Now Playing: Not "Freshmen 4 Ever"
Topic: Game Music
A couple of days ago, I was rummaging about in my composing folder on my computer, looking for an NWC I thought I saved somewhere and it turned out I saved it somewhere completely different. Anyway, I came across a folder of improvs I did in the latter half of the last decade. These were mostly based on existing scores by other composers -- Koji Kondo being the most present. What purpose these were supposed to have served, I really can't recall -- the most recent one was from February of 2009... that's five months pre-Utopia! Given the folder they were in, "resume" (like, something you submit alongside a job application), I can only suspect that I was trying to make people think I was a better composer by messing with the work of others.
It was kind of weird, listening to all of those again. I probably thought they were really nifty back in the day, but now that I've published three albums, they all sound so completely simplistic. There was one point at which I thought that the new age genre was like modern art... throw something together in five minutes and call it symbolic. It really isn't, and I know that now. One of the original improvs I found was called "Arachnophobia", which consisted of me banging on random piano keys for a minute and ten seconds.
But, there was some stuff in there that I still think is nifty. For example...
Grotto/Cave Theme (Zelda: Ocarina of Time)
This one actually got some airtime on my old radio programme (maybe you heard of And Now for Something Completely Different on KZUM 89.3? No? Well, never mind, then).
As the title implies, this was based on a song from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Nintendo 64 (and, soon, Nintendo 3DS). The first opportunity the player has to hear the official version of this song is in the first dungeon, "Inside the Great Deku Tree". I liked how it's in an irregular key (C7), and generally how new age it sounds... somewhat out of place in a Zelda game, some would argue.
I recorded this improv before I even had my Fantom X6... the synth showcased here is the Yamaha PSR290. I got it in 2002 after pestering my mother for a new synthesiser (something to replace the PSS480 and to use in tandem with the YPP50). I still have it, though it gets very little use nowadays... mostly, it just sits under a towel/dust-cover, waiting to be used again.
One thing you've probably noticed about the music file at this point is that it's fairly low-quality. This is less about copyright and more about space... the original, uncompressed file weighs about 1.5 MB, and we just can't have that.
Otherwise, I can't remember the exact voices I used here, but I suspect it was the default grand piano and the first XG synth-strings voice one encounters whilst scrolling upward.
Next time, I will explain why Freshmen 4 Ever has been taken down.
