandom from a musically rich fandom to bring in their talents. This is the exact opposite of the brony fandom as there's a lot of musical inspiration from the show and more recently from other musicians. There's also people coming in from video game fandoms which usually have a lot of musicians so their talents are brought in as well.

 

So yeah.

As for why bionicle has never had a music scene (if there was one, it certainly wasn't big enough to grab attention, maybe there have been one or two songs here and there at some point) and why MLP has a very strong musical presence, I would have to credit that to MLP having both great music you can sing along to and a great BGM to accompany the time spent inbetween songs. Bionicle has never really had the need for music so there wasn't any sort of spark to inspire remixes or original songs. It's far more geared towards construction with their sets. I've seen characters from MLP made out of Lego bricks and I must say they pale in comparison to what's here on BZP in both quality and quantity.

Perhaps you're right... in terms of sheer quantity of music, MLP:FiM far exceeds BIONICLE, which typically had one promotional song per year, not counting the soundtracks to its games, music, and animations. But BIONICLE did seem to take its music somewhat seriously, considering how much more MP3 content was available for download on the BIONICLE site than on the site for any other LEGO theme. Even in 2001, one of the three sites you could reach from the BIONICLE.com splash page was "BIONICLEmusic.com". And with the way BZPower members hyped the theme's promotional songs and soundtracks, you'd think you'd hear at least a few remixes. I wonder if BZPower's advertising policy might have played a role in limiting that kind of thing, since it reduced the amount of places people could share music from...

 

Also if you really want to see an amazing MLP MOC, check out this Discord MOC. It's easily the best MLP:FiM MOC I've seen.

 

Also, the brony fandom is what I like to refer to as a second degree fandom. This means that it's not necessarily the first fandom people join but the second (or maybe even third or more depending on the person). People in the brony fandom will have talents like music production that are carried over from their previous interests. By the time they're in the brony fandom and found the inspiration from the show's songs or characters or whatever, they would already have maybe 5-10 years experience in music compared to a first degree fandom like bionicle where, if there were a strong source of musical inspiration, musicians years old would be fairly new to music (as they would typically be younger) and wouldn't be quite as talented and not as many would be quite as inspired by other members to make music.

 

All in all, there's little to no musical inspiration coming from bionicle itself and there's pretty much nobody coming into the bionicle fandom from a musically rich fandom to bring in their talents. This is the exact opposite of the brony fandom as there's a lot of musical inspiration from the show and more recently from other musicians. There's also people coming in from video game fandoms which usually have a lot of musicians so their talents are brought in as well.

 

So yeah.

Good point there. The fact that BIONICLE fans tended to be younger and less experienced could indeed have played a role in that. I've been mostly looking at it from the perspective of "if BIONICLE fans could generate so much amazing fan art and fan fiction, why weren't they generating any fan music?" But I guess music requires a little bit more experience and background knowledge to get into than art and writing.

 

Plus, art and writing are heavily reinforced during childhood, less so with music. Might be an offshoot of the old cliché that "children should be seen and not heard" — art and writing are "quiet" activities and thus perceived as a better way of teaching kids discipline. Kids are much more free to express themselves at a young age through art and storytelling than through music, which they aren't encouraged to learn at that age except through highly structured lessons.

 

Thanks for your insight! I've asked this question a few places but never really gotten a response from someone who DOES have an appreciation for and experience with fandom-inspired music.