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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.

The Incredible Crash Dummies' 20th Anniversary
Now Playing: The Junkyard
Topic: Original Music

Remember back to the early 1990s (if you can, that is) -- there was a really nifty line of action figures called the Incredible Crash Dummies. They were, unfortunately, discontinued in the US in 1995 and Europe in 2001. However, they stuck around long enough to justify the production of a 21-minute-long Incredible Crash Dummies cartoon, rendered entirely in CGI (the character models came from the television advertisements).
Without re-writing my webpage on this subject, the Crash Dummies were an integral part of my childhood. In fact, Jim Morgan's theme to the pilot Crash Dummies episode was a key factor in my deciding to become composer.

However, even though 1993 seems very recent to me, it actually hasn't been 1993 for 18 years! Eighteen! Someone born on the day that The Incredible Crash Dummies aired will graduate from high-school this year! The line of action figures, though, is a bit older. It will turn 20 in, I think, November.
So, rather than let this momentous occasion pass unnoticed, I decided to use my Game Maker to make a Crash Dummies adventure game. Whilst the game, itself, is not finished (I'm likely to put it up on my other website when it is), I have finished with the overworld theme. And, to commemorate the niftiest line of toys since ROB, I've decided to post the theme's MIDI here.
The Junkyard

The game's title is Spin's Junkyard Adventure. As the name implies, it involves Spin exploring the Junkyard (where I always imagined that Junkman's lair was) in order to find all of Slick's parts. The Junkyard is one-half of the game's entire soundtrack (thus far, anyway) -- it plays during gameplay.

The song is based on Koji Kondo's principle that a level's background score should reflect the type of adventure the player-character is likely to find there. It's only a minute long, meaning that it can make two or three complete loops by the time the player finishes the level. Since it's likely to loop many times by the end of the game, I made sure that it wouldn't get terribly irritating. A lot of upstart Flash game composers make the mistake of writing short songs for long levels which include many of the standard MIDI sins -- putting a saw-wave in the melody line, trying to make the GM1 Distortion Guitar sound like its real-world counterpart (lots of slides and vibrato), and using a two-measure drum loop, for example.
I don't know the exact genre into which The Junkyard fits, but I used no synth-lead or synth-pad sounds at all, just the pseudo-acoustic ones. Plus, the chord on which the song is built, C-minor 6 (notated "Cm6") suggests neither the major key ("happy") nor the minor key ("sad"), but rather a sort of stealthy, misterioso situation.
The melody isn't really based on anything but the chosen chord. I suppose that parallels could be found between it and Morgan's Crash Dummies theme if one looks hard enough, but no reference was intended.
Also, the song is intended to loop ad infinitum.

I may, in the future, expand on this song to make it longer and more complex, but for the moment, I think it serves its purpose as a game underscore.

I appreciate feedback, also. So, if you liked it, didn't like it, think you can make it better, what-have-you, don't hesitate to post a comment.

Merci beaucoup. Rétournez a demain, peut-être.

TSN goes live amid "Pangaea" video difficulties
Now Playing: Pangaea
Topic: Original Music

First, I should acknowledge that this is the first entry here on The Thirty-Second Note. I know I have two blogs already on another website, but I decided that I needed one specifically for music-related stuff -- especially since I may be headed back to college for formal training in music theory and will probably be writing a great deal of music as a result. Since I like to write about stuff, this will be the place to read about really nifty music (gangsta-rap, hip-hop, and R&B excluded).

Okay, then -- on with today's entry.
I've recently been inspired to upload a new song to YouTube, entitled Pangaea. This is an unabashedly new age meditation piece made entirely with the Fantom X. Here's a bit of it...
Pangaea (sample version)

The entire piece is actually nearly nine minutes in length.
Its semi-choral melodic line is reminiscent of something from SimCity 4 God Mode and its windchimes are similar to Koji Kondo's Water Temple theme from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Although "magnum opus" is not necessarily the term I would use to describe Pangaea, I do consider it to be one of my better works.

"So, what's the problem, then?" you may ask, "Why isn't this on YouTube yet?"

When I listen to the song, I see Earth as it was in the Precambrian period -- the first plants are starting to sprout, the first reptile stops swimming and starts walking (sorry, creationists), and all of what are now called "continents" are all starting the billion-year trek to their current locations. The air and water are pristine, the land has a few plants and stray boulders about but is otherwise totally empty. Everything is new and completely unprecedented -- just a few thousand short years prior, the Earth was little more than a ball of lava floating in space. Now, though, it's a verdant utopia for upstart lifeforms.

If I were to stick a title onto it and toss it onto YouTube right now, that symbolism would be lost, which would make the song less effective.  See, I can envision what the accompanying video would look like, with dynamic CGI views of Pangaea, itself, drifting apart. However, with my level of expertise in computer animation (which is animating a videogame sprite with stop-motion), I could never hope to achieve it.
The main reason why Pangaea isn't on YouTube right now is that I'm trying to come up with an alternative to the CGI planet thing. I've considered paintings, Microsoft Office 2010 gradient effects, stop-motion, and photo montages, but nothing seems as though it would work. I really don't want to have the song play behind a title screen for 8.75 minutes -- that's just a Windows Movie Maker cop-out if you ask me.

Thank you for reading my first TSN entry. Visit frequently or subscribe to the RSS feed to find new entries as they are posted.