Now available for work!

It's been a few years since I did this and the scene has changed quite dramatically, but the need for decent music and memorable melodies hasn't!

Therefore I've decided to start offering my compositional services once again to the community and start putting myself out there again.

For those that are interested my portfolio is now up and ready to be viewed (either from the menu bar at the top of the page or by clicking here

So eleven years ago...

I'd just moved out of my family home and into a shared house which meant I could spend all night on the internet playing games and writing music. For the next 3 years writing music and entering small music competitions was pretty much all I did so I have a fairly substantial collection of "Mod" music files from that era.

As I've been asked a few times recently I've decided to try and make more of those available than are already on The Modarchive on this site.

So today I've uploaded some select tunes from the year 2000 which can now be found in my portfolio pages (menu bar at the top of the page) or you can just click on this link.

As usual any comments are welcome!

Dipping my toe into the murky waters of BandCamp

Since I've used BandCamp in the past to buy music I thought I would give it a try for selling music!

Rather than go to the trouble of writing a brand new album (I actually do have something in the long-term works) I decided to release a couple of game soundtracks I've written over the last few years just to preview the difficulty in getting noticed on BandCamp.

Well a few hours after putting the sound tracks on there I had....1 partial play and a skipped play! Hmmm, so not that easy eh? I guess there's no change there, it's all about how you sell yourself and how much effort you feel you can put into marketing. Which, for me, isn't much when it comes to music!

Anyway, it looks pretty neat on there so that's a plus at least. And you never know, I may earn a dollar! Wooooo....

Now I'm going to try out their player on this blog. Lets see how this works out:

The trouble with Tribloos and other bits

I've been a bit quiet here this year so far, mainly because I've been working on a new gaming project called "The Tribloos". A casual game made completely by yours truly featuring small blue fury creatures!

It's a lot of fun going back to creating games again rather than just writing about them, plus it gives me extra incentive to write some tunage again. I've actually written two tunes for it already which is pretty prolific for me these days!

Here's one of them (possibly not completely finished yet) which is quite "elevator-music-ish" (on purpose! :P )


So aside from all this I've been thinking of doing some official releases which I've not done for years. I've been listening to a lot of independent music over at BandCamp (after seeing that's where Alexander Brandon (AKA Siren) now releases his stuff)

I've got a couple of ideas for an album or two that I might release. The great thing about BandCamp is that it gives people the option to give money for your music, or to have it for free! (Or you can set a minimum charge.)

I'm not entirely keen on asking for money for myself for music, but if I did ask for money it would probably be to then donate any proceeds to a charity. Personally my chosen charity would be Cancer Research because a cure for all cancer variants would be something I'd love to see in my lifetime.

*Anyway* more on all of this soon hopefully...

Feelings and Music

Not long ago I wrote a piece for a game a friend and I are planning to create. Since it could be some time until that game gets finished I've decided to post it here.

It's far more sombre than Potato man (from my previous post) but I kind of like the emotion I got into it:

The Potato Man!

For our work at BumpkinLabs I am required to write musical background pieces that reflect the mood and style of the game.

Generally I ignore the requirements and write what I feel like, like this:

Orchestral sounds are good stuff!

I've been dividing my time up between writing music and creating 3D models for our new project over at Bumpkin Labs. This has regretibly meant that I've been unable to spend time on writing much music for my album project or for any competitions recently.

However I did recently buy, obviously for music related projects, is Garritan Personal Orchestra 4 (GPO) and I've been thinking for a while how I can describe my experiences of it.

I actually bought it by accident! Honestly! Even though it's probably the cheapest orchestral VST you can buy at $150 that's still a fair chunk for a hobbiest like myself. I initially wanted to see the final paypal screen before buying so I could check to see if any VAT/Sales Tax was going to be applied - which it turns out is absorbed into the $150, so that's good news.

So the confirmation arrived and I attempted to download it, which through no fault of Garritan, was an absolute nightmare and so typical of my connection to drop to pre-broadband speeds just on the day I'd spent loads of cash on something I wasn't going to be sure about until I'd used it!

*Anyway* the next day I was finally able to download the huge file and see if it worked in Renoise, my musical software of choice, which thankfully it did.

I learned a few things very quickly, like how you need several instances of GPO working at once, which it's designed for, and how to create ensembles and to take notice of instrument ranges.

This probably works differently to how it does with many other music programs, Renoise is certainly a bit different to most! And luckily there's quite a bit of information out there on how to adapt Garritan to your preferred program. I noticed there was at least a Cubase tutorial on the Garritan site and I've seen this used in FruityLoops too somewhere.

Best to get used to the preset ensembles first, this really helps with learning how the system works and introduces you to combining instruments. Take special notice of the channels number to the right of every instrument you include, especially when using it in Renoise, as this can allow you to play instruments at the same time within the same instance. This can be changed just by clicking on it. Also there are some slight discrepancies in the tuning of some instruments, but luckily these can be tweaked too.

I also had a quick go at using the .mid importer in the aria player to convert a piece my dad wrote. It worked after a fashion but some of the instrument assignments were wrong and I could have done with a proper MIDI based program to make it work. If I know what the assignments are supposed to be though it would work fine! Maybe I'll try that again later...

Something else I learned quickly was that GPO is flipping brilliant and is usually the first VST I'll load when starting a new tune. I've already polished off a great menu theme for the Bumpkin Brothers project and also some in-game musical ideas that I'll be expanding on, but I can't really share those here (I need to maintain some degree of seperation between projects.)

However, when I said I hadn't had time to work on my piano album earlier in this post, well that was kind of a non-truth. I haven't been playing my actual musical keyboard recently, but I have written a piano piece using GPO and the excellent concert piano that comes with it (thank you, thank you, thank you for including that Garritan!)

And that's something I feel I can share, it's a work in progress so this could be different if anyone comes back and plays it later. It's likely to be the first or last piece on my piano based album (I really need a name for that) unless I use it elsewhere.

Anyway, here it is.