Music

Something I came up with while trying to imagine things Dexter Holland would sing. I have a feeling he wouldn't sing this, though. My first and so far only attempt at punk... well, unless you count many hours spent on the Punk-o-Matic at age 10. Oh man, I definitely remember posting those somewhere. Wonder if they're still out there somehow?

And the guitars are still too loud. Oh well!

This was supposed to be a "magical girl song". I probably shouldn't be allowed to write magical girl songs. Also, apparently Crush 40 has an album called "Driving Through Forever", so fuck them.

The guitars are too loud. Oh well.

Over a year between songs again. Well, this was when I was starting to go all-in on fan translations, so at least I have an excuse.

I think this is my only attempt at actual, non-chiptune "electronic" music in LMMS (i.e. what the program was intended to be used for). Dunno if it's any good, since I really don't listen to that kind of stuff much, but I wouldn't bet on it. The drums are mixed weirdly low for some reason, possibly because I tried to mix on speakers instead of headphones, so download the MMPZ and pump them up yourself, I guess.

An entry to SMS Power!'s 2018 music competition, so this is a Master System VGM. Can't say I'd attempted swing before. While nothing special musically, it was made mostly to demonstrate an IT-to-VGM converter I made, and hey, it performed as advertised... in other words, not very well. But it did work, so that's something.

Nothing to do with the movie, for better or for worse.

The hook here is probably in the upper percentile of my attempts at rock riffs, not that that's saying much. I also managed to refine the guitar tone considerably from my earlier efforts, so it's at least a bit more bearable. The bass solo leading into Yngwie Malmsteen wannabe fake guitar wankery might be good for a laugh.

You know you're scraping the bottom of the barrel when you're naming your songs after Danbooru search terms.

The song itself is nothing special, but I think that compositionally, the guitar solo section in this one is probably my strongest effort overall. Though quality here is, as always, very much a relative measure.

Cover of the Gun song, which I got via Judas Priest. Shockingly, my version is not quite up to professional standards.

Even more metal. It happens. The "guitars" still suck, though. I think this was actually written before 666, but I released it later because I thought it was weaker.

Yeah, more metal. I dunno, I just get going on these things sometimes.

One time I made a ROM hack of an obscure Famicom game, and for some reason also wrote a 25+ minute original soundtrack for it. It was pretty nutty in retrospect, but it was probably worth it. It's my most successful original work by the numbers, anyway.

This is pretty different from anything else I've written, mostly because Layla's sound driver is quite primitive and I made only minor modifications to it for the hack. The music was specifically composed in order to allow it to work with the driver, so you get a lot of e.g. octave-based basslines, since the percussion has to be combined with one of the other three sound channels and that facilitates recycling beats at different pitches.

ZIP includes the soundtrack in NSF, NSFE, and MP3 formats, as well as the original prototype versions in IT format.

Probably one of my better tracks in terms of composition, if not mixing. I went to a lot of trouble to create the snare drum and other percussion from scratch by generating a white noise sample, pitch-bending it, and combining it with a triangle wave sweep. Wish I'd gotten more than one song out of the samples.

A slightly less... chaotic... attempt at a metal song than my last one. Now with a sound that you can at least pretend is a guitar.

Happy☆Star☆Band remix. Everyone has to do one of these, right? ...No, they definitely don't. (If you don't recognize this song from an obscure budget DS rhythm game, I can't imagine what you've been doing with your life.) This one makes me laugh just because it bears almost no resemblance to the original song. I listened to the original several times, but whenever I went to work on my version I couldn't remember how it went, so I ended up just making stuff up instead.

This got noticeably more views on YouTube than any of my normal uploads, presumably because it has anime girls in the thumbnail.

Hahaha, I tried. Would probably have gone unreleased in the old days, but by this point I'd discovered the LMMS Sharing Platform and realized I could dump low-effort content on it without anyone caring. (Uh, not to imply LSP is all low-effort content. Hey, I put my other stuff on there too!)

Touhou remix. Everyone has to do one of these, right?

A long-gestating MIDI. I rarely finish a song after dropping it for multiple months, but I managed it here for once. No doubt the coherence suffers for it. Was the last thing I finished for a good year and a half.

I honestly don't remember anything about this except that I wrote it with a laptop. What genre is this, anyway?

Something I made specifically to screw around with extreme pitch bends and other likely-to-break-shit MIDI effects. Not much of a musical composition, but it was fun.

Yeah yeah, Captain Falcon didn't even exist in this game, so what? He had a terrible demise anyway.

What I termed some "extremely half-assed F-Zero covers". I think I can take at least a little pride in the fact that the Mute City recreation was sufficiently close to the original that it tripped YouTube's copyright detection when I tried to upload it and I ended up muting the lead to get around it.

This game's music really fuckin' kicks. I prefer the arcade version these days, though.

Some self-described "uninteresting U.N. Squadron covers".

I always hated the X series, really. Constant mindless, droning ROBOT ANGST. Some of the music is good, though.

I spent a couple of weeks doing this thing where I ripped samples from popular SFC games, recreated three tracks from each game that I liked by ear, and then wrote an original one using the samples. The first of these resulted in a set of "boring Mega Man X3 covers".

ごめん。このやつを作った時には、日本語が全然分からなかったから、変な名を選んじゃった。「崎元仁のいやな一日」みたいな意味を表現したかった。許せてくれないね？

An attempt to imitate Hitoshi Sakimoto's style on Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, using samples from the game itself. For some reason, I was absolutely convinced that the Game Boy Advance had only four sample channels (it has as many as you're willing to waste time mixing in software, typically up to 16). This may actually epitomize more than anything else my lack of an ear for music and the degree to which I jump into things without actually understanding them.

Almost a year between songs, huh? Guess I had a lot on my mind. Like disassembling 20-year-old children's games, if my uploads on YouTube from this period are anything to go by. Oh well.

This is one of the rare tracks I made in LMMS using non-default samples; download them here.

I was forever trying to make this or that kind of music without bothering to learn anything about it, you know? "I wanna write jazz, what do I think jazz sounds like?" Well, I won't pretend I know any more now than I did then, but I have a feeling it doesn't sound like this.

First MIDI I released. Inexplicably, it's also my most popular standalone original composition, with a good 10x more views than anything else I put on YouTube. I have no idea why, considering I did nothing to promote it whatsoever.

I always wanted to write "cool tracker music". Never tried too hard, though.

I don't really remember much from this era of my life, but if the music I was making is anything to go by, I wasn't very happy.

I finished this on the listed date, but didn't actually release it until over two years later on 2015-1-18. The original idea was to use it for a game (see "Feeblemind"), but when it became clear that was never going to happen, I just put it out as it was.

Another old Soundcloud-exclusive. I believe this was loosely "inspired" by Outride a Crisis from Super Hang-On, though it really sounds nothing like it (and I mean that in a bad way). This is also another one of those "I had ten barely-related ideas and just jammed them all together sequentially" tracks.

A very silly cover of "Let's Go Away" from Daytona USA made using samples ripped from the game. I think this is technically my most popular song that isn't a dumb mashup. It eventually even got published on OLRemix, the highest honor I've ever received! RIP cawnil :(

Made with samples ripped from a Ninja Turtles game I've never played but spent a looooot of time listening to. Unfortunately, those samples are blatantly, horrendously out of tune. I think whoever added the automatic tuning feature to OpenMPT must have done it while weeping tears of rage at this crime against pitch.

My only attempt at a live recording, for reasons that should be pretty obvious. I took piano lessons for nine years as a child, but sadly, this is the highest level at which I was ever capable of performing. It took me a very, very long time to understand that if you want to do well at something, you have to try.

Also, this probably violates every rule of classical composition there is. As usual, I made no effort to actually understand the kind of music I was trying to write and just made stuff up based on my vague ideas of what it should sound like.

Made using Excel and a tone generator I wrote in Python, which is why it sounds like... uh, this. Originally posted on iiichan's music board. I really, really miss iiichan.

Originally posted only on Soundcloud because I didn't think it was good enough to bother putting anywhere else. Apparently my account still exists. Who knew?

space asininity

Made pretty much entirely so I could do silly things with samples from an obscure Spider-Man rock opera/radio drama album. Can you believe they made not one but two Spider-Man rock operas (for a very loose definition of the term)? Anyway, Spidey's voice actor managed to hit a pitch-perfect B on the climactic "NO" here, and I couldn't just let that slide.

Can you tell I had a few different parts here I wrote separately and was desperately trying to glue together? Because I sure can. Also, yes, that's a 4-meg IT file. My sample usage might have been a bit profligate.

One night, I had a dream I wrote a song in OpenMPT and it sounded like this. My only prior experience with a tracker was failing to recreate the Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego theme around a year earlier -- seriously, I still have the file somehow -- but I took it as a prophecy and promptly created this. Then I had to redo most of it because whoops, turns out you can't write your track using IT features and then save it as a MOD or bad things happen. Not coincidentally, this was also my first and last MOD.

If there was ever any doubt that I have no ear for tuning, look no further than this, where I detuned the lead instruments to create a chorus effect... and left them out of tune throughout the entire track. It took me years to realize how dumb this was. And further years for someone to add an automatic tuning feature to OpenMPT so I'd stop doing it.

The hook for this one came from a dream I had. Not quite on the level of Keith Richards, I'm afraid.

You have to understand that it's really quite a large miracle that I managed to accidentally stumble into a basic intro-hook-verse-bridge-chorus pop music structure for this one; at this point in my musical non-career, I had no concept of song structure and made everything by just adding more and more stuff on until I felt like stopping. Any resemblance to actual songwriting is pure coincidence.

Far from the first thing I wrote -- see all the "unreleased" crap below -- but I believe it was the first that I publicly released (via Uboachan, of all places). To that one person who complimented it: I didn't really deserve it, but thanks anyway.

Sparing you several very bad ones, here's my other marginally successful novelty mashup. It's dumb enough to still give me a laugh, at least.

Heh, am I really counting these dumb mashups as "music I made"? I guess music and some form of arrangement was technically involved.

This was both my first musical release and, going by raw viewcounts, my biggest success ever. All for a stupid novelty game music mashup that, I later discovered, had already been separately made by a Japanese person a good year or two earlier. Ah well.

It took me a pitifully long time to understand even the barest rudiments of musical composition, mostly because I was utterly unwilling to expend the effort required to actually analyze songs and figure out how they were put together. Here, I wanted to write a J-pop song, but I had no idea how to. Rather than, say, make covers of some songs I liked to figure out how they worked, I instead just made something up based on my vague impression of how I thought things should sound. Shockingly, the results weren't very good.

And yes, for reasons unknown even to me, the intro is a completely separate file. It's not even something dumb like "I needed a time signature change and couldn't figure out how to do it" -- somehow, it just ended up like this. Judging by the contents of my project folders, I was repeatedly making miniscule changes, rerendering both parts, and then painstakingly stitching them together in Audacity. Christ.

Baby's first chiptune. Ouch. I think I actually posted this on Soundcloud ages ago, but I doubt anyone noticed, so let's just call it unreleased. It'd have been better off staying that way.

This originally had vocals (vocoded, naturally), but that's definitely best left in the past...

Pretty much the exact same story as "Nona", right down to the genre I was trying to copy. Uh, maybe it's an improvement? Slightly?

My hilarious attempt at a "rock opera", with various songs written in genres I had no understanding of and of course made no effort to learn about. You'll never guess how that turned out.

All of these were originally vocal songs; these are the instrumentals, because no one deserves to be subjected to the originals.

In order to be played back as intended, the MMPZ files require a bunch of weird external VST plugins that probably aren't even available anymore, so I wouldn't bother with them. Not that there's any reason to anyway.

I think I wrote this as generic RPG "field" music. I sent it and several other tracks from this era to someone under a pseudonym in an attempt to get recruited for a project I should never have had anything to do with and still feel a lot of regret for. On the off chance anyone involved ever reads this... all I can tell you is that I'm deeply sorry about the whole thing.

More generic RPG music, this time a battle theme. This is an excellent example of the childlike approach I had to things -- rather than undertake any kind of analysis of the type of music I was trying to make, I just imitated the superficial, surface-level characteristics and didn't bother with anything beyond that. The result: a battle theme consisting almost entirely of trumpets and bass, simply because those are the instruments that stand out in the Final Fantasy music I was trying to copy. Ugh.

An original intro section, followed by a truly horrendous attempt at a medley of game covers, and... holy shit, I'm listening to this right now for the first time since I made it and it is hideous. Yeah, sure, that's definitely how the Casino Night bassline goes, right? Bridging from Big Blue to Super Metroid boss music via Air Man, are you serious? Hahahahahaha ooooooh my god.

Technically not unreleased, but this was only available on 8bitcollective for a short time prior to its implosion, and I doubt any of the available site archives include it.

Still more "RPG music" for "a weird town". Suffers from the fatal flaw that I used to have no idea how to actually write music.

Haha, I actually named this piece of crap? Wow. Still on the "generic RPG themes" kick, I intended this to be "shop" music. Sounds more like a knockoff of the Backyard Baseball menu theme, except really, really, really annoying.

More "RPG" stuff, though unlike the others, it was actually written for a specific project (which went nowhere, mostly thanks to my stupidity). This was supposed to be for a forest area. It's not as bad as the rest of the set thanks to having at least some hint of compositional depth -- by pure accident, of course -- but the pervasive awkwardness is still very much in evidence.

One of my earlier attempts at metal. Compared to most of the crap I was making at this point, it actually isn't nearly as bad as it could have been.

At some point I got some vague notion in my head of creating what I guess could be described as a depressing indie game in RPG Maker XP. (Yeah, in 2012 -- if you've looked at any of the other content on this site, you just might have picked up on the fact that I tend not to spring for the latest and greatest technologies.) I don't think I ever got as far as developing actual game concepts, just screwing around with events to adjust the screen brightness.

Anyway, I did make this thing for it... whatever it's supposed to be. I never even got around to properly naming it. And wow, this is pretty annoying. I hope that's what I was going for, because if it was, I sure succeeded.

Incidentally, this short-lived game project was also the origin of an avatar I used for a long time, and still do in some places. That was the main character. You know, I've never claimed to be an artist...

Another failure to J-pop. This one has a long, stupid story where I came up with the basic idea years earlier and, despite the fact that it really wasn't very good, I obsessed over it endlessly, continually trying and failing to write it. I eventually managed to produce this monstrosity on something like my fourth attempt over multiple years. The MMPZ file for this grew so hideously bloated that, back in the bad old days of LMMS' mandatory and broken autosave "feature", the autosave would freeze my computer for upwards of a minute every time it kicked in... which happened approximately once a minute. Bad times.

Oh, and the song sucks, too (why is it six minutes long??). Kind of a shame; I still feel like the basic concept could have been made into something decent...

Heh, and I still hadn't realized that snare drums are normally center-panned. What a fool.

More music from my putative depressing indie game. Not much of anything, but at least it's not AN ACTIVELY ANNOYING 30-SECOND LOOP like the last one.

"intb" is a short, differently mixed loop of the main riff that was supposed to be used for... something, the hell if I remember. I'm including it because it's frankly better than the actual thing.

Another track for Imaginary Depressing Indie Game, or maybe some new project I imagined I might possibly do someday; it was that era of my life. Anyway, it's crappy Game Boy RPG town music. I'm not sure what exactly I was trying to knock off this time. Kakariko Village, maybe?

More music written from that period where I imagined I would somehow be able to cause a game to manifest in front of me without needing to actually expend the effort of making it. This time, I was imagining a shooting game, no doubt after a bout of Touhou.

This was made shortly before "98th Mystery", which I thought was good enough that I did eventually post it years later after giving up on my fantasies of game-making, but this one was a weaker composition and I never bothered with it until now. Would have been a boss theme, I guess.

Many years ago, I briefly played Sailor Moon: Another Story and found the music impressively soporific (sorry, vivify!). For some reason, I was sparked to write this in imitation of the style. I doubt I really succeeded, but then I can't actually remember the game's music anymore, so who knows. I guess I really should play the whole thing sometime...

I never recorded this with the intended soundfont (the default GM.DLS included with e.g. Windows XP), so you'll have to content yourself with this render using an SF2 soundalike.

Ice level music pastiche. Could be worse, I suppose, but I didn't care enough about it to bother posting it anywhere.

As you can see, at some point I gave up on trying to give names to my WIP tracks and just started mashing the keyboard. Gets a little tricky when you're going back a decade later and trying to remember what files like "eqrnqerymqrymqeymrtmywrmywr.mmpz" and "aertgtahaeryjh.skj" are supposed to be, though.

At some point I had this idea for a game which I, for once in my life, actually made some sort of effort to create. Of course, I lost interest and gave up within a few weeks, but I did at least program something this time. Anyway, I wrote this one track for it, which was supposed to be some sort of battle theme. It's pretty aggravating to listen to once, let alone hundreds of time throughout a game, so I really hope it wouldn't have made it to the final product if I'd actually gone through with things.

During the era when I was developing a level editor for Tails Adventures, I wrote a few Master System/Game Gear–style tracks for a putative hack of the game. I imagined this would be for the cave areas.

Same project as the above. Would have been for... some cheery outdoor area, I guess.

Still the same project (can you see I had a theme with the names here?). This was going to be the final boss music. There's a prominent riff near the end that was supposed to be quoted from the regular boss theme, but I never actually finished the regular boss theme, so this is all there is.

More Tails Adventures hack music. Probably meant for the outdoor/mountain areas? Not sure if I was even planning to that extent. More likely I was just going with whatever ideas popped into my head and figured I'd find something to do with them later. Which of course worked out swimmingly.

Something I made for no particular reason and apparently just couldn't figure out anything to do with. Makes me think of Super Metroid, though it's been so many years since I've heard the music from it that I'm not sure if there's anything to that.