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So a friend of mine emailed me last night and said “Please make a 20th century style Nintendo piece” and then mentioned a ton of genres that the game should fill such as adventure / action / puzzle / survival horror / RPG / FPS / MMO etc.

20th Century, eh? Like the nerdiest, difficult listening music. Set theory, 12-tone rows..

So! Cutting to the chase, I stayed up a few hours past my bedtime and made a 12-tone row Nintendo piece. I call it  NINTENROW.

(ah, hahaha.)

Anyway, it’s an overworld/area map and then it steps into pause mode, and then battle mode… and a little victory ditty before going back to the overworld/area map.

I used the following row: C F D# G# A# G D A B E F# C#
and its inversions and retrogrades.

I feel so nerdy right now, it’s awesome.

28 / June / 2008  Music by zath  Comments (1)

It’s a weird song.

So today I made something weird!

[SND] zath_EsamNaesQuaSneoq.mp3 18-Jun-2008 18:50 5.0

Mostly used my keyboard (roland xp-80) and a voice sample from the AT&T text to speech operator.

18 / June / 2008  Uncategorized  Comments (2)

Economic Stimulus

I got a Zoom H2 portable recording device.

So, to celebrate, I took part in the optional assignment for Composition class which was to write something “Electronic”. By Electronic, they meant something in the classical sense (like Musique Concrete, using sound effects and bits of random recordings and no real tonality to speak of).

[SND] zath_E_Tore_Be_Ye_Ten.mp3 28-May-2008 02:30 3.1M

So it’s like a bunch of crazy sfx that I recorded, arranged in a way that probably only makes sense to me.

28 / May / 2008  Music by zath  Comments (0)

Eggshell

[SND] zath_eggshell.mp3 07-May-2008 23:06 1.7M

“Whoever heard of an eggshell sending a distress call?” she demanded. “There has to be a transmitter somewhere, it stands to reason.”

Why should you stand to reason? It didn’t make sense. Why didn’t you lie down to reason? So much more sensible. Rests the cerebellum. He was just about to remark on the fact when he realized that Romana was gone. Searching for the transmitter, no doubt.

Still, why shouldn’t an eggshell transmit a distress call? Particularly if it was broken.

Something along the lines of Monday but with more sounds I made instead of all sounds I sampled.

7 / May / 2008  Music by zath  Comments (0)

MUS 241, Motive Assignment.

Another one of these assignments for Composition. This time, the teacher wanted us to feature a motive and then mess with it using augmentation and stuff.

[SND] zath_motivated_by_discomfort.mp3 23-Jan-2008 12:00 424K

The teacher said she really liked it! :)

Er, dunno about that title, really. Just thought of it right before printing it for class.

4 / February / 2008  Music by zath  Comments (0)

MUS 241, Rhythm assignment.

The teacher provided all of the notes for the melody line, and it was left up to the students to determine the rhythm that these notes would be expressed in. She also said we could add a bassline/left-hand part.  The point was to figure out what notes would make good points of arrival and emphasize those while letting others take a more supporting type of role.

This version is double-time, and it ends up sounding groovier than the regular one.

[SND] zath_rhythm2.mp3 16-Jan-2008 03:59 372K
17 / January / 2008  Music by zath  Comments (0)

No, not more Monday!

Just a few days ago, a friend mentioned he was looking forward to Monday. I made it my mission to demonstrate to him just how scary Monday is.

I give you…

[SND] monday.mp3 10-Jan-2008 14:38 2.7M
14 / January / 2008  Music by zath  Comments (0)

The story so far

Everyone’s friend, the charming sysadmin McGrue, helped change my icky web page that I made myself to a Wordpress css & php database thingy (thingy being a technical term). So I think that’ll help me want to update more often (crossing my fingers here).

Here’s all of the things I posted before the whole format changed:

10/22/07: Dive into the Box - A “mashup”, with contents from Orbital’s “The Box” and “Dive into the Heart” from the Kingdom Hearts soundtrack. I accidentally opened both songs at the same time and they meshed in my ear, so I tried to mix them together. Apologies to Orbital and Square Enix, no infringement intended.

11/21/07: Aquarius Francaise - So I was amused by the fact that Boards of Canada called a song called (and a vocal sample that said) “sixty-ten.” In French, once you get past 69, there is no actual “seventy”, but it goes “sixty-ten, sixty-eleven, sixty-twelve,” etc… so in the song “Aquarius,” I replaced the English counting with French. Why bother, you ask? Guess I thought it was funny enough to spend a few hours on. Apologies to Boards of Canada and AT&Ts text to speech operator, no infringement intended.

11/23/07: arpeg and luup - a pair of little snippets where I was testing VST instruments and getting used to Renoise.

11/24/07: Abalandia, Caught at a Crossroad, Epitaph, and To Rule at the End of the World. These are old! I tracked them when I was in high school. I’ll put up the Impulse Tracker versions on the Archive page soon.

11/29/07: Wind Quintet - something I wrote for composition class at school. The instruments are VSTs too (although there is a recording of live players out there somewhere…)

12/07/07: MedSci Remix from System Shock 2 - I’m not entirely satisfied with it, but I dunno if I’ll go back and work on it anymore, so here it is as it stands. Maybe it’ll get submitted to OCRemix! Apologies to Irrational Games, you know the drill.

12/15/07: BGR Music.
BGR is a Play By Email game I’m participating in. Often there are scenes or locations that I’m interested in scoring music for, and I had a little time to throw together some snippets. It was also an excuse to try out more VSTs.
Aftermath - It’s scary and something terrible happened here.
Discovery - Oh, scratch that. Something terrible is happening here. And someone is dead!
Land of the Dead - A departed soul has to spend time in this sort of limbo outside the realm of the living. It’s weird there. This tune is very loopable.
Internment - Luckily, there’s a hall of resurrection. This could also double as “game over” music. :)
Breath of Life - That dead guy is alive again!

I’ll have more stuff to post soon.

13 / January / 2008  Music by zath  Comments (0)