ZATH BLOG
Song and Remix
Zaratustra created a game called Fugue back in 2002. It was for an Hours of VERGE competition (where you have a certain number of hours to create a game from scratch). He used a public domain song to go with it, but he wanted something that fit the game a little better, so I whipped up a song in an evening. I think the only requirement was that it had to sound baroque (or use some kind of baroque instrumentation), so it features a harpsichord sample rather heavily.
I’m sure all three of you who read this (including however many of you who are actually me) are familiar with this tune, but it jumped out at me tonight while perusing some of my old stuff, so I thought I’d upload it.
Later, Zara was looking for music to use in Zeta’s World. I volunteered some music from earlier games, and since he didn’t plan to sell Fugue, its music was up for grabs. I assumed he’d want a remix of the music, so that way he could have the main version of the level play the above song and an alternate version play the remix below. It was used for a level called “Sunspot”.
It kind of diverges from the original, but that’s alright. This version was made in late 2004, according to the timestamp on the Impulse Tracker file.
Most of the Zeta’s World soundtrack is by Troupe, and it’s good stuff. I guess I’m the “guest artist” for that soundtrack :)
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
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.