my dismal career
i was once a professional music composer/performer for computer adventure games. so ashamed was i of this occupation, i used a fake name when doing it, kinda like a guy who fucks sheep would like to do when hauled into the police station. finally, the shame grew so great that i left for less whorified work.enough time has passed that i feel comfortable discussing this unsatisfying time of my life as though somebody else was responsible for it. and if you're a fan of MIDI files composed for the roland MT-32 (in other words, MIDI files that, unmodified, tend to sound like crud on anything other than an MT-32, especially if pitch bending's involved), here are some of the less heinous samples of my rent-paying effluence.
*those with asterisks are considered (comparatively) mildly noteworthy, or unpainful (at least in part) played outside the MT-32. natural rights are reserved, and please note that the contract i signed prohibited the use of these compositions/performances (a few popular songs or bastardizations were obviously not written by me) in any other computer game.
Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers get all the Girls 1990
newtheme
Timequest 1991
napoleon
theme
victory
Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer's Appliance 1991
bananas*
bludemon
C&STheme
endgame
eve
failure
goernie*
pool*
Frederik Pohl's Gateway 1992
aivirus* (blatant ripoff of the beginning of patrick moraz's Story of I. i'd call it "an homage" if i hadn't been scraping around for anything i could toss over the line so i could climb back into bed. sorry, mr. moraz! in junior high i went to sleep every night listening to your beautiful music. glad it could put food on my table regurgitated, however poorly.
bluehell (after the horrible patch mismatches at the beginning, this is kinda amusing because of the influence of early prince, another of my music heros.)
disco* (i like this stupid beat, and the aural illusion round cycle mess at the end.)
first* (closer to my real composition style, though still whorified.)
gateway
gauntlet (pretty much a keith emerson, ELP ripoff. for being a cheapo synth, the MT-32 had a surprisingly good rockin' hammond organ, which i joyfully slid all the fuck around. again, none of it translates off the MT-32, and all the key slides gave nightmares to the transcribers, who ported tunes to other cards. "lazy" will be my epitaph.)
gospel (a beautiful piece, IMO, though you'd never know it outside the MT-32).
wander1 (nothing special, but if you're a weather report fan, it's funny [disturbing?] to hear how i just mimicked whatever for a buck. shameless.)
wilting* (this used one of my favorite lead patches on the MT-32, the name of which escapes me now. on my laptop's MIDI card, it's mostly inaudible and screwed. i toyed with pulling my old MT-32 out of storage and sampling these, but then they'd be huge .MP3 files instead of .mid, and the MT-32, while having the correct patches, still sports bandwidth just slightly better than a telephone.)
Spellcasting 301: Spring Break 1992
if my lazy approach to game music writing had a perfect match, it was the humor of game author steve meretsky, who wrote the spellcasting series. this was a game i sorta enjoyed working on, unlike most of the others.billybob*
dittie
dthsquad*
elevator (piece of cake to throw together, considering my dad played shit exactly like this for hours in the car on long trips. the dreck basically dribbled from my fingers. EZ listening, baby!)
furtle*
gigglit*
hooskow* (the keith emerson effect. under deadline, go with what you know, right?)
jeepers
love (often when writing, you come up whatever you think sounds good. anywhere from minutes to years later, you sometimes realize you ripped off an existing song without knowing it. not sure, but i think there was a contemporary mariah carey song with a theme similar to the opening of this. as i recall, the similarity wasn't strong enough to worry about pulling a song and losing my $2.78. therefore, more time to sleep!)
MT-32 (this is very computer adventure gamey pussified. i left the business right before real music, i.e., audio recordings, not MIDI, became commonplace, and sometimes i wanted to go back just so i could play some bitching guitar instead of this gay crap. but hey, sometimes the gay crap went perfectly with the game. see the xanth section below.
)presence
puffer* (a common request when writing for games was to fuck up a popular song. this one's "puff, the magic dragon", for a dragon sequence, as i recall.)
pussman (rarely, i'd slap into a computer game a serious song i'd already written, for efficiency. this goes in the other direction — a throwaway game tune i eventually started lyrics for and planned to record seriously. would be nice with real horns and stuff.)
rockbore*
skleebr
Companions of Xanth 1993
this was the first game i seriously buckled down for and considered maybe making game music a career. didn't take, but of all the games, this is probably the richest in themes and non-jam material. many of these songs were written on paper, on top of a fender rhodes, then recorded. most of the other stuff was just fucking around into a sequencer and keeping whatever sounded halfway usable.ammo*
basimic*
canopy (this is a real song, written with lyrics 'n' shit. not surprisingly, it sounds like a vocal song with some asshole playing the vocal part like a lamer. paul shaffer's one of the only people i can think of who does vocal parts well on keyboard.)
center* (even though keyboardy and adventure gamey, it went very well in the game.)
colgate* (another good match with the game)
crappo (could be the opening music for any cheesy 80s teen romance movie. ouch!)
credits (fortunately, the meandering bullshit middle part of this was drowned out by a gag reel of the voice actors and production crew. sometimes i wonder how i could have released such drivel. oh that's right; there was a purpose to having a pen name!).
disturb* (pretty cool on the MT-32. little bit of 3 mustaphas 3 influence toward the end.)
dixie* (i love this one; my kind of dissonant shit, obviously written on paper first.)
doobie* (happy xanth time!)
gyro* (another i like very much, considering.)
highbrow (ahh. very highbrow. i think i'll call it "highbrow". yes.)
house* (after hearing this one so many times, i wrote filthy lyrics for it.)
intro* (i think this went very well with the beginning cut scene. might be a good film theme if expanded and de-kitsched.)
kyrandia (i liked the music from The Legend of Kyrandia, a game released while we were doing xanth. was thinking kyrandiaishly when starting this one, and the song names were usually whatever was in my head when i started, 8 characters or less. DOS, baby.)
lovestik (one of those cases where the song by itself sucks balls, but it goes pretty well in the game.)
mundane (whatever. i'm getting sick of these songs all over again, just writing this post. few of them stand alone.)
pastel* (another real song, written about my daughter.)
rector* (not bad. another paper-written one.)
router (love string pads.)
scrimp*
transprt (butt stupid.)
Eric the Unready 1993
the game, and developer, that removed permanently whatever enjoyment i got out of the business. had a meeting with the company president and pleaded to be released from the grips of dr. barbershop. in a nod to my sanity, he relented and stepped in as my liaison, for which i'm still grateful. had gotten to the point where all i wanted to do was anything but write for this shit game and author. or maybe he was the music director for the next game. don't remember. don't care.
juglthis
measle
monkey
ostiney
ruddy
scram
Superhero League of Hoboken 1994
another meretsky game, and a pretty funny one, but by this time i was ready to get the fuck out of writing throwaway music for money.
arusse
barley
betty*
clods*
downtown*
drive* (very diddy kong racing, the music for which i love)
dude* (talk about music that went perfectly with the game. fucking superhero dorks.
)ilbitt*
irritant*
mars* (gustav holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War". sounds like crap here, but it's straight from the orchestral score. any MIDI geeks looking for this song might salvage it simply by changing patches.)
newboy*
ninny
SLH* (pretty cool theme for this farce.)
sprach* (as with mars, this is straight from the score, and may be salvaged with patch changes if not played on an MT-32, since much of it is inaudible, at least on my laptop MIDI card.)
valkyrie* (a pretty fun screwing with wagner's famous "Ride of the Valkyries". despite the drums, most of the rest is note for note from the score, which was a real pain in the ass, considering that many orchestral scores have those damned C clefs. enough to drive ya insane.)
Labels: music
posted by saltypig @ 23:15
Only sampled a little bit, but what I listened to was interesting, your self deprecation notwithstanding. Some good seeds in there that could be further cultivated.
I'll bet you would like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Words-Mountain-Wally-Badarou/dp/B000001FTC/sr=8-2/qid=1170961123/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-8705217-3206553?ie=UTF8&s=music
thanks. i do think i wrote some good stuff, but it's just so depressing that it's on dead technology that wasn't so great to start with. didn't include one of my favorite pieces because the patch mapping was far worse than even these. since there's no way to adequately explain MT-32 weirdness in a post, i toss in self deprecation mostly as ass covering. i mean, the difference between the two mixes, when a piece is good, is startling (except for the terminal cheesy aspect of the MT-32). my proprietary files also specified custom reverb settings for each piece, helping to give it a little atmosphere that stripped away a bit of the sameness. so that's lost as well.
the best simple solution would be to tweak each piece to the standard MIDI map, but i don't have the interest or energy to do even one of those, much less the mess i dumped here. did think though that some MIDI geeks might be interested in my few versions of orchestral classics. i like "bananas" ("The Sorcerer's Apprentice") the best, because i transcribed it from a real recording and sync'd a sampler to the sequencer, playing everything in time with the orchestra. nice time deviations, which so much sequencer stuff lacks.
thanks for the URL. listened to the first 4 or so. like the first one okay, but not such a big fan of the others. i do see the similarity to some of the pieces here, which is making me cringe. ha! not to insult that guy, but new agey stuff just isn't my thing except in rare cases.
BTW, if you share amazon URLs much, they're usually fine with everything after the product code thrown away, like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Words-Mountain-Wally-Badarou/dp/B000001FTC/
you might be interested in tinyurl.com, if you haven't heard about it. great for sending links via email and stuff.
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