Hello everyone&#33; Newbie here would like to properly introduce myself and my compositions. Simply put, I like writing energetic music with lots of pretty chords. I don&#39;t get to write songs very often because of school, but I&#39;ve got tons of ideas and they&#39;ll slowly form and pop up in this forum. The setup I use for composition is some 8-year-old Casio keyboard for input and synthesizing and either MIDISoft (old Win 3.x program, but it still rocks for electronic pieces) or Finale 2000. I can&#39;t write anymore electronic pieces until I get past this problem of the keyboard not being compatible with my SBAudigy 2 ZS <_< . *boo*

Anyways, listed below are the songs in chronological order and pretty much from worst to best. All the files except for "Live for the Day" (MIDI) are MP3s, so dial-ups might have to wait a bit.

I look forward to hearing from you and participating in this forum&#33; Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu&#33;&#33;&#33; (I hope that was right...)


Purple Rain* (http://www.otakuongaku.com/about/PurpleRain.mp3)
My very first composition. This one and the next one were pretty much written in the same day as I was writing for a jazz band project. You may notice that both songs have the same bass line, just totally different styles and tempos. The second one ended up being the one presented.
*Please note that the drum track and the guitar that shows up every now and then was part of a preprogrammed rhythm on the keyboard, so I cannot accept credit for these two instruments.

Latviga (http://www.otakuongaku.com/about/MySecondSong.mp3)
Second song, consisting of varying accompianaments with improvisation and a thrown-together chorus. Not exactly the best, but I like the bridge though.

Heat of the Faiya (http://www.otakuongaku.com/about/Heat_of_the_Faiya.mp3)
Second jazz band song and first real song. This was actually performed (with a modified bridge for live performance) by my high school jazz band while I was playing keyboard with them.

Quest of the Balguns (http://www.otakuongaku.com/about/Quest_of_the_Balguns.mp3)
Written after playing too much DDR. I came up with the synthesizer line at the beginning of the song and wrote the rest of the song from there, keeping a traditional Chinese/Japanese flavor present with a sitar and music box.

Smash** (http://www.otakuongaku.com/about/smash.mp3)
This was written as an intro to an unofficial epic duel between me and my brother in Super Smash Bros. Melee. :neko: It has a distinct J-pop intro/ending (distinct being an understatement). Since it was meant for fight music, I focused on ambience rather than melody. I also made an effort to use choir voices just because they&#39;re cool. :D
**It was originally named Smash as a temporary title based off the game. I just haven&#39;t been able to come up with anything else.

Live for the Day (piano and chorus) (http://www.otakuongaku.com/about/Live_for_the_Day.mid)
The latest composition as of approximately 6 months. This song was performed by my high school chorus, although I never was a member of this group. I have a recording of the performance but the quality is really bad and I&#39;m too lazy to use a WAV editor to cut out all the talking at the beginning of the recording. There are words, but I won&#39;t bother posting them unless someone requests so.

amazing pieces.
I really like Heat of the Faiya, Quest of the Balguns as well as Smash**.

for Quest of the Balguns, the beginning synthesizer line seems a bit too mechanical. In contrast, some later parts have wonderful chord progression and beautiful melodies. eg, the ones around 0:40 and around 2:10.

in general, they seem really fit in video games, battle scenes especaially. I admire your ability to create such high energy pieces; I feel really encouraged and motivated while listening to the pieces.

Welcome&#33;

~~

Purple Rain: nice title (I&#39;m still trying to imagine it), fun/upbeat song, I do hear the raindrops, however it was kind of like background music to me, as in nothing really stood out

Latviga: more interesting than Purple Rain, nice to hear some solos and all the variety

Heat of the Faiya: first real song eh? nicely done . . not much else I can say except I really do agree with your statement, sounds professional (like a real song)

Quest of the Balguns: heh, DDR . . nice song on its own (sounds like it could be used as a fight song in a RPG), but it doesn&#39;t really remind me of DDR (although I don&#39;t know if that was your intention)

Smash: it won&#39;t download for me, damn . .

Live for the Day: also won&#39;t download for me

~~

Good job, I look forward to hearing more of your songs around here&#33; A friendly warning to keep all your music in this thread, and a friendly nudging towards the pinned CMA thread. =)

Darren:

Thanks for the comments&#33; Now that you mention it, the synthesizer is a bit hyperactive. I guess I could&#39;ve slowed it down a few ticks. I always tend to play things a little too fast both in composing and musical instruments.
The song is all about contrasts between heavy drums and bass to pretty string instruments, so I couldn&#39;t put in too many pretty sections as much as I love them. By having them alternate, it makes both that much better, or at least that was the effect I was trying to accomplish, climaxing to the duelling bass solos and the soundtrack-style section (I like to think of the Princess pleading the hero for help. :necko: ) and merging from a final boss battle :boo: (which is almost always too short relative to the length of the game) to a kind of finale RPG victory march :P and then the end of game dance party&#33; B)

I love high energy songs just because they&#39;re more interesting that way. For future projects, I&#39;m trying to make some songs on the other extreme (slow and pretty), but still maintain the energy (instead of an adrenaline rush, it just makes your skin crawl cause its so pretty :drool: ). The real problem I have is encompassing a single thought because slow songs can move so seamlessly from one topic to another. The result is an endless procession that leaves the listener wondering "Is it over yet?", a composers worst nightmare. This&#39;ll take practice to overcome, and I&#39;m hoping that my participation in the CMA thread and this forum will help out.



Al:

Purple Rain was a title someone else had come up with, and I still love how well it fits. First of all, Purple is about the only color I can imagine when listening to this song. The funk beat, the scale used, and the lack of a dominant melody leaves little room for variations. Of course, this was not my original intention. I just thought it sounded cool. :heh: This was also written at a time when I was having a really tough time coming up with melodies, which is why Latviga ended up being all improvisation.

Heat of the Faiya was the first song that actually had structure (verses and a real chorus), which is why I consider it my first real song. Basically it was to make up for everything that Latviga was lacking. The only big problem with this song was the drum track. It was my first time writing a drum track that didn&#39;t loop over and over again, and I was obsessed with the hi-hat sound on the keyboard. I wasn&#39;t aware of it until someone mentioned it, and now it sticks out like a sore thumb. :doh: I believe this problem was fixed entirely in Quest of the Balguns.

Quest of the Balguns began as a DDR piece, but it bent into something different along the way. The key thing I noted about DDR was that the songs have a lot of looping synthesizers in background to the main song. I was also making a heavy effort to add more filler and more layers to songs to create a more consistent performance and a fuller sound. I had the heavy drive going until my love of pretty chords got the better of me. Ah well. Things never turn out the way you had originally intended, and at least in this case I&#39;m glad they didn&#39;t.

Sorry Smash and Live for the Day don&#39;t work... I tried the links again after I read your post, but they&#39;re still working just fine from my computer. Thanks for the post and I guess I should apologize for the extensive reply. I don&#39;t hold anything back in words when typing, so even the simplest of replies can be quite extensive. :lol:

I don&#39;t know about the songs themselves, they sound mostly like experimental music, but the names do fit them. I&#39;m actually amazed how you think of Purple Rain when listening to it, so good job on that.

Johnny boy, I must say, YOU got some talent&#33; (understatement), Mr. Crawford.

Pardon my french, but WOW&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33; AWESOME (A-WEE-SOME)&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33;&#33; (Er...I mean, I hate all of them since they&#39;re so much better than mine). Ugh... If I could compose half that well, I would be the most famous person in my high school.

wow yet another amazing composer...............its amazing