Tag Archives: 80s

Rumbling

Posted by Piscis on
Fish Notes

Happy Halloween!

This has been a stressful and busy month, I got sick for a good portion of it, and on top of that I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired, so it’s some small miracle that I was able to get an October piece put together in time for the holiday.

Going for more of a sci-fi horror vibe this year, finally taking advantage of a neat, gritty little sound design synth called Scarbo, which my brother had gifted me sometime back.  It’s certainly not my best work, given the above-mentioned constraints, but sometimes in art, you just need to pick something, push through, and finish it in order to break a slump with that little jolt of forced productivity!

Bene scribete.

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.

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.

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.