My friends, the wait is over. I am FINALLY getting around to updating the music on this site.
I know, I know – it’s been (literally) years since I made any updates to my music entries, but in all fairness I’ve been a busy man. Working full-time, writing a 400 page novel, and being married to my best friend all consume a lot of time.
But no more excuses! I’ve finished my novel and am currently working on signing up an agent, so with my newfound free time I’m working on updating my poor, forgotten music.
Here’s how this is going to work.
Starting with my earliest music entries, I’m rewriting each song description/article. The old descriptions were thrown together in haste, then cut-and-pasted from T.H.I.S. (Tanner Helland Independent Sound, my old music studio), and they are in desperate need of a rewrite. So first things first, the descriptions are being rewritten. (This includes writing proper excerpts so song pages aren’t useless on the search results screen.)
Next, I am tweaking and fine-tuning the MIDIs for all MIDI-based songs. This includes remixing most of my drum tracks, stripping out dissonant notes, and cleaning up sloppy orchestration. This is the most time-consuming step of the process and most of you probably won’t even notice these little changes.
But that’s okay, because you will notice the final step in my revamp process.
The final step is to produce all MIDIs with full soundfont orchestration. Previously, most of my MIDIs were generated with the default XP soundfont, leaving them sounding tinny, synthesized, and weak. While professional soundfonts aren’t quite up to par with a real orchestra/rock band (obviously), they are markedly better than the default XP soundfont – and the corresponding difference in my music will be huge. For example, check out Ominosity (old mp3 and new mp3) and Surreptitious (old mp3 and new mp3). Notice the difference?
As each song is updated, the old mp3 will be renamed as <songname>_old.mp3 if you’d like to compare versions. Otherwise, keep an eye out for updates as I work my way through my large music repository.
I am also looking into licensing all my music under a Creative Commons license, which I think would be a great move. I’ll let you know if this formally happens.
Finally, if you’ve never listened to any of my music, now would be a good time! :) Here are some of my favorite tracks to get you started:
Bloody Tears (Castlevania II Remix)
FFVII – Aerith’s Theme (Remix for Solo Piano)
And – dare I say it – once all my existing songs have been updated, you may even get to see some all-new, totally original music.
<gasp>
Stay tuned!
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I have been thinking about getting back into composing myself, but haven’t found anything for Linux that I really like. Do you have any recommendations, or are you just using the same old stuff under Wine?
I’ve recently gotten Rosegarden completely working under Ubuntu 8.10 (no small feat!), but for now I’m afraid I’ll have to boot into XP for actual composition. Rosegarden can record nicely from my keyboard, but I fear it’s going to take some work to get used to its notation editor. My attempts to get MIDI software functioning under Wine have not been good… but Rosegarden is certainly worth a try, as it looks to be full of features. MuseScore is next on my list of Linux MIDI programs to try.
If anyone else knows of a good MIDI notation editor for Linux, I’d love to hear about it!
Thanks for your reply. I briefly looked at Rosegarden, but not long enough to get it to cooperate with my sound card :P
I’ll have to try it again. I’ve just been messing around with the programs listed at http://blog.audiojungle.net/resources/29-music-making-apps-for-linux/
Maybe you might find something there that appeals to you. I haven’t looked at all of them yet.
Well, I was mistaken on MuseScore being useful. From what I can see, MuseScore is only a notation editor – but as it lacks the ability to actually play what you enter, it’s not so useful for a composer.
While I’ve found a number of excellent audio editors (particularly the classic Audacity), Linux MIDI editors seem to be significantly more sparse. I’m also becoming unhappy with RoseGarden, mostly because I can’t see a way to edit multiple staffs from the staff view. Hmmm.
I guess the search continues! :)
BTW – RoseGarden started working much better once I realized I needed to manually specify a soundfont for playback. Who would’ve known there was no default soundfont?!