First, a recap.
Summer School
An original piece.

Spy Hunter (Thump Mix)
A remix of the Peter Gunn theme by Henry Mancini as it appeared in the 80's video game classic, Spy Hunter.

Carol of the Bells
An original arrangement of the Christmas classic.

Planetary Rock
A mash-up of Planet Rock by Africaa Bombaattaa/Zulu Nation/Soulsonic Force and some choice pieces by Kraftwerk.

Parasite Event
A remix/overture of the Parasite Eve video game sountrack by Yoko Shimomura.

And now...

I'd like to dedicate this piece to sundancekat, who provided one of the tracks used for this piece. Also, to jvowles and docthestampede and all my other Whofan friends who geek out with me when the time is appropriate.

So what is this I'm talking about?

"Swamp Doctor" is a mash-up of Swamp Thing by Juno Reactor, and 3 versions of the Dr. Who theme. This is, by far, the best piece of music I've ever put together. It will be a very long time before I make another mash-up better than this, and I don't know if I'll ever write anything this good.

Yeah. You want this. You really want this.

Stereo Static presents:
Swamp Doctor

( Liner Notes )

I had about a million pounds of fun making this; it's become my new favorite. I hope y'all enjoy it as well.

As usual, comments and critiques are welcomed and encouraged.

<<-- Planetary Rock - Swamp Doctor -->>

Remember when I said I loved video game music? Here's another great example of that.

After playing Parasite Eve I decided I needed the soundtrack, composed by Yoko Shimomura, one of the greats in the field. At this point I don't remember what inspired me to make this track, but I enjoyed every second of it. It serves as an homage to the score, and the game, and its one of my favorite pieces of my own work (and I will readily hate my own stuff if it's warranted, let me tell you).

Stereo Static presents:
Parasite Event

( Liner Notes )

As usually, comments and critiques are welcome and encouraged. Enjoy

<<-- Carol of the Bells - Parasite Event -->>

After producing a collection of point'n'click original songs and covers, and one fairly complicated tribute piece (coming tomorrow), this was practically a breath of fresh air.

Way back in 80's, someone in my family owned a Kraftwerk album and played it regularly, to the point that it become a permanent earworm for me, although I had no concept of the band name, song name, album name, or any other indentifying piece of information. That was well before I turned ten. Fast forward to 4 years ago, having a discussion with my friend in Tribrix lead to him handing me a few .mp3's. Three songs in and I was rocked back to my early childhood. Finally! A piece of music that I'd been hearing in my head for literally decades could finally be identified and, more importantly, heard again! Even while I was recovering from that wave of happy nostalgia, I got hit with a hilarious realization; the basic rhythms of some of the pieces reminded me a hell of a lot of Planet Rock, the often sampled cult dance hit from the early 80's.

I didn't have a choice, now did I?

Africaa Boombaattaa, Zulu Nation and The Soulsonic Force, mashed up with Kraftwerk.

Stereo Static presents:
Planetary Rock

( Liner Notes )

<<-- Spy Hunter (Thump Mix) - Planetary Rock -->>

Christmas, Christmas time is here
Time for joy and time for cheer.

Those are lyrics from a song that I ALMOST used for the bridge to this piece. I'm glad I reconsidered.

CotB is my most labor intensive musical undertaking to date, but I accomplished exactly what I set out to do and for that I'm extremely proud.

I wanted a dance mix version of the song, but it was written in 3/4 time. Every, and I mean EVERY dance/club version of a 3/4 song that I've ever heard changes it to 4/4, and that drives me guano. I was trying to find away of getting around that and still pulling off something you can shake your ass to. Then I remembered that 3/4 time is also used popularly as a dance rhythm. Waltz, much?

So, before I even started, I immersed myself in the world of dance music and deconstructed the genre. I took what I learned and applied it to 3/4 time, and when I was done I realized that I had hit upon something very few, of any, have before. At some point I'm going to make a bunch more 3/4 club mixes to see if I can get a new genre spread. ClubWaltz! HouseWaltz. TripWaltz. Waltz'n'Bass. Call it whatever, I think this can work.

Enough jawing. I bring you holiday cheer in the form of music.
Stereo Static presents:
Carol of the Bells

( Liner Notes )

Alright, sports fans, there you have it. As always, comments and critique are welcome and encouraged!

<<-- Summer School - Carol of the Bells -->>

I have always unabashedly proclaimed my love of video games, and I probably will 'til my dying day. I'm one of those parents that can school their kids in video games.
One of my favorite aspects of video games is the music. As the technology improved, so did the quality of music being written for video games. Yoko Kanno (one of the best Japanese score writers for movies and TV) got her start writing for video games, to give you a hint. So over the years I've been amassing a collection of game soundtracks.

Streets of Rage.

Fatal Fury.

Final Fantasy VII.

Final Fantasy Tactics.

Parasite Eve.

Dungeon Explorer II.

Ecco The Dolphin.

Ecco: The Tides of Time.

Frankenstein.

Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Killer Instinct.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

I could go on, easily. The point is, I love the stuff, so when I decided I wanted to do some remixes, I felt compelled to play in this field.

Enter: The Old School.

An old friend (known in some circles as Domino) procured for me a audio rip of the theme from Spy Hunter. Raise of your hands if you remember THAT one. Yeah, I sucked at that game, but I remember being utterly fascinated by guys who could play for hours on a single quarter.

The music is both highly memorable and very infectious; it's the Peter Gunn theme filtered through a... what, 4bit? 2bit? processor.
So with that rip and some choice sound effects from the game, I went to work.

Stereo Static presents:
Spy Hunter (Thump Mix).

( Liner Notes )

As usual, comments and critique are welcome and encouraged!

| Spy Hunter -->>

Some of you know this already, but I'm a teeny bit of a musician. I've recently decided that I'm a musician in the larval stage; I've talent, and I've received some royal jelly in the form of 3 years of concert band, 2 years of jazz band, a smattering of original music written and the occasional arrangement. I have performed on stage, I've solo'ed and I've handled behind-the-scenes tech for concerts, including setting up and running the soundboard for a live performance.
With all that experience, I say larval because my actual training has been relatively limited; I spent those 7 some-odd years playing trumpet, and not really learning music, just the pieces I was playing. I have had a single piano lesson, which has served me magnificently well (thanks, Great Granpa Clyde!). I have my own electric guitar and a few books to learn by, but I don't really do well with self-teaching.

At any rate, about 4 years ago I decided that playing and creating music was an important piece of my life that was missing. So, under the band name Stereo Static, I got my hands on a few chintzy programs (and one not-so-chintzy) and began dabbling with making techno pieces. I realized VERY QUICKLY that my lack of understanding of music theory was a fantastic hindrance. To wit: what I made sucked. So, in an effort to better understand this craft, and to hopefully become a full-fledged musician, I started doing remixes and mash-ups. By taking apart the work of the experts, I thought I would learn more about what I was doing.

So off and on, for the last 4 years I've been spitting out occasional pieces. The first piece that I did, mostly for practice, was a reworking of my last palatable original piece.

Some of you might have heard the original version, and a few of you might have heard a prior draft of the remix. What I have here is a brand new file.

Stereo Static presents:
Summer School for your downloading pleasure.

This will be up on a temporary basis. Grab it while it's hot!

( Liner Notes )

Free music, from me to you. All comments and critiques are welcome and encouraged!

I'm trying to explain chord progressions to a friend of mine. Would someone mind correcting me?

( Read more... )

Your help is greatly appreciated.

EXPERIMENT
At work, I've undertaken a very minor experiment. I have a playlist something like 1251+ songs long, set on shuffle. With that multitude of choices, WMP only seems to play maybe 100 of them a week, or at least it feels that way. So, to hear some of those tunes that I don't hear too often, and to see just how long the playlist is, I've turned off shuffle and started it at the top, sorted first by my rating, then by album, then by artist.
As of Thursday morning, 9:30am EST, the list is approaching 1/3 finished, sitting in the "J's" of the 3 star section, which I believe is the largest section, followed closely by the 4 star section. That's 3 days running, 8 hours a day.

Fascinating, Captain.

WHY BOTHER/THEY DON'T CARE
Hey, king_duncan, remember that "they don't care" link you sent me? I got another one for the books.

As the last part of my birthday present, I received this week two CD's. The first one gets it's own mini-post here, for it is squeeful and squeemaking. The second cd was the Transformers score. I've seen the movie a bunch of times, I bought the soundtrack, I loved the score, and since I collect movie scores (Danny Elfman alone has 4 album's worth on my playlist), I picked this one up.
On the cd are 20 tracks. Of those twenty tracks, on the liner listings, 16 of them are asterisked. "What does the asterisk mean?" you might ask, intrepid reader, and I answer thus; different versions of the track were used in the actual film.



Say what? I thought, when ordered this thing, that I was going to get the music composed and conducted for the film. The VAST MAJORITY of this cd is comprised of music that does NOT appear (as is) in the film.

But... I wanted the music that was in the movie. That's what the SCORE is supposed to be...

I have no idea what these tracks actually are. They sound similar to what's in the movie, certainly. Maybe what's in the movie are recut versions of the tracks on the disk? I don't know.

I decided not to return the cd because the music on there is in fact very good. However, it would seem that the tradition of Transformer movie soundtracks being difficult to attain is continued. Le Sigh.

BLACK MAGES
The other disk that I got was the first Black Mages cd.

If you know what that is, squee right along with me. C'mon. Squee for me! Squee like a fangirl!

Enough Anideliverance.

Black Mages is the band put together by Nobuo Uematsu, who is the composer for most of the music you've heard when playing Final Fantasy ___. It's a rock-synth band. It is an AWESOME rock-synth band. All they do are Final Fantasy covers; this cd is basically the best battle music from a bunch of the games (including the ever popular VII, which gets two tracks) redone in a smoking metal'n'synth style.

Yeah, I'm picking up more Black Mages as soon as I can. My goal is to get their cover of "One Winged Angel," featured in the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

So for the first time in something like 10 years I bought a CD of an artist in the current top 40, with one of the songs in the top 40. I'm NEVER this contemporary with music! LOL

It's Natasha Bedingfield. She totally won me over with 'unwritten'. I almost never buy an entire album on the strength of a single song (Enigma being the only other exception to that) and MAN did she not disappoint. First song to last hidden track are excellent (with peaks and valleys, of course), but errie thing is the lyrics and movements to the pieces are speaking directly to me. They are relevent to my life, some to things that are in existence now that weren't when I ordered the CD.

I'm thrilled that I made this purchase. I think I'll be listening to this one for a while.

Walking, indeed traveling is much, much easier when you can breath.
And it is true, you never know what you have until it's gone. These things I have been reminded of while trying to get to work.

Alright, the show!
( 169 and East Broadway )