Hi!
Hoo boy have I been busy! Lot’s of work on Archvale and some new music for Somewhen and a bunch of other stuff that’s still under NDA.
But, outside of the world of paid work, I’ve also been busy working on a Radio Show! I now have a monthly show with the lovely folks at 1020 Radio focussing on the weirder, darker and more electronic end of Video Game Music. I’m on 1-2pm every 2nd Tuesday.
You can check it out at the link below, hoping to have some awesome composers on as guests in the coming months so stay tuned for that! 🙂
https://1020.live/residents/the-vgm-show/
Tag: Composition
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Pleased to say that an awesome game project I have been working on over the last month or so has just launched it’s first trailer. I composed the main theme for the game, which you can hear a bit of in the trailer below.
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I was lucky enough to be commissioned recently by the awesome folks at Rising Arts Agency to write a piece of music in response to the question “What does lockdown sound like to you?” This is what I came up with.
I decided to only use free tools for this (I cheated a little when mastering tbh) as my self imposed limitation. I wrote a short blog post too over at Rising’s blog talking about what tools I used and why I wrote what I wrote, if you’re interested you can check that out here.
[bandcamp width=350 height=442 track=2315723719 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false]
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Woke up yesterday and felt the urge to try writing some chiptune! Not a style that I usually work in but I often find that arbitrary restrictions can be quite inspiring when composing so I decided to give it a go. I needed some kind of visual prompt to help me with the writing process, so I decided to re-score the final boss battle from Analgesic Productions awesome 2013 game Anodyne. Really can’t recommend this game (and it’s awesome sequel) enough to fans of old school JRPG’s like me.
Anyway, here’s what I came up with: -
This week I decided to do something I’ve never done before, an orchestral arrangement of one of my all time favourite bits of video game music!
I picked Song of Memories as it’s a super emotive piece that’s pretty simple harmonically & I thought it would lend itself well to orchestration. I never normally write music like this but I felt like it would be a good challenge and I recently picked up Spitfire Audio’s BBC SO Discover plugin so I felt like I should really test out it’s capabilities.
I decided to post a video of the result over the final scene of FFIX as I felt like it worked quite well over the scene, and that I should start to make use of my much neglected YouTube channel! I didn’t score this to picture, but I’m currently working on a re-design & re-score of the opening FMV to Grandia, another one of my all time favourite JRPG’s.
I’ll make sure to post that up here when i’m done, in the meantime, here’s my arrangement of Song of Memories. -
Finished up the last day of 21 Days of Video Game Music challenge today! Pleased to say I managed to write something everyday and I’m pretty happy with most of it! Here’s a playlist of everything:
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Forgot to post again yesterday! So, two very contrasting styles for todays and yesterdays pieces. Starting with yesterdays, Harold Budd/Ryuichi Sakamoto inspired gentle solo piano stuff:
and todays, which is some weird, wonky 8-bit (ish) techno.
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Forgot to post yesterday so doing a quick double post today! Two very contrasting styles for todays and yesterdays pieces. Yesterday I went for intense black metal, inspired by some silly conversations in the dungeons and dragons campaign I am part of about what a great name for a black metal band corpse wave would be! I don’t have my guitars with me sadly (they’re in my studio which I currently can’t access due to covid-19) so had to make do with samplers.
and then for today I went in a completely different direction! Feeling inspired by freya’s theme/Burmecia from Final Fantasy 9, I went for a sombre piano and choir vibe. Here’s what I came up with.
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Another quick sketch/idea today. Went for something faster and techno-ier (is that a word?!)
Very much inspired by “Conflict Crossover Pt 1” from Martyn Stonehouse’s score for For The Warp.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=1403328197 size=large bgcol=333333 linkcol=2ebd35 tracklist=false artwork=small track=2473864692]
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Another quick sketch for today’s piece, this time I was taking inspiration from the Ice Cavern theme from Final Fantasy 9 (albeit going in a slightly different direction):
Here’s what I came up with: