peggios

lumpy1.mp3

I guess it’s supposed to sound spacey.

spacedisco

Tonight I pull them out again. I want to start doing more instrumental pieces for that game I’m working on. This one took me about 10 minutes to compose for one minute of recording. I might use this as part of a longer piece or maybe in a part where the music can be short; like a menu or something. As usual, it ends abruptly because it is meant to be looped.

brightpath

Check out my latest sketchbook post for a little bit of concept art if you are interested int he game.

Trying to come up with something else in FL studio. I guess this is sort-of a dead end. Or an ugly mess. I only gotta about 30 seconds out of this one. If I may be so bloggy, here it is anyway.

This track is just a bunch of fruity loops synth presets dropped in a simple arrangement.

epicsaw

This is a track

I started way back…

a-way-back-back-a-wiggity-whack.

(dig it)

but my patience diminished

and so I never did-a-dip-done-done finished.

(I ,like, totally got hung up man. It’s crazy.)

snapsnapsnap

So I had this idea for a concept piece to do in fruity loops. It would be like Camille saint-saens’ Carnival of Animals except about  beer instead of animals. And with cheezy synth loops instead of the symphony. So I started this track along time ago and never finished it. Today I just opened it up in my new FL Studio 8 and added some parts and then put a fat compressor on it.

This is about the pull. When you pour the beer from the tap. Its got all the cheezy gurgly, gloopy sound effects that I could find. It’s only a minute long, but sometimes an idea only stretches a minute.

lager

The setting is all-the-way scifi fantasy. In the post apocalyptic future, much of the Earth becomes covered in forests of massive trees. The forests are full of poison spores and gargantuan insect monsters. Human beings are forced to live in the deserts, but there are a few who venture into the forest to try to learn its secrets.

Nausicaa navigates through the Forest with the aid of a small, rocket-powered, winged conveyance, fueled by scifi magic. How great is that?

Gliding through the Poison Forest

Years ago, when I first started using fruity loops, I did a bunch pieces where the composition was very step-sequenced from small individual parts. Each part was simple and repetive, but I would plot-out variations in the arrangement, making the piece complex overall.  The sound was very techno-ish.

Eventually I learned to use the piano roll where I could plot notes over whatever range of measures I wanted. Fruity loops was no longer just a sequencer, but also a full music-writing tool. I started writing real melodies and backing parts, but the arrangement contained less variations in instrument sounds, and lacked the thickness that my previous compositions had. Additionally, back when I used fruity loops as a step sequencer I threw in non-melodic synth noises that fit rhythmically and these were gone from my later compositons.

For this piece I tried to use a hybrid of both approaches, and I like the result. This is the most complex project that I’ve done in Fruity Loops for a very long time.

anxiety

For this, I was thinking of one of those haunted mansion, point-and-click games like those old NES/Mac games that include Shadowgate, Deja Vu, and uninvited.

Currently I’m trying to learn actionscript to further my web programming expertise.  I’m going to try to implement my own knock-off, which I’ve been thinking about for awhile. It’s called Uncle Charlie’s Fun House. I’ll post the link when there’s something to see.

By nightfall, the hero wins the battle against the demonic horde with the aid of his trusty NPCs, but the battle is grueling and costly and it’s beginning to look pretty hopeless for winning the war.  This piece would loop at dawn when the hero’s hope is renewed and he begins a quest to find a way or afirm his righteousness  or something silly like that.

To break-down the arrangment:

there is a continous arpegio bell that is a sequenced synth. The Drums are essentially sequenced.

There are two main guitar tracks that overlap, and three other guitar overdubs for highlights. On all othe guitars i put on the thick Tracktion chorus filter for that eighties, fantasy sound.

The lead is played on my piano with the same Mellotron flute samples I’ve used before in other tracks.

morning