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.

Getting there. One of them is fully fabricated now — thanks, Swazzle — and the rest are patiently waiting for somebody to make a sufficiently good first impression.

I’m talking with some extremely talented puppeteers and slowly figuring out what the live version of Bobku should actually be. A big part of that is giving performers enough character, movement, and personality material to understand who these puppets are without handing them a script and saying, “Here, imitate this.”

And I wouldn’t get too attached to the idea of each puppet having one trademark voice.

In a studio, with enough time and audio processing, almost any voice can be pushed somewhere completely different. That makes for fun records, but it would be a terrible requirement for a live character. I don’t want every future puppeteer to also need to be a specialist voice actor, rely on prerecorded dialogue, or wreck their vocal cords maintaining some exaggerated voice.

And the puppeteer’s gender doesn’t need to match the puppet’s. A woman can play Patch. A man can play Aria. The character lives in the performance, not in the performer fitting some predetermined mold.

The important part is that they perform like the character.

Patch should feel like Patch. Aria should feel like Aria. Faderghost should feel like he's too annoyed to answer this question. Their timing, reactions, posture, attitude, and relationship with the audience matter much more to me than whether every syllable sounds exactly like some studio recording.

So yes, the puppets are becoming very real. Their voices probably will too — just not in a way that traps the people bringing them to life.

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. Every track is meant to survive on its own, but some of them are much more directly connected than the album tracklists make obvious.

Sometimes it's simple shared-world continuity: another song is happening across the field at the same time. Sometimes one track causes the next. Feet_Beat.pdf → Trance_Rules.docx → Rules of Proper Trance → Pepe en la Fiesta is basically one increasingly ridiculous Stage C incident told across four songs. The two versions of Hiya.ha are an in-universe original and rewrite, while Starlight & Gasoline follows the supply-line problem feeding into the same part of the night's spectacle.

There are also recurring lyrics, characters, jokes, production arguments, locations, and events that show up from different points of view. You never need to know any of that to enjoy a track—but if you start pulling threads, there are quite a few threads.

For the easiest overview, 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.

The honest answer is that Bobku had a very unfair head start.

For years, I had been collecting demos, hooks, MIDI fragments, weird titles, sound-design experiments, lyric scraps, and half-formed concepts that never quite knew what they wanted to be. They were not finished songs. They were little audio gremlins living in folders. Then the Feltware Festival framework showed up, and suddenly a lot of those old fragments had a job. A strange idea could become a crew dedication. A production joke could become a scene. A half-built track could finally explain why it existed.

So it is not really that Bobku came out of nowhere. It is more that ten-plus years of loose wires finally found the same patch bay.

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.

Potentially, yes.

The producer personas are more developed than just names attached to tracks. Each has an internal character bible that includes personality, creative habits, musical instincts, and a loose sonic identity. So in principle another producer could step into Patch's chair—or Phase's, Aria's, Philter's, etc.—and interpret a track through that character.

That's a little more involved than an ordinary remix, though. The goal wouldn't be to imitate how I personally produce; it would be to understand what that puppet would probably do with the idea and how the studio works together. If that sounds interesting, reach out directly and we can talk about it.

Hold on, let me get a soapbox to properly answer this: Mostly because somebody had to build the machine before other people could work inside it.

Bobku started with one person writing the music, building Feltware, defining the producer characters, and figuring out what rules actually mattered. But keeping every creative decision permanently locked to one person would be a pretty strange ending for a project that's spent this much time arguing that the person in the spotlight isn't the whole show.

Curated doesn't mean closed.

The long-term idea is for Bobku to behave more like a tiny creative studio: producers, puppeteers, performers, writers, visual artists, crew people, and other collaborators contributing where it makes sense, with enough shared structure that the project still feels like Bobku without requiring me to personally make every piece of it.

I'm still responsible for keeping the world coherent and deciding what becomes official Bobku canon. But the goal isn't to build something nobody else can touch. It's to build a creative engine sturdy enough that other people can touch it—and eventually make things I wouldn't have thought of myself.

Honestly, I almost look forward to the day Bobku doesn't really need me anymore. If it can keep moving because other people understand the idea, care about the crews, and want to add something of their own, then I probably did what I was trying to do in the first place. I was never supposed to be the point. I was just trying to build something that made more people look at the crews who usually disappear behind the show.

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.

You're an artist that wants to "perform" at Feltware... Try this one: bobku@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.