So, you used to write original music...
Uh-huh.
...and then what?
Well... I wasn't very confident. I'm still not, which is why you see 9 scraps of music on this page instead of the dozens that I've started. I still have lots of unfinished song ideas just sitting there, but I don't think I'll ever revisit them.
Oh?
However, I still found myself wanting to play with music, so I began taking old material written with old tools (Amiga ProTracker, the Commodore 64's SID chip) by other people and bringing them into a more modern context with Reason. This is what you see on this page. Not a single note here was written by me (see each file's details for author information) but I did the rearranging and, in most cases, the transcribing. I have a good ear and terrible fingers, so 99% of my transcription work is done by ear and with the mouse.
I can do silly exercises like these remakes—I compare it to creative non-fiction in my mind—but new material? Naw. Not these days. I've remade all the old tunes I knew, so I'll have to go and find some new ones. In case I haven't convinced you to go somewhere else yet, this music isn't much all by itself in a modern context. Most of these are golden oldies from the European demoscene of olden lore, or from relatively obscure computer games.
This is one of those modules (MODs) that always stood out because it was unusual in every way: original samples of mostly acoustic instruments, 3/4 time (the design of ProTracker and company encouraged 4/4 time since it was written by programmers, not musicians), its jazz flavour from decades past. And really, who could ignore someone with a nickname like Lizardking?
Brass and woodwind instruments are hard to sample; even Reason 2.0's Orkester soundbank saxophone is kind of embarrassing if you don't know how to play it well.
This was a guitar-piano-flute ballad that was started more or less by accident. One of those copy-and-paste errors, or those moments where you accidentally drop something on the keyboard and you suddenly say, "Hey, that wasn't bad..."
Unfortunately, the tracker format is inflexible and I wrote it at such a slow speed that everything is really very mechanical. But, this was the last original track I wrote, finished and publically released that I'm not overly embarrassed about, so it's here.
This is the second half of the introduction music for Quest for Glory I. The first half is practically useless to transcribe into Reason because everything is so high-pitched that it goes beyond the five-octave span of the Orkester sound bank—typical for earlier computer music.
I always wondered why Sierra On-Line never insisted that their composers quantize their work, at least a little bit. Was it to give the music a human feel? Did these people not know about score editors like the rest of the world did? Did they not notice? Did they not care? The world may never know.
There's a funny story behind this one. Ryan passed along a plain old MIDI file with the note information in it, and I brought the dull notes to life in Reason with new instruments. I tried to contact Peter Wagner to see if I could get his permission to post this remix but found no trace of any references to him or any web pages under his name. The e-mail address included with Tetrix Max, circa 1992, of course, was dead. Just a few days after the remix was posted, Peter wound up contacting me instead, which was ironic in the extreme. I was thrilled to hear that Peter liked the rearrangement despite my limited mastering and production skills.
Have a listen to the original version of this and other works by Peter at his website, www.prwmusic.com.
Virtual Reality was one of those modules that had samples and sequences that were produced and extracted from real studio equipment, both a rarity and a pleasure in the module world. The name is a bit corny now, but the phrase 'virtual reality' had not yet been worn out at the time—I think. The original module is tranquil, liquidy and oozing with classic Amiga demoscene style. It didn't rank very high on the compo or scene charts, but it was always in my list of top 10 modules.
To preserve the feel of the original, I took the original drum loop and used it in the remake, which I've barely started here.
I found the module version of this song in 1996 before I discovered that it was a game in 1999. As with many other classic modules, the melodies are effective and memorable, though a bit simple. I managed to sequence most of this without hearing it while on a long phone conversation with a fellow Tridejan. As with other the other remakes I've done in 2000-early 2002, this piece came to life under the relatively limited Reason 1.0 synthesizer sound palette.
Not much to these two. Once upon a time, there was a game on the Mac called Marathon; an unknown crew called the Power of Seven did the music. The first file is a messy remake done in Reason; the second is a messier remake done with the grungy drum sequences and samples courtesy of Clawfinger. Thank them for the fancy programming, not me.
Reverie of Truth 2 is another Misty/Daeron classic. The synth-riff always intrigued me because it was one of those things that was hard for me to reproduce with any of the tools I had back then, or at least it was hard to do a reasonable imitation. I finally nailed it in Reason after years of trying to remix it. Now, of course, I have so little creative spirit left that my remix may go unfinished for a while longer.
We never had a video game console in the house when my sister and I were growing up, but studying the technical capabilities of these things at friends' places was always fun. The original Nintendo's sound chip is often referred to as a 'blippety-blop' sound chip as it only made hollow square waves, and only four or five of these crummy waveforms at a time. Not so great for music in general, but fantastic for things that should sound hollow—like, say, the giant castles in Super Mario Brothers 3.
First you'll hear my quick-and-dirty transcription of the castle theme in its original square wave glory, followed by an overlapping of sampled stringed instruments, and then the real instrument samples all by themselves. Come on! Do it with me! Dun dun dunnnnn! DUNDUNDUNdundun/BOM bom!