Tanner Helland’s Interesting Stuff

“King of the Desert” is kind of a new endeavor for me.  In experimenting with some new soundfonts, I’ve really wanted to bust out a powerful rock ‘n roll number.  This is what came.

This chord progression has been in the back of my head for awhile, but until this song I’d never found a good use for it.  While I like the melody and structure of “King of the Desert,” the real masterpiece, however, is the countless subtle effects used throughout.  The strum of the guitar, the pitch fades on the high power chords, realistic harmonics on the guitar solos (I’ve never heard a synthesized song use them correctly until this); this song is a product of a lot of carefully implemented effects.  I love way it all came together.  Hopefully this song is indicative of a new style I’ll be able to put to good use in some future songs…

If you’ve read my explanation/confession/description for “Ominosity,” you’ll have read about how I hate naming songs.  I’ve got no inspiration whatsoever for this song’s name, so it will forever exist as “Unknown”.  If you can think of a better name be sure to let me know.

This song is a byproduct of boredom in its purest form.  Sometimes I find myself in a real rut with the direction my composing is going, so I’ll force myself to sit down and arrange whatever comes out of my brain first.  I’ve always loved “Hall of the Mountain King,” so I figured I’d slaughter it by converting it into MIDI with a tacky drumbeat and strange background synth instruments.  Grieg would kill me if he heard this.  No offense intended, old buddy.  Just trying to get myself out of a rut.  (Thanks for the help.)

This song is, in a word, random.  Sometimes I get a bunch of ideas in my head and I can’t think up a whole song for each one, so I throw them together into one big mess.  This is such a song.

Organs are a greatly underutilized instrument IMO.  They’ve been around for hundreds of years and are such a critical element of hymns and spiritual music, but really they fit a whole variety of other genres.  I love what “Phantom of the Opera” did for the organ - it applied it in a modern context with the grandeur it deserves.  Organs are cool instruments.

Now this is not to say that I use organs appropriately in “Reign of Anarchy,” because I really don’t.  I wanted to write a really evil organ bad guy boss kind of song, but - as always - it didn’t really turn out how I’d planned it.  This song sounded way different in my head.  The opening bars are probably my favorite part of the song, and it’s kind of downhill from there.  This song is a little too unfinished for my purposes, but it’s fun so I’ve uploaded it here.  I’d appreciate any ideas regarding a future final arrangement.

What I find weird about this song is that the human brain naturally associates this with some kind of patriotic event.  I don’t know how brains work, but for some reason if I weren’t to tell you the name of this song and have you listen to it, I bet you would say it sounded patriotic.  How does that work?  The human brain is really something…

The ocean sound effect is because Tiberia is located on the ocean, as we all know.  It also makes for a great introductory sound effect.  MIDI horns are a bit disappointing, but otherwise this song came together nicely.  If someone wants to write words for this then it would be a true national anthem.  Feel free! 

I’ve played with many ideas for adding a melody to “Faith’s” original simple vi-IV-I-V (or i-VI-III-VII in natural minor) progression, but invariably none of them were epic enough to match the scope and majesty of the original arrangement.  Eventually I settled on a couple ideas that I liked, so I decided to arrange the song in a more peaceful, quiet setting.  Thus we get “Faith’s” Love Remix.

The key to writing a good remix is to maintain enough of the original that it sounds familiar, but to add enough new/changed material that it’s not just a rip-off variation.  I wanted this to be a literal “re-mixing” of the original “Faith” theme and I’m pleased with how it turned out.  Nothing spectacularly technical here - just some simple arrangements of a couple simple themes.  Nothing as majestic as the original, but - then again - a sequel never is, eh?

“The Haunting” was my first composition after a two-year composing hiatus (2003-2005).  After being away from music for so long, I didn’t want to jump back into composing too quickly so I used this simple piece to help get back into the groove.  It felt great to sit at a piano and plink out such a simple but compelling theme.  The rest of the song just kind of came together, and I’ve really come to love the subtle panning and velocity effects.  Unlike “Halls of Despair” - which is a very in-your-face effects-driven song - “Haunting” is much more cunning and insidious.  I’d love to someday hear it in the background of a clever RPG horror sequence…

“A Memory Away” is one of the few songs that - from inspiration to composition - changed hardly at all.  After writing “Faith,” I found myself trying out various variations on that same chord progression but not finding anything that worked.  It wasn’t until I heard “Not Enough” by OLP (Our Lady Peace), which uses the same chord progression as “Faith” and “A Memory Away,” that I realized the kind of style I wanted to try to achieve with MIDI.  I’d never heard an intelligent pop-rock instrumentation in MIDI, so this was a bit of a gamble.  I worked off the instrument mix OLP used and put together what I guess is really a variation on “Faith” with a strong OLP presence.  Go figure.

As soon as I heard it, I knew this would be a perfect female character theme for the lead character of Defiance, one of the story premises discussed by the video game team I was working with at the time.  The protagonist of the story was a girl named Cara, who I see being comparable to the main character in “Underworld” (if you’ve seen the movie; it’s a good show).  Cara was a strong, action-oriented girl who ends up falling in love with a man she thought she was saving.  Thus the song is a - perhaps odd - mix of electric guitar and other rock instruments but with a mellow melody.

Technically-speaking the song may not be anything outstanding, but I’m pleased that my first attempt at trying to produce a realistic alternative-type song using nothing but MIDI instruments worked out.  Ideally, I’d really like to work with this instrument mix again in the near future…

I love all (or at least most, heh) of my music, but “Faith” stands out as one of my top all-time favorites.

Spirituality has always been an important part of my life, and I’ve always wanted to write a spiritually-themed song that - in a way words can’t do - affirmed my faith in something higher.  While “Faith” may not do that perfectly, I think it’s the closest I’ve yet come.

Technically, I don’t know where this fits musically; the main melody isn’t even a melody - it’s a simple chord progression.  The 2nd section is a 4-part harmony (even correctly harmonized for the most part), and the final section is distinctly modern.  The instrument mix is all over the place but was designed to be largely churchy in nature (hence the organ and choir throughout).  The percussion was added as an afterthought because I felt it added majesty to the epic sections of the song in a way only percussion can do.

You may wonder why (for a song I’m so proud of) I’ve never used anything more than the default XP soundfont for its mp3 recording.  For now, the choice is deliberate: there is purposely nothing fancy about the instruments in this arrangement.  What I find magical about this is how, despite their simplicity, the synth instruments work together to create something beautifully complex.

Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned here…

Ah, sweet “Defiance.”  I’ve gone through hundreds of variations and modifications of this theme, but still I love the original incarnation of this piece.  Yeah, it’s repetitive; yeah, the layout is awfully simple; yeah, that’s a weird techno-ish sound in the middle of what should be a solid rock song.  But somehow it works.  I don’t know how, but this song still rocks (and I’ve heard it probably a thousand times).

Getting a solid distort guitar sound out of raw MIDI is tricky, but I think “Defiance” succeeds.  My goal for the near future is to produce an mp3 remix of this using real guitars.  I’m not sure where I got the idea for the swayed power chord that comprises the whole first half of the song; I think it was Disturbed or Godsmack that first gave me the idea.  The 2nd half - in case you haven’t already figured it out - is a straight adaptation of the bridge in Vertical Horizon’s “We Are.”  On a random side note, Everything You Want was the first rock album I ever bought.  Weird.  Anyway, I love the riffs VH pulled out of that album, and “Defiance” borrows from them as a kind of twisted salute to a good band.  Rock on, 35-year-old dads.

“Remember” is a simple remix of the 2nd half of “Cyaron’s Gate” - which tells you how long ago I wrote it (~1999).  Despite its age, I still find it to be one of my more majestic themes.  I wrote this song for piano probably a good year or two before I used it as part of Cyaron’s Gate, and the short piano version of it on T.H.I.S. M&S (mp3 format) demonstrates what it originally sounded like.  I’ve not done much to change it from the piano version to the MIDI version, and I don’t know that I’ll ever change this theme much.  There’s something invariably nostalgic about compositions from early in your career, and “Remember” has a lot of meaning to me still.