Hey, I just found this site by chance, and decided to join it; it&#39;s nice to see another big &#39;amateur&#39; composition forum(which isn&#39;t clumped in with the discussion thread *cough* *cough* GamingW *cough* <_< ) around (I frequent VGmusic.com&#39;s mainly). Nowadays, I mainly compose &#39;video game&#39;-styled music, which pretty much means anything-goes ;). Anyways, I&#39;ll definitely be enjoying this deluge of original composition. I&#39;ve attached something I&#39;m working on right now for an RPGmaker XP game; the recording (which is encoded in mp3pro format) quality isn&#39;t that great(the dynamics were kinda muffled by clipping, and some of the samples aren&#39;t that great). I&#39;ll probably throw in another section before the end too, and round out the transitions in general. Hope you enjoy.

I see that you can&#39;t do multiple attachments per post, eh... well, here are a few more in reverse chronological order

String Piece (mainly to test out some string soundfonts, and ways to make them sound more realistic; didn&#39;t come out too well though :():

Overworld Theme (for the same game as Tension; it&#39;s intentionally cast with dark overtones, to compliment the game&#39;s decadent mood):

Slums Theme (with a touch or two of psycho-thriller themes :boo:); incomplete, and will probably remain like that:

&#39;Experimental&#39;-electronica-ish Piece (based on notes generated from FMusic):

"Percussion"-only piece which took 1st in this little online contest(only by a hair though); this recording is kind of messed up, as some of the instruments don&#39;t play correctly. I&#39;ll try to record a better one later:

A far-fetched piano arrangement of a theme from Chrono Trigger :(:

A &#39;Collab&#39; Piece with a few other people (my contribution starts from when the guitar comes in; I also added the dynamics and remastered it in audio with high-quality samples):

A piece composed on a whim during 12.7.04; it&#39;s mostly to try out a few of the many soundfonts I&#39;ve acquired (also, it&#39;s written mostly in 11/8 :blink:)

A piece written for a keyboard-only contest piece (in which I placed 4 out of 8 :(); I lost the original midi, so I couldn&#39;t re-record it/add on to it. I think it was scored for 2 bright pianos and 2 clavinets. Anyways, a "few more" turned out to be "every MIDI piece I&#39;ve transcribe to audio". @_@

Too many to comment on&#33; Agh&#33; X_X X_X X_X

Dialog

It doesn&#39;t fit it&#39;s title and it seems rushed through most of the song (0:48 - 1:00 was, uh slow.)
From 2:46 on, that wasn&#39;t very good. It was just the sames chords and some other notes being thrown in. It sounded like you were hitting the notes with a baseball bat at some parts (ex. 0:26 - 0:31)
I personally did not like this song one bit, (just my opinion :boo: )
If you came 4 out of 8, you must only have got 4 for effort. Sorry. :think:

5.5/10
.5 for effort. :boo:

Well, I suppose the theme is more focused on the nature of duality (I actually made a little script which involves the inner dialogue of a person&#39;s contrasting persona based on this music, which is where the title comes from); duality is expressed in various forms (contrasts chord by chord, section by section, theme by theme, etc.) juxtaposed together with a fair amount of deliberation. The ending was sort of an resolution in which duality slowly merges into unity- a sort of grand epiphany in which the two contrasting personas were found to be from the same root- via the last unison chord, which is why I kept the harmony relatively the same which gradually modulating the rhymth. It certainly did evoke mixed feelings; some people thought it was a very compelling representation, while others felt that it was just random notes.

Anyways, not all of my pieces are this &#39;bleak&#39; (the RPGish ones in particular), so I hope this initial impression doesn&#39;t leave too sour of an aftertaste for you to check them out :doh:.

Tension:
Nice battle music&#33; A bit too random for me, but meh, haha.

Stringz:
Good use of the strings, you certainly know how to get the sounds out.

Overworld:
I really like the harmony and atmosphere, but I thought an overworld theme would be bright and chipper? Meh, I need to play more games . .

Slums:
Too slow for my taste, but you definately capture the "slums".

tluafed:
I&#39;m not into this type of music, so there&#39;s not much I can say, sorry.

3try:
For percussions only, this was impressive.

ct3:
Which theme from Chrono Trigger was it? I don&#39;t remember it, but your arrangement sounded nice.

MI2:
I&#39;m glad to see that collaboration songs can work out . . *waits for Ichigo&#39;s own group song to come around*

12.7:
Hehe . . well I&#39;m happy that after the experimental "soundfont" intro, the middle part was more of proper music.

Dialog:
I kind of agree with Sarkurah, sorry. Too modern for my tastes.

for me... "tension" was the best &#39;cause it&#39;s something i really wanted to compose. sorry i couldn&#39;t listen to the whole song, but i give it a 7.5/10 for this piece.

I lied... there&#39;s actually one more, though it&#39;s a short one. It&#39;s the title screen music for the same game that Tension and Overworld are composed for. This is also the first piece in which I&#39;ve incorporated some ambient FX along with the music.

Err... and then, I recorded this today too, which is another one of those "soundfont test" pieces. This is actually a pretty old piece, but I lost the original recording, so decided might as well re-do it. As the title implies, the instruments are all very &#39;airy&#39; (winds, voices, organ).

Oh, and Al, the CT arrangment was of the Special Boss Theme (very far-fetched, no ;)?). I had done two more for the same theme, each one digressing more from the original sound than the next (this is the only one I&#39;ve finished and recorded). The progression in the melodic part of the piece is sort based on the chromatic-y one in the original, and I&#39;ve (perhaps too subtley) quoted parts of the original melody. Anyways, in the end, it became almost uncomparable to the original (perhaps it&#39;s better to say this is an original influenced by the CT theme, rather than an arrangment). Oh well.

Well, here&#39;s a MIDI for once... somehow it never occured to me until a while ago that it&#39;d be much more appropriate to post in this form (since this is mainly a sheet music site, right?-I probably got carried away with the huge file upload limit :D ). This is sort of a lamentation theme in a rather serious, "cinematic" style, which is quite a change of pace from the more light-hearted, "video game" style music I&#39;ve posted so far. It&#39;s a bit heavy on the block chords, but I hope you can sort of feel the mood; your input would be much appreciated :).

Edit: Slowed down to 50bpm for better pacing; improved timing of transitions and some re-worked some chords

Edit2: Added some dynamics (expression controller changes).

Definitely sad and cinematic ^^ the chords are nice and everything. I loved the mood and the tones. But I was wondering if there was some way you could incorporate more melody :think: you do have those strings playing the high notes, but it&#39;s not enough. This makes it sound like there&#39;s no direction, which leads people to assume it&#39;s just random notes, but I know that&#39;s not the case.

Yeh, it does sorta lack a melody for the most part. But it&#39;s kinda hard for me to think of an appropriate melody when the chords are shifting so quickly. I think I&#39;d made it like this to represent to sort of represent feelings of confusion and denial; the "transition" measures where the contrabass comes in shows hint of settling, but it doesn&#39;t really do so until the F minor section at the end, where it reachs a sort of sad epiphany (the chords don&#39;t wander as much, so the top line sounds more like a melody). Anyways, thanks for the comments, and I&#39;m glad you appreciated it :).

Here&#39;s a harp obbligato that I wrote for a piece which never came to be... so I just added some parts near the end and wrapped it up.

Brainstorming for the next CMA - it&#39;s a bit ambigious right now (the first part sounds more appropriate for spring, while the latter moreso for fall). It&#39;s not really finished at all, but I thought it sounded decent enough to post for now.

edit: "Done".

Chris2sy:
I really like your sense of harmony. The first part seemed a bit repetitive to me in style, but then the other remaining parts really shined. You&#39;ve got a lot of interesting stuff going on there, I didn&#39;t expect that from a harp piece. As usual, you know what you&#39;re doing with your music, even if our tastes don&#39;t match.

water:
I shouldn&#39;t listen until you&#39;ve submitted this . .

Yeh, well it was intended as an obbligato... but I did get start to get bored with it, which is why I made the latter parts more interesting ;).

Here&#39;s some more of my older MIDIs that I kind of stopped working on, but are more or less complete.

another...

another...

...so there :P.

Boss Battle:
^^ takes me back to NES/SNES . . nice bass&#33;

Final Battle:
From the nice intro, I imagine the boss to be ginormous and insanely hard to beat =P

oks:
*feels like sneeking around* hehe . .

misc:
Miscellaneous, just like its title, haha =T sorry, not really my taste, but I do know it&#39;s good and impressive. I can&#39;t compose in this style for the life of me&#33;

Hehe, thanks for your commentry, Al. You seem like the only person not "intimidated" by the lack of convention found in many of my pieces. Well, here&#39;s a pretty conventional piece that I&#39;m now working on, due to some unexpected free time. It&#39;s sort of a step back into simplicity, with a very tighted and explicit structure (A-B-B&#39;-B-B&#39;-C-A&#39;); well, C and A&#39; aren&#39;t quite finished yet, and the melodic lines are pretty weak, but overall, you should probably be able to see where I&#39;m going with this.

Wow, so you&#39;re good at both the conventional and non-conventional&#33; I quite enjoyed this one ^^ Although I was surprised at how drastically different the middle section is from the rest, haha.

I really enjoy hearing your bossbattle it is a great song you really get in to it.
it just has a really good beat.

Such great instrument quality&#33; As if live performed. Great job on keeping the intensity on the first piece too.

Thanks for the comments. Those two were definitely some of my better attempts at writing RPG-ish music, though they aren&#39;t quite finished yet. I&#39;ll get around to wrapping them up once I feel like doing them again. Anyways, haven&#39;t had a lot of time to work on music lately; here&#39;s a little "teaser" for a piece that I&#39;m currently working on (be warned that it&#39;s very unfinished - especially melody-wise).

Wow, so professional/RPG-ish&#33; Can&#39;t wait to hear the rest&#33;

Thanks for the comments. Actually, that part is temporarily scrapped until I can put it in a more appropriate place, but overall, the piece is going well (it&#39;s actually a collaberated contest entry). Anyways, since I don&#39;t have anything new to post, I&#39;ve touched up and recorded an old piece :D. This is the 2nd piano arrangment of the Chrono Trigger Special Battle Theme; it was discontinued for being too tangentially "interpretive", but I&#39;ve added an ending just now to round it off.

what program do you use and how do you convert them to mp3?

How much did it cost also?

I like your RPG one. Very atmospheric.

I used Cakewalk Sonar and Adobe Audition for most of my mp3s - though technically, you can do it with just Cakewalk (I like Audition&#39;s wave editor though; it makes for some intuitive post-processing effects). Those programs aren&#39;t exactly cheap, but you can do it with less advanced options. Most of my stuff is recorded using soundfonts, which are for the most part, free. You can use them with SB Live/Audigy cards, or load them with an soundfont emulator like Synthfont and various Vst plugins. For recording, you can use a free wave editor such as Goldwave or Audacity. So other than the cost of a sequencer/notator (you can of course get a free one, but most of them don&#39;t really give you good controller tweakability), you can basically reproduce a similar quality for free.

P.S. Which "RPG one" did you mean? Most of my pieces are intended to be RPG-ish... :huh:

More recordings:

A motif-based piano piece:

An early, cute attempt at minimalism.

An unfinished, but very flamboyant symphonic piece:

I think it was flie. Yeah, so what were the prices. I know they would be expensive but I need figures really to see how expensive.

Heh, actually that was one just composed on a whim, but whatever. As for the prices, I&#39;m not too sure. I&#39;ve got mines during a promotion, so they were very discounted. But I&#39;m guessing each one costs at least &#036;300, probably more. Check out the developer&#39;s websites for more information. There are probably cheaper alternatives too that&#39;ll give you the same results, since I doubt I&#39;m using the software to it&#39;s potential.

Aire: Great rhythm, and I love your woodwinds. So much you can do with them, and you&#39;ve done it well with the blending. And the piece does sound &#39;airey&#39; to me, haha. One of your best pieces I believe, or I suppose to be more accurate, one of your pieces I like the most.

mutations: Wow, the mutation/transition between styles was so smooth that I didn&#39;t notice at first that that was what the title meant. This one was just pure fun eh? Also one of your best.

lib: Good job&#33; Not much else I can say, hehe . .

sym: Sounds at first like a RPG battle. But I liked how it progressed into something more.

Okay. You&#39;ve posted way too many things for me to all comment on them here. :heh: But, I&#39;ve listened to most of them and, I must say that you, my friend, are an excellent composer. I really mean that. Your Chrono Trigger "remix" (I think you should perhaps call it an original work, since it seems unrecognizable to the original piece it was based off of) was your favorite of mine and, among your recent ones, "Aire" and "Mutations" were my favorites as well. Of course, though, all of them are great. :D

Keep it up. ^_^

Just for the record, you guys do realize that "Aire" is also an arrangment ? (Of the main theme to the Anime with the similar name) I tried to make it more "pulsy" to compliment the original&#39;s light techno-y parts. Anyways, thanks for the comments as usual. You seem to be commenting a lot recently, Al, but I don&#39;t think I&#39;ve seen you post one piece since I&#39;ve come on board - is there any particular reason to that?

And Apollo, I do realize that it might as well have been an original, as I&#39;ve implied with the "tangential" reference. The third one (posted earlier in this thread) is probably even more deviant; however, let me post the first (which is actually quite conservative for the most part) to round off this trilogy of errors. I&#39;ve also just added an ending to this, so bear with the sharp change in style (as well as the general lack of dynamics due to laziness :P).

This one&#39;s mostly for An-kun, to show off just a few of the many neat post-processing effects you can achieve with Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit Pro).

Originally posted by spc1st@May 27 2005, 11:13 PM
You seem to be commenting a lot recently, Al, but I don&#39;t think I&#39;ve seen you post one piece since I&#39;ve come on board - is there any particular reason to that?
Hehe, my sporadic comments appear whenever I have free time . . anyways, just check out my thread, I believe I gave a reason why. I have been composing lately, but I believe my songs to be so terrible so as to be unworthy of being posted =)

firstfail: omg, I actually love the harmony&#33; Love the rhythm and drive . . this is an arrangement, right? Well then, great job&#33; And since Aire was also an arrangement (let us know in advance next time you arrange something =P), I guess I have to take back my comment about it being one of your best pieces xP but oh well, still, great job.

hahah: Show off&#33; =P j/k

Firstfail: Aaaah. Okay. Now I recognize it. Awesome arrangement. =D

Hahah: Hmmm. I wanna get more into producing the kind of sound quality found in your pieces. For free, of course, since I need to get myself a job before I can even hope to afford your software. :/ But, this was a good piece, too. Makes me think of some futuristic Sonic stage. ^_^

I should probably be PMing this to him, but:


I believe my songs to be so terrible so as to be unworthy of being posted =)

Well, if such is the case, why not post them, anyway, so we can tell you what&#39;s so "terrible" about them to begin with (even though I&#39;m sure they&#39;re not) and how to fix it? Hmmm?

C&#39;moooon. Don&#39;t be shy. ^.^

I agree with Apollo; this place should be not only a place to showcase your finished works, but also to receive help on works-in-progress which you are having trouble with. You should really post a few, Al, and maybe we can help you make them less "unworthy" ;). Anyways, here&#39;s another cute orchestral piece that I&#39;ve just whipped up out of boredom. I&#39;ll attach the MIDI, and provide the link to the mp3 (so as to save this server from some bandwidth :)). So here&#39;s the link (http://www.snipamasta.co.uk/hosted/Spc1st/Music/MP3s/funfun.mp3).

Another excellent piece. It makes me feel as if I&#39;m on the beginning of a great adventure or something. (Like coming into Bart&#39;s Hideout in Xenogears.) Good job. ^_^

Maybe I&#39;ll post something by the end of June =P

As for canon, it&#39;s just great ^^ This is what you do out of boredom? =P Anyways, I feel like sailing&#33;

Two piecies - Another discarded snippet from my Airshup "Magnum Opus" j/k :P

MP3 Here (http://www.snipamasta.co.uk/hosted/Spc1st/Music/MP3s/sample2.mp3)

A shamelessly exotic mock-attempt at Gakoku - ancient Japanese court music. This is the rough draft.

MP3 here (http://www.snipamasta.co.uk/hosted/Spc1st/Music/MP3s/nipponese.mp3)

Note: I had to mute the percussion track for the MIDI, since it uses the Roland GS Asia Kit.

tst:
I really like that string effect . . hope you know which one I&#39;m talking about =P

nipponese:
Ah, you seem to be good at whatever type of music you write ^^ *didn&#39;t hear percussion because he used midi, but still liked it*

lol, listening to nipponese, I can&#39;t help laughing in amusement. (in a very good sense
:heh: ) Did that involve any research?

haha, nipponese is neat :P

Originally posted by Stefan@Jun 13 2005, 10:13 PM
lol, listening to nipponese, I can&#39;t help laughing in amusement. (in a very good sense
:heh: ) Did that involve any research?
Not more than finding out that Gakoku uses a "variety of wind, string, and percussive instruments" :P - so I just ended up using the cliche instruments for Japanes-y sounding music.

Anyways, here&#39;s a rather long-winded piece I&#39;ve been working on for over a month now. I really got sick of working on it, so the latter half or so is noticably lower in quality. The link to the mp3 is here (http://www.snipamasta.co.uk/hosted/Spc1st/Music/MP3s/airshipblah.mp3). The MIDI is attached below, though if you listen to it on the MS-GS, it&#39;ll probably sound clippy.

EDIT: The mp3 posted is also sorta messed up - here (http://www.snipamasta.co.uk/hosted/Spc1st/Music/MP3s/airshipblahblah.mp3)&#39;s a new version.

How do you come up with so many original ideas? You never cease to amaze me with your talent&#33; I don&#39;t notice a decline in quality in the later half.

It&#39;s amazing, the way you weave a sound tapestry on sound and silence. How, when so much is going on, do you find the one spot that could profit from another sound? So much going on, that I bet I don&#39;t hear it all in one go. Baffling. And brilliant. :blink: ^_^

Originally posted by Al@Jun 30 2005, 04:07 PM
How do you come up with so many original ideas? You never cease to amaze me with your talent&#33; I don&#39;t notice a decline in quality in the later half.
If you looked a bit closer, you&#39;d see that it&#39;s mostly the first half chopped up and transposed XD. But whatever - this kind of crap always happens to me when I spent too much time on a piece; either I don&#39;t finish it, or I just finish it quickly without much finesse - and in either case, I end up moping at this pathetic heap for weeks or even months, feeling cheated out of my precious time and end up despising composition (and thus end up not composing at all). But whatever...

Anyways, it&#39;s horribably over-orchestrated at parts (the pointless winds during the 3rd section overshadow the neat counterpoint in the strings), and under-orchestrated at others (the recap section progressively drops out instruments not because it was intended... but because I just got sick of copying and pasting all that junk). And so on...

Hopefully, I&#39;ll be able to get back cracking at new pieces sooner than later :/.

Well, this isn&#39;t exactly a full-fledged piece per se (more like an exercise/review/study of some minimalistic techniques), but it&#39;s better than nothing. The 2nd violin part kinda gets off track near the middle, so I ended it somewhat prematurely rather than in a more appropriate, symmetric fashion. But whatever :P - anyways, it&#39;s scored for chambers strings, so I&#39;ve used the individual patches rather than the string section patches for MIDI (so the quality is most likely going to be bad :(); an audio (http://www.snipamasta.co.uk/hosted/Spc1st/Music/MP3s/stringala.mp3) version is also available - take your pick (or try both :))

Please close this thread - I can't be bothered to re-upload all those old pieces x_x. Thanks.

Closed.