Now Playing: Sim Mod Con
Topic: Original Music
Cor blimey, look at that! A fourth album by this obscure English composer! Who'd've thought it? I was utterly surprised when I found I had enough material for one album, never mind four!
Of course, this newest album just sort of appeared one day -- no planning had gone into it, no test cover-art made to see how a particular title would look on a store shelf. It, literally, just happened.
See, one day, I decided I was tired of The Sims 2's sprightly synthesised soundtrack (oo, hey, an alliteration!), questioning why Team Mutato chose a fully-scored route over Jerry Martin's somewhat cheatist path which was taken for Build Mode. Like I mentioned in a previous entry, The Sims Classic's Build Mode score was nifty! I liked how Jerry, Kirk, and Robi could just sit down at a piano and play whatever, then put that whatever into the game as finished music.
I was rather surprised that nothing similar was done for The Sims 2. After all, I've seen Mark Mothersbaugh improvise on his organ-synthesiser with the skill of a seasoned stage-performer (probably from all those openers Devo did for better-known musicians). Nevertheless, to each his own, I suppose. I was still tired of the same old music.
So I decided to try something. I connected up my computer to my Fantom X6 like I do and I used my "Improv Piano" voice (really just Roland's "Ultimate Grand" with some different reverb settings), thought of a house I'd built in The Sims Classic once, and improvised a theme for it. After I was done, I put the finished product into The Sims 2 for testing -- I figured if I didn't notice it right away whilst I was building brick retaining walls around Demosthenes Trevelyan's flowerbeds, I could consider the test successful.
That was in 2009. Since then, I've done Sims-related improvs on a fairly regular basis, finally ending up with a grand total of 20 pieces of piano music (more, I might add, than there was in The Sims Classic's Build Mode by, like, 14 MP3 files), or just shy of an hour in total.
So, hence the title, "Sim Mod Con". In keeping with tradition, Sim Mod Con is also the title of a song on the album. "Mod-con" is short, of course, for "modern convenience". "Sim" just seemed to fit, being a three-letter word and all, making for a simple trisyllabic title.
I'd do more writing, but my computer seems to be overheating at the moment, so I'll leave you with a sample from the album. The title track, in fact.
Sim Mod Con (TSN version)
