FAQ

Bobku is a narrative EDM / tech-trance project: festival-grade dance music with short story scenes built into the release universe.

The songs are meant to work as standalone tracks, but together they form a run-of-show for a fictional puppet-run festival called Feltware.

In reality, Bobku is made by one human producer/engineer. The point of the project isn’t celebrity—it’s craft, story, and shouting out the people behind the show.

(So yes: the human exists. No: the human is not the main character.)

Feltware is the in-universe setting: a recurring 4pm–4am EDM festival run by puppets.

Most tracks are pinned to a timecode + location + point of view, like a cue sheet for an imaginary night that feels weirdly real.

Puppets are disarming. They let the project talk about serious backstage labor, anxiety, and logistics without sounding preachy.

The inspiration is the idea of a show about making a show—translated into a festival about making a festival.

Working on it.

Right now the puppets are a narrative studio crew and a voice in the songs—but the goal is to get them into the real world.

With luck (and the right puppeteer), they’ll be playing a club or festival near you someday.

The foundation is trance (tech-trance / uplifting), but the catalog is intentionally genre-flexible: progressive house, chiptune edges, DnB hybrids, Dutch-house bounce, happy hardcore, and other “whatever fits the scene” detours.

Part curiosity, part obsession, part: “what genre fits this scene?” Also yes: Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music is a real gateway drug.

Because festivals are basically temporary cities, and the people who keep them safe and running rarely get named.

A lot of Bobku tracks are written as love letters to FOH engineers, riggers, runners, med teams, ground ops, security, and everyone doing invisible work while the crowd looks at the stage.

Both. Each track is designed to work in a playlist, but many releases also connect through the Feltware timeline (timecodes, locations, recurring crew roles, callbacks).

If you want the “story order,” start with the Festival Schedule.

Many tracks have two extra layers:

(1) Narrative intros place the scene in the festival (time + location + what’s happening).

(2) Dedications connect that fictional moment back to real-world people who do that job.

Lyrics and story notes live on this site under Songs & Lyrics.

They also appear on other platforms, but Musixmatch is the one that gets updated directly most often.

Story first, genre second. Most tracks start as narrative + lyric sketches, then get “scored” into EDM arrangements in a DAW.

The exact stack changes per song, but the workflow and philosophy are outlined on Production Approach.

Mostly me—sometimes with an extra layer from my daughter for brightness—and then heavily processed to feel like a character.

In-universe, any puppet can “sing.” Don’t worry about Dial’s terrible singing… that’s what Melodyne was made for.

Yes, in the “if you’re a purist and you mean it literally” sense.

Some modern vocal tools sit in the gray area (voice transformation, voice swapping, and related tech). But beyond those moments, Bobku is not a prompt-to-song pipeline—it’s story-first writing, manual arrangement, and a lot of engineering decisions made the hard way.

Detectors get it wrong a lot—especially with heavy vocal transformation, formant shifting, time-stretching, and aggressive sound design.

If you’re curious, I’m happy to talk process, but the best rule is still: trust your ears.

It varies. Some tracks evolve from old sketches; others are built fast when the story clicks.

The fastest full finish so far has been about four weeks, but many take longer once vocals, sound design, and mix polish are factored in.

Yes — once a track is finished, I delete the session file, stems, MIDI, working exports, alternate versions, and most of the scaffolding that got it there. The only things I intentionally preserve are the pre-master and the final WAV.

That habit comes from working in environments where drafts and working files are not just clutter. Once ownership turns over to a client, old versions, unused assets, abandoned edits, and stray working files can become operational headaches, version-control risks, or even legal liabilities depending on the project. You learn very quickly that the thing that matters is the approved final output.

So I built that discipline into my music process.

A single song can easily generate hundreds upon hundreds of files because the track does not usually live in one neat little session from start to finish. Ideas move between programs. MIDI gets built, rebuilt, exported, bounced, chopped into stems, arranged into sections, stitched into a final structure, and then sent out again for mastering. By the end, there are alternate lyrics, broken renders, test masters, MIDI fragments, abandoned stems, “final” exports that lied about being final, and strange little audio fossils that only made sense at 2AM. Deleting all of that after the song is done is not just practical — it is deeply therapeutic.

It forces commitment. It prevents endless tweaking. And it keeps the focus on the finished piece instead of the scaffolding behind it.

If I ever truly need to revisit something, I can rebuild it. Usually cleaner. Usually faster. And if I can’t? Then that version was meant to exist exactly as it was.

Fair question... and yeah, stems are useful. I’m not pretending they aren’t.

If somebody genuinely wants to remix one of my tracks, I’m happy to provide the pre-master and final mastered WAVs. You’re not going to perfectly recover clean multitracks from a flat file. That’s just not how audio works, unless you enjoy artifacts, weird ghosts, and a little emotional damage.

But I also don’t think stems are required for a good remix.

To me, a remix isn’t just opening my session and rearranging my furniture. That can be cool, but it can also start feeling more like correction than reinterpretation. What I’m more interested in is what another producer hears in the idea. What hook stuck? What texture mattered? What part did their brain grab onto?

If someone chops up a WAV, phase-cancels, carves, replays parts by ear, mangles a vocal, or builds a whole new track around one little moment, that’s not a lesser remix to me. That might actually be the bigger compliment. It lets me hear how my track sounded inside someone else’s head.

And honestly, learning to work from a flat WAV is good audio archaeology anyway. Phase cancellation alone teaches you a ton about what lives in the center, what lives on the sides, what disappears, and what survives.

So yeah... stems are cleaner. No argument there.

But limitation can be part of the fun, and even with a flat WAV, if the idea is strong enough, there’s still plenty to steal, bend, rebuild, and make your own.

Bobku is available on major platforms including Spotify, YouTube / YouTube Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and more. The easiest hub is bobku.net.

Yep. There's actual internal lore bibles and all sorts of documents that would make you question my sanity.

But I suggest you start with World & Lore for the festival concept and Festival Schedule for the run-of-show structure.

Most songs also have their own page with narrative context, lyrics, dedication, and an in-universe production note.

Yes. Feltware Festival is built like a world people can imagine around: stages, zones, timelines, crews, side areas, and weird little corners where stories could happen.

You don’t need permission to be inspired by the world or make unofficial fan work. If you want something treated as official Bobku canon, want to use Bobku branding, include the puppet producer personas, or connect it to an official release, please reach out first.

Short version: Feltware can be a playground. Bobku Studio is still curated.

Bobku is open to remixes, reworks, edits, and strange reinterpretations. A remix doesn’t have to mean opening the original session and redecorating the kitchen — sometimes the best version comes from what another producer hears inside the track.

Full stems are not always available, because finished sessions are usually archived down to the essentials. For serious remix conversations, pre-master and final mastered WAVs are usually available, and other options can be discussed depending on the track.

Please reach out before releasing or monetizing any public remix, bootleg, edit, or derivative version. For remix, rework, or licensing questions, email requests@bobkutech.com with “Remix / Rework” in the subject line.

Double check the contact page is your best bet, but here's the short version:

For press, interviews, and that sort of thing, email press@bobkutech.com.

For general collaboration ideas, crew stories, worldbuilding questions, or anything that feels more creative than legal, email bobku@bobkutech.com.

For licensing, sync, permissions, or remix/rework requests, use requests@bobkutech.com.

That side of the project is actively being built. The live vision is a puppet-forward DJ performance, not a standard DJ set with a puppet standing beside it. The goal is for the puppet producer to function as the visible performing artist, operated by a puppeteer in tech blacks as part of the stage picture.

The first puppet producer, Patch, is currently in fabrication, and the live format is being developed around practical puppetry, pre-planned music playback, character interaction, and staged worldbuilding.

For booking interest, email bobku@bobkutech.com with “Booking Interest” in the subject line. Bobku has a working set of technical needs for the live puppet-DJ format, and we’re happy to discuss any early interest about the what and whens.

Streaming, sharing, saving tracks, following the socials, and sending the music to people who might understand the concept all help.

Merch also helps fund the live side of the project — puppet fabrication, puppeteer work, performance development, and the production team needed to bring Bobku off the screen and into the room.

But the most real support is still simple: say thanks to the sound tech, be kind to the crews, respect the runner, tip where appropriate, and treat the invisible labor like it matters — because it does.

More releases, more song stories, more dedications, more cowbell, and a bigger push toward the live version of Bobku.

The long-term goal is to move beyond tracks online and develop a real-world puppet-DJ performance format that can survive clubs, side stages, strange rooms, and anywhere a tiny felt rave can make it through load-in.