Music

ID:14594
 
Jun 30 2006, 8:49 pm (Edited on Jun 30 2006, 8:56 pm)
Keywords: music
I uploaded a few of my homemade songs yesterday in order to share them with someone, and figured I might as well share them with a few other people: namely my loyal blog readers! (You guys suck! ;-))

So, here we go. Copyrighted works, original, blah blah.

Fight for Glory! -- Battle for Solaris battle theme (3.97MB)
A fairly simple, moderately repetitive battle theme, but I really like the harmonic interaction between the horns.

Pacifia -- my attempt at a cheerful song (1.22MB)
I had been accused of being incapable of making a song that didn't sound dark and dreary, so I made this. The result? A cheery song that sounds dark and dreary if you read between the lines. I ultimately dedicated this to my former cat Perdy...

Victory Parade -- Battle for Solaris victory theme (2.44MB)
I originally wrote this to be the theme that plays when someone successfully wins the whole Solarian war, but realised that such a thing would never happen... so it's now just another song.

Space Ace -- (2.67MB)
This was written for my final year of high school, for a Space Invaders clone I was making in my Info Tech 12 class. Macromedia Director wouldn't accept the whole song, however, so I was forced to use only a tiny subsection of the song. This is the unabridged song, and I consider it to be my very best MP3 recording.

Stellar Tactics -- Battle for Solaris logistics theme (2.75MB)
I wrote this song to be the background theme that played in logistics mode, which is to say any time ships aren't blowing holes in one another. However, it wound up being too cheery for my tastes, so I scrubbed it. Again, it's now just another song.


I do have a few more, but I only have 20MB of space and I couldn't fit them all anyway. ;-)

Incidentally, the songs do have some timing errors, but that's only because of the freeware MP3 encoder I used, which horribly munged the encoding at times -- the MIDI files have proper timing. It's most notable in tactics.mp3.
Jun 30 2006, 9:05 pm
Pacifica seems to cut off in a really strange place. Neat tune.

edit: Through all of these, a suggestion I'd have is to make it less painfully obvious that it's all done in a midi editor. I'd recommend changing volume/consistency occasionally to provide variation. Not bad compisitions though!
Jun 30 2006, 11:34 pm (Edited on Jul 1 2006, 9:17 am)
I really (read: really) like Pacifia. It has a really neat sort of happy but sad feel to it, and I definitely see how it would be dedicated to Perdy.

I am going to be honest and say the rhythm section (drums/synth bass) in Victory Parade do not agree with my ears, heh. It sounds really intimidating and ominous whereas the horns and stuff are in an entirely different feel. It's a cool song, but it leaves me feeling kind of awkward or something. Cool melodies in the horns and flute though :)

I agree: the horn harmonizing in Fight For Glory is awesome. When the second horn goes down in its melody, it sounds so good.

Check out some of my tunes that I've written for various BYOND games throughout the past, although none have really used them. I don't have fancy mp3 encoding like you, though, unfortunately! heh

As with your tunes, if I find anyone using these tunes without permission, I will send castration agents.

City Morning - this was an attempt at a sort of a small village song. I love the texturing in this song.

Cave - for Kunark's Dungeon Diver (if you want me to take it down, bud, then I will do so :)). He asked me to make a song for the cave level that wouldn't get annoying if looped over and over. I dunno if I accomplished this.

Dunno? - I think this was just an exercise in harmony. On my current soundcard, this one sounds like trash. I like the guitar melody in the end, though.

Eerie - cool chord in the intro and throughout. Otherwise, nothing special.

Shallow Sun - This is a transcription of one of the songs I've been writing to put a band together to play. Nobody in this town really wants to play the same music as I do, though, which is unfortunate. The intro to this song is one of the favourite things I've ever written; with the subtle lead guitar over top, I find it quite tasty :)

Let's catch up sometime, Jt!
Jul 1 2006, 10:54 am
Most notable is the fact that I haven't had any form of musical theory or instrument training (beyond the "Music" class in grade 5, which was a mandatory singing course and honestly didn't teach a damned thing).

Last time I composed a song was in 2003, I should add. At that point, I was only starting to learn how to do variation at all! My latest composition was Gearhead, which doesn't have an encoded version (I no longer have soundfonts so I can't record the "true-to-Roland-SoundCanvas" version).

The software I used to compose was Magix Music Studio. When I still had the card, most of the MIDI was recorded straight from my Roland SoundCanvas, then MP3-encoded with the freeware (read: sucky) BladeEnc. When my Roland SoundCanvas went the way of the dinosaurs, my brother bought a Virtual SoundCanvas, which was nice but as a software emulation it had a 1-second buffer lag (!) and still didn't sound quite right. Space Ace was the last song I managed to record from the real SoundCanvas, encoded using LAME, and it's honestly the last encoded version of a song I actually feel comfortable sharing... I miss my SoundCanvas. ;-)
Jul 1 2006, 1:06 pm
Oh, I should also mention that I've never been able to find a good way to end most of my songs. ;-)

Here's a valid link to Vortezz's Shallow Sun song. Always remember the quotes in an HTML tag, Tezz! ;-)
Jul 16 2006, 2:06 pm
Pacifia2 sounds like a song from Creatures Adventures, ages 4 +. :P

Good songs, though.

Vort said:
I am going to be honest and say the rhythm section (drums/synth bass) in Victory Parade do not agree with my ears, heh.

Agree'd. That guitar would've sounded better off in a Doom 2 level, not a celebration. :P