Music

Work In Progress

A collection of songs I made within the span of about a year, primarily from OHC, which is a composition jam I participated in for a while where the song had to made within an hour.

Following the pattern of Journey (2019), the songs were based on ideas I had floating around for games, though the primary difference is that I'm actually working on the games now. This one primarily pulled from a game idea for a metroidvania where you play as a robot and move through a section of land that is supporting a giant underground server system, from a lab on a mountain peak lit by the night sky to a giant heat sink at the bottom of an ocean. I think there's a boss song in there somewhere too.

As you'd probably be able to hear, this is when I actually started using drum loops more often, whether if it was by itself (like in Moonlight Summit and Hidden Laboratory) or if chopped up and reinforced by other samples (like in Flowing and Fracture).

Storm

This was an album made for OST Comp Jam #4, where you had about a week to make an OST based on an image and a title, this one being "Runaway".

Like before, I was only really able to make two songs and mostly just used it as an opportunity to try something different, which was a new orchestra and NES VST. I'm not super happy with how it turned out, but it's passable. It ranked 136th in the Jam.

Solstice

This was an album made for OST Comp Jam #3, where you had about a week to make an OST based on an image and a title, this one being "Story of Seasons".

I wanted to make four songs, one for each season, but I didn't have time so I ended with a song for Winter and a song for Autumn. The Autumn song was passable as a Summer song, so I changed it to that so I could name the album Solstice.

I also didn't submit the album after everything was completed, so it isn't in the jam page! I'm still embarrassed.

Journey

The oldest album I can still confidently say I'm proud of and the last to be made with LMMS before I switched to FL Studio.

I had a lot of different game ideas floating around in my head, and when I sat down to make music I'd usually base it on one of those ideas. There's about three different games ideas in there, though the most prominent was a game where you explore a bunch of floating islands with different themes and history left behind by its previous residents. I drew the album cover myself, which I'd like to do more frequently.

Cave Story Reimagined

I made this album very early in my music making career and I don't think it holds up very well. I debated actually including it here, however:

Cave Story is one of my favorite games and is what inspired me to begin looking into Game Dev, and with its music creator OrgMaker (and improved OrgMaker 2.0) being available to the public as well as a very active modding community, it's where I first started making music and stages. When I started using LMMS, I would occasionally try my hand at remixing one of the songs, using BitInvader, which let me to imitate the game's soundfont. This means the project is a cornerstone for a lot of techniques and composition styles that I still use despite its age, terrible mixing, annoying drum samples, and harsh tones.

See if you can guess which ones were made first, the quality does noticibly improve over time. You may even notice a slow shift into the style that would become the next album, Journey.

Novice's Experiments

These are some of the first songs I've ever made! Listen at your own risk, I didn't know how mixing and mastering worked.

When I first picked up LMMS, everything was new and shiny. Every new technique would become its own song: Rainbow Llamas is a reference to the icon for the LB302 VST, Pitched Percussion is when I learned how to pitch shift, Distonance is when I set the key to be something strange, Panicking about Obligations is when I learned Automation, Curved Path is when I changed tempo, and so on.

Given that I was learning music because I wanted to make video games, Many Things to Do was a medley of all the "stress" songs in the album, because I wanted to learn how to use motifs. It was a literal culmination of everything I learned, and to this day a part of me wishes I'd do something like this for any album I release.

We all have to start somewhere.