Frosty Meadow

 

How about another quick piece of video game music?

 
I usually write NES music with a tracker, which is more like programming an audio chip with a series of sound instructions than it is composing in a traditional sense.  This time, however, I wanted to try out Matt Montag’s NES VST, which is a plugin that allows one to recreate 8-bit Nintendo tunes with a standard notation sequencer.  The streamlined workflow meant I could throw something like this this together in about an hour.

As such, enjoy (or hate (or be utterly indifferent to)) a jaunty little level loop.

 

Bene scribete.

Star Flash

 

What’s this? More music? The only creative thing I can complete lately!?

 

 
I encountered a thread on Twitter a couple weeks back of people posting their favorite (invariably science fiction) ’80s cartoon opening themes, which left me with the urge to write something along those lines.

As a side note, if you crave an exercise in madness, try coming up with a title consisting of “Star” followed by a cool/short/punchy word that isn’t already the name of some existing sci-fi show, movie, book, game, or what have you.

 

Bene scribete.

Pumpkin Punch / Stress Fracture

 

In lieu of sufficient progress on certain matters to make a worthwhile announcement quite yet, here is…yet more music.

Eh? Ehhhhh???

 

 

This one’s just a short bangy harpsichord piece I did while feeling glum. What better than baroque tones to express feeling bad, but, like, in a classy way? As always, SoundCloud compression trashes harpsichord, but feel free to download if so inclined.

 
 

 

And here’s an experimental synth piece I did with a neat little waveform shaper called Glass Viper. I constructed all of the sounds in it just by manually drawing in and layering small audio waveforms (which it will frequency-modulate to pitch-map), and only really scratched the surface of what this synthesizer is capable of.

Anyway…

 

Bene scribete.

Trovami Sotto la Luna

 

WHERE HAVE I BEEN.

Good question!  Short answer…doing big things.  But more on that later.

For now – new music!

 

 

I had the urge to write something classical, which I realized I hadn’t done in some time, so I threw together my take on a baroque harpsichord toccata (well, maybe not “threw together”; I actually spent a lot more time on it than I meant to).  As usual, SoundCloud’s streaming compression crumples harpsichord dynamics, but alas.  Feel free to download if you’d like a giant FLAC file.

 

Bene scribete.

Harry Potter and the Portrait of what Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash

 

Ron’s Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself.

 

If you haven’t yet encountered “The Handsome One” – a short computer-generated chapter of an imaginary Harry Potter book entitled Harry Potter and the Portrait of what Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash – you owe it to yourself to give it a quick read.  One of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while!

 

Bene scribete.

Spooky

It’s still October.

 

 

Bene scribete.

 

Show ‘Em Your Claws

 

Programming audio for the NES is fun, so when I came across an emulator for the S-SMP (the SNES sound processor), I had to take a stab at Super Nintendo music as well.

I’m not very good at action/battle music.  So, of course, I wrote an RPG battle theme.

 

 

Naturally, I went for something in the Final Fantasy vein.  I probably could have done some further sample-rate/bit-depth reduction to make it sound more like it was coming from a real SNES DSP (the percussion’s a bit too crisp in particular), but this seemed to be an acceptable balance that hopefully still captures its distinct feel.

 

Bene scribete.

Have a Banana

Just screwing around with the new version of Procreate and Apple’s hilariously priced iPad stylus.

 

 
Bananas are just the best, you know?

 

Bene scribete.

Midnight Run

 

Got a neat little inverse-colored super-portable miniature MIDI keyboard to use with my laptop on a Labor Day sale, so I of course had to throw something together with it

 

 

Another go at an ’80s-noir synth vibe (but with a koto for some reason).  Had a heck of a time getting it to sound O.K. streaming – pure sine waves amid a lot of ambiance is really hard to compress, apparently.   Ended up uploading FLAC instead of MP3 this time, which helped a bit, but this piece seems a lot more dependent on physical speaker properties than most.

 

Bene scribete.

Write More

 

…is what I need to be doing.  But then laziness and business (…and TV and video games) keep happening.  What’s up with that?

Well, I guess I did write two screenplays this week…

I mean – they were for fifteen-second shorts.  Let’s not get crazy, here.

Still.  I guess that’s better than nothing…!

 

Bene scribete.