Originals

 Weather Bot (finished in November 2007)

    It's about a mad scientist who take his new creation, the Weather Bot, to a playground. Decide for yourself what unfolds.

 

Noname (finished in 2006) Sheet music

    This song is named after a cat my family had a long time ago. We had another cat name Tsunami, and, as we could not think of a name for this one, we called him Noname, rhyming it with tsunami. 

 

Royal Stride (finished in November 2007)

    I recently had to submit a portfolio of songs to certain music programs I was applying for, and the deadline was getting desperately close. Not satisfied with my portfolio as it stood, I was trying to get ideas for a new song. I saw Beowulf opening night and decided latch onto the character of Beowulf himself. I wrote this over the next couple of days and produced a little performance with GPO just in time to submit this and the above two songs.

 

 Arrangements

Sizzlin' Solitude(finished in January 2007)
 
- An arrangement of the Lava level music from Donkey Kong Country 2 (Super Nintendo) written by Dave Wise [original tune here]
 
     I started this a few months ago just to try out some new samples I got. It's been sitting on my hard drive for a while, and I opened it up this morning and vowed to complete it before the end of the day. All the acoustic guitar is my new Taylor 414ce and the electric guitar is all synthezised. I didn't obsess over my guitar performance; I just sort of let it flow. I didn't spend much time on the mixing and mastering either becuase (1 It was really really complicated and (2 it was slowing down my computer a lot. This song really pushed the limits of my 1GB of RAM and G5 processor.



Mine Infested Waters(remastered in Jan 2007)

- An arrangement of the water level music and world map music from Wario Land (GameBoy) written by Kozue Ishikawa and Ryohji Yoshitomi [original tune here (just the water music)]

     As in waters infested with explosive mines, I finished this in late 2004. I was up at 4AM sitting in front of my old iMac playing this through a little Griffin iMic. I just opened it up today and added a little compression, chorus, and reverb.
 
 
 
Revisiting the Ruins(finished in September 2006)
 
- A (second) arrangement of the same Underwater Ruins theme from Donkey Kong Land (GameBoy) written by Dave Wise & Graeme Norgate [original tune here]
 
     Here is my resubmission to OCR for my previous attempt at this tune. This started out after I was playing around with a jazzy little chord progression on the piano (found at 1:20 in the song). It just sorta flowed from there. Most of this was completed in feb/mar of this year. It's latin/techno pop, and I hope you like it. I think this is my best work yet.
 
 
 
Shadow at the Falls(finished in July 2006)

- An arrangement of Shadow Man's stage theme, password theme, and title theme from Mega Man III (GameBoy) written by Bun Bun [original tune here (just Shadow Man's theme) ]

     I am so glad this is finished. These long projects can really start to take their tole, and I haven't really been enjoying this one. Anyway, this is Shadow Man from the GB port of Mega Man 3 for the NES. The two versions are virtually the same, but I've only played the GB version, so that's what I labeled it. It's served up in a house/breakbeat style. I only meant to use Shadow Man's theme, but I couldn't resist using the password theme when I ran out of ideas, and then I used the title theme to modulate from B minor to E major. I'm satisfied with how it turned out, but this isn't my favorite work.
 
 
 
Walking on Water (finished in early 2006)

- An arrangement of the Muda Kingdom music from Super Mario Land (GameBoy) written by Hirokazu Tanaka [original tune here]

     This one has the Muda theme twisted around into a minor sonority with an aggressive synth guitar and dash of groove. I had planned on doing a bit more to this one, but I accidentally deleted the Logic project file and was stuck with remastering my last recording of it. I had a lot of fun sequencing the guitar here, and I'm very surprised with how well it turned out. Check out the whole tone fun at the end.

 

Raindance in the Ruins (finished in early 2005)

- An arrangement of one of the Underwater Ruins themes from Donkey Kong Land (GameBoy) written by Dave Wise & Graeme Norgate [original tune here]

     This was my first project with Logic Express 7. It took me about a year of off and on work to complete. It guess it's a sort of trance/downtempo/breakbeat thing. Who cares? Anyway, a lot of work went into this one; it was a tremendous learning experience for me. For those of you who might care, the main lead in this song is just the exsp24 with no sample loaded. The sine wave's cutoff and drive filters are just routed through ADSR.

 

Orange Juice (finished sometime in 2004)

- An arrangement of Orange Ocean from the fantastic Kirby's Adventure soundtrack by Hirokazu Ando & Jun Ishikawa [orignal tunes: stage theme & map theme]

     This was my first really serious music project on my Roland KR-7 (started shortly after I discovered what the "quantize" function does). I'm very happy with how it turned out, and I think it holds it's own against some of my more recent work. I think bubbly/fruity/island are words that best describe it's genre. I hope to do more of this soundtrack in the future.

 

Links

Nothing in particular:

OverClocked Remix - a video game music arrangement site with very high standards for submissions

VGMix - a video game music arrangement site which posts virtually all submissions it receives

Tommy Emmanuel - one heck of a guitar player and entertainer

Civil Air Patrol - United States Air Force Auxiliary