Category Archives: Music

Frosty Meadow

Posted by Piscis on

Fish Notes

 

How about another quick piece of video game music?

 
I usually write NES music with a tracker, which is more like programming an audio chip with a series of sound instructions than it is composing in a traditional sense.  This time, however, I wanted to try out Matt Montag’s NES VST, which is a plugin that allows one to recreate 8-bit Nintendo tunes with a standard notation sequencer.  The streamlined workflow meant I could throw something like this this together in about an hour.

As such, enjoy (or hate (or be utterly indifferent to)) a jaunty little level loop.

 

Bene scribete.

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Star Flash

Posted by Piscis on

Fish Notes

 

What’s this? More music? The only creative thing I can complete lately!?

 

 
I encountered a thread on Twitter a couple weeks back of people posting their favorite (invariably science fiction) ’80s cartoon opening themes, which left me with the urge to write something along those lines.

As a side note, if you crave an exercise in madness, try coming up with a title consisting of “Star” followed by a cool/short/punchy word that isn’t already the name of some existing sci-fi show, movie, book, game, or what have you.

 

Bene scribete.

Pumpkin Punch / Stress Fracture

Posted by Piscis on

Fish Notes

 

In lieu of sufficient progress on certain matters to make a worthwhile announcement quite yet, here is…yet more music.

Eh? Ehhhhh???

 

 

This one’s just a short bangy harpsichord piece I did while feeling glum. What better than baroque tones to express feeling bad, but, like, in a classy way? As always, SoundCloud compression trashes harpsichord, but feel free to download if so inclined.

 
 

 

And here’s an experimental synth piece I did with a neat little waveform shaper called Glass Viper. I constructed all of the sounds in it just by manually drawing in and layering small audio waveforms (which it will frequency-modulate to pitch-map), and only really scratched the surface of what this synthesizer is capable of.

Anyway…

 

Bene scribete.

Trovami Sotto la Luna

Posted by Piscis on

Fish Notes

 

WHERE HAVE I BEEN.

Good question!  Short answer…doing big things.  But more on that later.

For now – new music!

 

 

I had the urge to write something classical, which I realized I hadn’t done in some time, so I threw together my take on a baroque harpsichord toccata (well, maybe not “threw together”; I actually spent a lot more time on it than I meant to).  As usual, SoundCloud’s streaming compression crumples harpsichord dynamics, but alas.  Feel free to download if you’d like a giant FLAC file.

 

Bene scribete.

Show ‘Em Your Claws

Posted by Piscis on

Fish Notes

 

Programming audio for the NES is fun, so when I came across an emulator for the S-SMP (the SNES sound processor), I had to take a stab at Super Nintendo music as well.

I’m not very good at action/battle music.  So, of course, I wrote an RPG battle theme.

 

 

Naturally, I went for something in the Final Fantasy vein.  I probably could have done some further sample-rate/bit-depth reduction to make it sound more like it was coming from a real SNES DSP (the percussion’s a bit too crisp in particular), but this seemed to be an acceptable balance that hopefully still captures its distinct feel.

 

Bene scribete.

Midnight Run

Posted by Piscis on

Fish Notes

 

Got a neat little inverse-colored super-portable miniature MIDI keyboard to use with my laptop on a Labor Day sale, so I of course had to throw something together with it

 

 

Another go at an ’80s-noir synth vibe (but with a koto for some reason).  Had a heck of a time getting it to sound O.K. streaming – pure sine waves amid a lot of ambiance is really hard to compress, apparently.   Ended up uploading FLAC instead of MP3 this time, which helped a bit, but this piece seems a lot more dependent on physical speaker properties than most.

 

Bene scribete.

Ion Tower

Posted by Piscis on

Fish Notes

 

Playing around with MixCraft Pro 7 – wanted to do something synthy, so I thought I’d throw together a video game-y stage loop with a “final dungeon” sort of feel, as I tend to enjoy such pieces (any well-composed game from the ’80s and ’90s had to have a good last level theme, right?).

 

 

I feel like something’s not quite right, or missing, from it, but a plethora of tweaks and additions I tried only made it sound worse.  I probably just need more practice with modern synth and techno.  As much as I enjoy it, my mindset’s still too ingrained with orchestral tendencies (or simple waveform generation, on the other end of things).

 

Bene scribete.

A Long Way From Home

Posted by Piscis on

Fish Notes

 

Whew. This piece wasn’t easy to get right. Glad I stuck with it, though, since I like how it turned out.

Not sure what it’s for – just a synth and orchestral blend that wormed its way into my head and rattled around until I could put it together.

 

 

As is typical for wide-range pieces, SoundCloud’s compression crushed the audio, but feel free to download for higher quality.

 

Bene scribete.