Today’s download digs deep into the archives of an old video game project I was involved in (circa 2002). The original version of this song is a simple orchestral theme led by an oboe melody. The game called for an action sequence using the original song, but it didn’t really fit; the original mix is slow and unassuming, which isn’t generally what you want accompanying an action sequence. As an alternative, I put together this demo of the theme remixed as an orchestral march…
What to say about this piece… for starters, let me clearly state that “Thugs” didn’t turn out at all how I intended. I was working on a deathmetal battle theme and instead it turned out like this.
As background music originally designed as an “entering the forest” theme, this number is distantly reminiscent of classical Irish music. (Very distantly!) The pan flute lead is quick and clever, and the 6/4 time signature keeps the piece moving along…
“Assault on Mist Castle” is another one of my earliest pieces. Originally designed as an “ambition theme” – seriously, that’s what I was asked to create – it instead ended up as a two-part anticipation/battle theme…
Honky-Tonk Villain has a bit of a history behind it. I was originally commissioned to write this piece for a flash animation parody of the silent-film era. After finishing that project, I didn’t do much with this song – after all, it’s not exactly fitting for video game composing, which is what I mostly focus on. However, while working on the same game project associated with the aforementioned “Daybreak,” I needed to come up with a character theme for a particularly bad-ass villain character (appropriately titled “The Dragon”). You can imagine the response when I submitted this piece for consideration…
When I first submitted this song to my batch of video game project teammates (circa 2002), I classified the genre as “Hoe-down…? Jig?! Barnyard dance?!?!” That about sums it up…
“Syntheticity” has gone through any number of name changes. It started out as “Technojazz”, then later became “Diridian Syndicate Theme” as part of a video game project. When that project went belly-up, the song ended up lost in an obscure folder on my old Windows XP hard drive. When I finally stumbled across it while perusing old musical archives in search of music worth fixing up, I have to admit I was pretty excited to see “Syntheticity” again…
“Cyaron’s Gate” will always hold a special place in my heart, since it was the first composition for which I won an actual award. (1st Place, Audio Division: 2000 Utah State Multimedia Festival). As you can tell from that date, this piece was completed last century… a.k.a. 1999.
“Deeper” is a new type of music for me – a techno dungeon theme with a bunch of cool non-MIDI sounds. To give you a feel for the thematic setting of this piece, think of a sci-fi hero quietly sneaking through an alien lair. When the music escalates, the hero makes a run for it after being detected by his otherwordly enemies…
Great news! Phase 1 of my “new music project” is now complete. What does this mean for you? How about three all-new mp3 tracks. How about 25 more fully remixed tracks (using top quality soundfonts, I might add). How about cleaned up MIDIs and rewritten descriptions for each song? This is a massive update, undoubtedly the largest music-related update this site has seen since its inception. Hope you enjoy it!