ExplodingPonyToast

The perfect way to wrap this up, honestly.

Thank you everybody who came and asked questions! I've really enjoyed this experience and I hope it's been interesting for all of you as well! If you want to ask me any further questions, don't hesitate to get into contact with me - all my contact details are in my YouTube about page in my signature or the OP of this thread. Ponies at Dawn truly appreciate any and all support given, and it's a wonderful thing to have such a supporting community at the cornerstone of our efforts. And thank you to all the staff at mlpforums for giving us this opportunity!

Haha, I'm more than happy to! The more questions the merrier. I don't have any specific snacks I eat whilst working on stuff, but I'm definitely partial to some soy crisps every now and then, as well as maybe some Shapes (dunno if this is a US thing too) or watermelon if there is any. Not at all!! There might be less general interest in everything, but I think there is still a massive amount of interest around in the fandom. If 'a slow loss obsession with every part of the fandom' is dying then sure, but I think whilst the fandom is definitely not as explosively big as it used to be I still think it's more than big enough for meaningful things to come out of it, including our albums! Starlit Flames had 120 submissions, for a dying fandom that would be quite something We also had over 2500 downloads of our Christmas album, so I think there's definitely still more than enough interest to make this stuff worthwhile! Send it to my PO Box please

Hey! My favourite anime.. That's a tough choice! At the moment I'm watching FMA: Brotherhood and very much enjoying it, about two thirds of the way through it. SAO is also really good! Though it suffers from turning what is initially a strong female character into a literal bird in cage needing to be rescued. The animation is gorgeous though. I think my overall favourite is probably Log Horizon or HunterxHunter. The depth at which they explore their subject matter is really really interesting. I have not heard of GUNSHIP before. From a quite glance though, their music seems pretty coolz! I don't D: I just buy them ready-made in a packet... I'm not MLG enough to know the secrets behind them haha

Eurobeat Brony - Discord (The Living Tombstone Remix) It's 42, of course.

I'd like to know too!! In seriousness, what it takes, in my opinion, is hard work, perseverance, and never missing an opportunity to improve things where you can. Also, taking risks - if you think somebody might be interested in your project - ask! Worst case scenario, they won't care and you won't get a response, but at least you tried. An alternative way to get popular is to cater to the masses with things you know are popular, or just purely by releasing the right thing at the right time. Even with all the hard work in the world, sometimes it just comes down to luck as to whether success happens or not. It's a bit of a lottery, but so is life in the end!

And every little bit helps.

We have some playlists of all the tracks released on YouTube from our most recent albums, in no particular order https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzYwRjNCX_eI6beR4tHQRKksFlqltMXG_ Celestial Planes https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzYwRjNCX_eK4BXnBCLJKU0dCaUkwHEXh Starlit Flames https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzYwRjNCX_eLlxuU8ANHAcOJTcxt855fK Snowfall

Well we do try to get ourselves out there as much as possible! Our main avenues of advertisement are direct (through sites like Equestria Daily, Everypony.ru, My Little Remix, etc.) and indirect (through artists releasing their album tracks on YouTube), so if you or anybody else has ideas on where else we should try advertising, I'm all ears. But yes, some of the music we've released is amazing and so worth checking out! And if you like what you hear, it's well worth checking out the individual artists too, because we wouldn't have these amazing products to release without them! We'll do our best to keep it up as long as we can.

To be honest, I feel like the hiatus is an awesome time for brony musicans to go out on a limb and do some crazier and more out of the box things! During the season, often a lot of what you see is 'speed remixes' of show songs getting all the attention. Sure they're technically the most pony that pony music can be, but I feel a lot of the time that they lack any real soul or creativity beyond getting a remix out as soon as possible. With no episodes airing, I feel like brony musicians have time to really get into some more meaty projects like more ambitious remixes, more fleshed out original tracks and collaborations, and perhaps even entries to compilation albums like us. I don't think the hiatus is something that should be worried about, I think it's something that, quite honestly, should be embraced for what it is - a chance for people to strike out with their own ideas without worrying about relevance or a time frame they need to be done by.

I do it as a hobby, rather than a career. But what motivates me to continue is seeing all the awesome stuff all the other people I know are coming up with, and wanting to be apart of that and give my take on things, even if it's not as good as what they do! As for pony music in particular, the show itself has so many different characters and ideas in it, as well as obviously the amazing community that exists around it, that it's hard not to be inspired. One day we might all move on from this, but I don't think anybody is going to forget the fun times we've had. And as for Ponies at Dawn, I don't think we'll be going anywhere any time soon as long as I can help it.

Oooh, I like this question! I might cheat and mention multiple for some though haha! From Hold Your Rainbow: Counterwise - Raw Metal is probably my favourite, it sticks out as being pretty well produced, and it doesn't just throw wubs all over the place, it feels pretty well structured for what it is. From Moonlight Vapours: Replacer - Waltz for the Night (feat. Feather) is definitely one of the big stand outs. Even though I tend towards electronic stuff, Replacer's and Feather's voices are just beautiful, and in a waltzy track like this they really stand out as quite wonderful to listen to. From Crystal Skies: ThatMusicBrony - Fragments of Insanity is amazing, really one of the best drumstep songs in the fandom in my opinion. The use of Pinkie Pie samples is really ingenious and makes the track something pretty special. At the time of the album release, it was absolutely my jam. Gotta give a big shot to EnsionD - Open Skies (feat. Evdog) as well though, because it really still stands out as an awesome progressive tune with some neat vocals from Ev. From The Remixes: ExplodingPonyToast - Borderline (Exiark Remix) - Okay so there's a bit of bias, because it's a remix of my track, but once you listen to the remix you'll understand! Exiark took what was honestly a relatively bland track of mine sound design-wise and turned it into an absolute masterpiece. He said this remix was one of his most complex tracks ever at the time and it definitely shows! From Celestial Planes: ThatMusicBrony & Pony Music - Equestrian Territory is easily my favourite. When we did judging for this album I gave it a perfect score. The vocal hook from ThatMusicBrony going into the drop, including a name drop of the album, is gorgeous to listen to, and then the drop itself is full of some magnificent sound design. These guys put a heap of effort into this track, and it was absolutely worth it. It even got itself a pretty awesome feature on Glitch Hop Community's YouTube channel! From Starlit Flames: Almost impossible to choose a favourite here! Ones that I adored though, include R3ctifier & DJT - Prey (feat. PegasYs), Plum Creek Rhythm Section - Wouldn't You Like to Know, PegasYs - Master Race (feat. Heather Feathersong), Morgsch - Let the Sun Rise (Exiark Remix) and Mantlegen - Diver (which got a feature on the promotion channel HDdubRave3!). Finally from Snowfall: Phonic Boom, Rhyme Flow & Technikel - The Christmas Heist, as well as Metapony - Blizzard. Forgot to answer this! Vinyl all the way! I'm definitely more into electronic stuff than classical, though there's definitely a place for both of them. The ultimate question! To be honest, purely going by aesthetics, I feel like Bon Bon looks a bit silly, so Lyra's pants design is my personal preference! However it certainly defeats the point of pants to an extent, so I can understand the arguments to either. Fluttershy is and always has been the best pony! Oh wow I have no idea! Maybe try crossing Pinkie Pie with Deadpool, for the maximum chaos. 1. Yes, Kingdom Hearts is pretty cool! Though I must confess I've played very few of the games, possibly only the one on the gameboy advance, but I certainly enjoyed what I did play. 2. Of course! I'm happy to help anybody out with music, just send me a soundcloud message or a YT message or add me on skype at alexander.ashenden and I'll do my best to help out. Though I'm not a high quality musician myself, so my help might not be as good as some other people can give. 3. I've already talked about my favourite music, and I must say I don't really feel comfortable giving my favourite art or fanfic because I really don't read much fanfiction, and I don't catalogue the art I see so it's hard to make comparisons between things. Have this amazing digital art of my OC with Typhlosion though XP: http://blackstormclouds.deviantart.com/art/EPT-and-Typhlosion-Keeping-Warm-431958008 Probably muffins! They have a bit more to them.

I'm not sure if I have an exact favourite! It kind of changes around a lot. In the past my favourites have been Archie's 'Spitfire', GaugeN's 'Changeling Bass Eater', and more recently ThatMusicBrony and Pony Music's 'Equestrian Territory' that I linked above. Of the most recent stuff to have been released, I absolutely love the collaboration between DJT and iblank2apples, Ponez: My bandcamp collection would be a nice place to go if you want a bit more of an idea of the kind of stuff I like, though obviously it's only a small portion of the music I have downloaded. https://bandcamp.com/explodingponytoast Well to begin with we just posted on places my My Little Remix about our albums, but for Celestial Planes I took it upon myself to actually go out and directly ask people through YouTube, email, SoundCloud etc. if they would be interested in taking part. To my surprise, a lot of them agreed to join in! Since then we've gotten bigger, so a lot of people seem to gravitate towards us, plus EqD have started actually posting up when our albums open up for submissions and when they release, which helps a lot. Because we've released so many albums, and the organisation and quality is obviously there at this point, a lot more people seem more willing to get involved. We've even had people like Foozogz express interest recently, so who knows, there might be a few more well known people on future albums. We've always been about quality over popularity though, and the quality of some artists that remain relatively unknown is through the roof! Exiark jumps off the page as somebody who I feel deserves a lot more attention (which he is steadily getting), because he is pretty much the number one EDM sound designer in the fandom at the moment. The soundscapes he creates with his music are insane: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGP_td_P74bAS70Cfkx1iSw

To be honest, I've been blown away by some of the quality recently too! It just keeps getting better, which I'm really proud of. The first album of ours was honestly quite amateur for the most part but Starlit Flames especially I've heard some people say has been one of the highest quality compilation albums in the fandom! I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm happy to agree! The titles of our albums generally come about through the admin group throwing around ideas for names, themes, ideas and so on until something sticks. Normally we have a general idea of what we want the album to feel like, and we go to a name from there. For example with Awakening, we knew we wanted something green, pink, to do with blossoming, basically the feel of Spring, and from there we had a look at ideas and words that encapsulated that kind of feeling. I'm very happy with the name we chose, and hopefully the music we're sent helps bring the album to life. We've already had some submissions that I'm personally very excited about!

In terms of choosing songs, recently we've mainly had issues working out what to leave out! Our first album only had 17 submissions and all of them are available to see on the Hold Your Rainbow album, but our most recent 'main' album Starlit Flames had 120 submissions! Evidently we couldn't even include half of them, as we had to cap it off at 50 tracks, so there were some really good ones that didn't quite make it onto the album. Luckily, the artists are able to release the tracks regardless of what happens with judging, so some of the tracks we've rejected have still managed to go on and do pretty well without us, which is nice to see. The hardest thing with making the albums is probably sticking to the deadlines. Starlit Flames ran pretty smoothly, but for Celestial Planes we didn't have the album artwork finalised until pretty much the day of release! Definitely not letting that happen again. And then with our informal christmas album, I was up until 2am waiting on the final track to be submitted so that I could upload it to bandcamp for the Canterlot Hill people to download in time for the morning broadcast, so that was a bit of a last gasp thing too! Firstly, it's actually called 'y e s', and secondly it's probably going to come out on April the 1st, if ever! (Even Ponies at Dawn has in-jokes!).