Tanner Helland’s Interesting Stuff

As is becoming typical in my work, this song relies heavily on its mp3 mix for sound quality.  MIDI instruments just don’t do it justice.

I wanted this piece to be a simple, catchy town theme - not the typical dull background piece associated with that style of VG music.  I like the instrument mix and pace and am pretty darn happy with how it’s turned out so far.  Perhaps in the future I’ll lengthen it, since this version is unfortunately short…

The mp3 arrangement of this piece makes all the difference.  The original MIDI sounds shallow and somewhat trite, and what should be beautiful melodies are somewhat slaughtered by their synth instruments.  I used Synthfont and several soundfonts to mix this arrangement, and I really like the way it turned out - not bad for synthesized music, eh?

There’s something irreplaceable about your childhood home.  Even for those who have moved around a lot - like myself - inevitably you find a home somewhere.  Thus “Home” is short, simple, and peaceful.  Listening to it brings back the comforting feeling of coming home after too much time away.  “There’s no place like home,” as Dorothy so quaintly put it…

Mmm…hehe…a ha ha ha.  This song is bizarre.  I don’t even know how to explain it.

Truth be told, a large element of track 10 (the MIDI percussion track) was random mouse-clicking.  At the time I wrote this piece I was really frustrated with the way my percussion tracks were all starting to sound the same.  So, I resolved to write a percussion track unlike anything else I’d ever done.  Several hundred mouse clicks later, the first rendition of “Lost Islands” was born.  I tweaked my favorite random-clicking percussion track, added several other percussion tracks (taiko, tom, wood block), picked sweep for the main instrument (I still don’t know what a “sweep” is), wrote a choir track and added whatever other mystery instruments I could find.

I’m still amazed this piece turned out as coherent as it did.  The song has a sweet groove and the choir adds rather than distracts (something I was initially worried about).  The percussion blends well and the instrument mix really is one-of-a-kind.  I don’t know that I’ll ever find the patience to write a percussion track more complex than this one.