Club Silicon

Game Music Websites

Greetings, fans of game music.

When I started using a variety of handheld audio cassette recorders to tape arcade, PC and NES game music in the late 80s (see the post on Heroes: Jason Emery for just why I did this), little did I know just how much of an explosion and growth would take place in game soundtracks, let alone my own involvement with them.

These days, over 20 years later, there's some cool resources for game music fans.

First, there's Original Sound Version, started by a friend of mine Jayson Napolitano and his cohorts.

In true "back in my day" talk, I could follow game soundtracks overseas easily enough because you just couldn't get imports then, and the few games that came from Japan for the PC were mostly PC speaker related such as "Ancient Land of Ys", which most people associate with the simpler name "Ys". Sierra brought over a few good ones too such as   Sorcerian (with music converted by Rob Atesalp, already interviewed on CS) and Thexder / Firehawk, who I believe encountered a brief revival of late.

OSV is what I like to read to keep up with the what seems like 8 soundtracks a day that get released based on overseas original and licensed scores.

They recently had a "year's best soundtrack" review, which contains good picks from across the map.

Next, check out Michael Schiano's site "Skitch Studios". The guy is, along with Jake Kaufman, a master of 8 bit sounding scores, though I don't think he's actually done one yet outside his personal tunes. He should though.

Finally, try NESGuide. This is a site that, if you've always at least wanted to see what the games were like that you missed on the NES (and frankly, you weren't missing much outside of the top 20-30 games anyway), there's a gameplay video. Music of course is prominently featured.

At some point as I've mentioned I need to figure out how to make my own personal collection of VGM available here, but in the meantime here's some chum for the sharks:

PopulousInGame

This piece, from the Amiga game was in fact NOT done by Rob Hubbard, but by David Hanlon, and is in fact one of the first examples of ambient soundtracks in those days. Absolutely brilliant.

The Album: Update

Well, I know I said April 1 folks, and I'm doing my best to get there. But it may not happen. If anything it'll be close.. within a month, two at the most.

Truth is, the biggest reason I haven't completed things is that I've been lazy. But on top of that there has also been a big move to Texas and a lot of crunch time at Obsidian that preceded the move.

On top of THAT, the laptop I've worked on was work owned so I have to transfer all my projects on to a new one, and as mentioned previously, without knowing exactly which DAWs and plugins you use (I take my stuff from a repository of things stored on DVD), you can wind up doing a lot more prep work just to get back to where you started!

Seriously, my friends, I've struggled to cope with change, but I have to accept it. I'm not writing music 24/7 anymore and it is hard to find time and energy to do it now. Believe me I don't love it any less but it just ain't like it used to be. This also culminated in my last post, declaring my desire to put a lot of duct tape around my gear and mark it "DO NOT UPGRADE, EVER". The Fatman did that at one point and man, did he have a good idea!

So tonight I plan on relaxing with my wife and taking it easy. Tomorrow I plan on delving in to the album. I've delved into my back catalog of MODs and found quite a few that would be great to finish / remake. There's also the three or four other projects (such as one called Earthscape that will consist of pieces that will all be written only on the Clavinova and be something of an homage to Mannheim Stemroller) that I need to figure out. 

Top that off with my elusive interview with Miki Higashino (Gradius), Spencer Nielsen (Ecco) and a few other cool old game music bits, there's a lot to do. And I sincerely appreciate your patience.

VGM Greatest Hits: Twin Cobra

 

1987 was perhaps the greatest year of the golden age of video games. Ultima 5 was about to be released with Ultima 4 reaching its peak of perhaps the best game in the series. The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, Mega Man and Kid Icarus were released. One of the first hydraulic "mega" arcade games was released (After Burner II). Some of the most lasting game series' began their journey on this year.

It was also a year for some killer tunes. One of the first pieces of game music I remember enjoying in the arcade was "Twin Cobra". Written by Tatsuya Uemura, little did I know that this game was a sequel to "Tiger Heli".

Twin Cobra was one of the first shooters other than Gradius to provide a very cool set of power ups. The player would acquire colored floating power ups and each color would yield a different kind of shot. Yellow was a rapid fire shot that could, when increased in strength shoot in 4 directions. Red was a tracer that would increase in a frontal pattern. Green was a laser shot, and blue, the best of all, was a wide spread ball shot.

Enjoy the music of olde!

Download TwinCobra.mp3

Grade A Inspiration: Queen

YouTube is a wonderful thing. I'm sure we're all saying that now but in browsing yesterday I came across the making of "One Vision" there, and let's just say I got inspired.

Anyone who doesn't think Queen is a great band should have their head examined. Really. Go get an MRI right now if none of their songs are your cup of tea.

It was fascinating watching Freddie desperately search for ways to tell Roger Taylor (the drummer) to play a specific rhythm. Since apparently none of the band had much knowledge of theory, they "just played" or sang, writing appeared to be a pretty funky process. And I got to see that Freddie Mercury is actually not perfect as a vocalist, he had a few "off" takes.

But, through it all, they made some of the best rock music in history. Compare what one might call "rock" these days whether it is Nickelback or Godsmack (or Limp Bizkit), I dunno... these young punks are doing something new, sure, but do they "rock"? Not as much as Queen.

Hope II, new single!

As you may or may not already know Jeanette released "Hope II" last night on www.alexanderbrandon.net. Check it out!

Hope was one of the first MODs I wrote quite a few years ago and I decided to write a few tunes in the midst of interviewing guitarists and vocalists for "Contention" for Jeanette's Jazzercise. It's harder than it would seem, to write a song that people can exercise to, but I'm trying to find a medium between what works for the class and what I like. So this is the first full effort along those lines. As a song itself I enjoy it and hope you will too.

Contention, the next studio album

I apologize for the lack of updates about the current music project. Life has a way of... getting in the way.

I just wrote up a schedule. See, Andrew Sega of Iris, who most of you probably know as Necros, said that either write electronic albums, or bit the bullet and start a band. Biting the bullet is right.

Challenges abound from getting the precision of MOD files into live recording, to actually getting my lineup solidified. Then, there's marketing more than simply an email blast, and while Club Silicon has exceeded my expectations in terms of its readership, I'd like this album to be somewhat mainstream for exposure, and that may or may not mean going with a CD Baby-like entity or the folks that can "get you into iTunes".

But the simple goals are still there. Write music I want to write, announce it to as many people as possible, and hope they enjoy it.

I won't divulge just what kind of music it is, except at this point you know there's live recording involved. In addition, while I believe I announced release this year, it ain't going to happen. But there is now a hard date. I will NOT be a Battlecruiser 3000 AD or a Duke Nukem Forever.

April 1st, 2009.

No April foolin'. Mark your calendars.

New Single!

A nice present for Christmas, I hope. This was written back in the day but was one of my first vocal efforts with music in MOD format by none other than Bryan Rudge. I hope you enjoy it! The next release will be the new album: Contention, and will be released May 1st, 2008. I want to shout out to all the folks that picked up Era's End, and props to my wife for getting the lyrics to niftily pop up when you click on the song. Thanks again!

Mannheim Steamroller

Since we've just done a post on Jason in our "Heroes" section it is only fitting that Mannheim Steamroller follows.

You can read more about MS on the website of course, but what makes this band so interesting? It's essentially every American music geek's dream: to create synth music, combine it with acoustic recording, and come out with a section of the market that the market itself never knew existed.

Pictured at left is the album I first heard at Jason's house, the first song I actually heard from it being "Good King Wenceslas", with an opening riff one can't possibly forget. How his mother actually found this album I'll never know, but for the first time I heard music that didn't take itself too seriously and was a lot of fun to listen to. Before continuing, this deserves a bit of background into the history of the synthesizer in pop music.

In the late 70s and early 80s the synth was at the height of its popularity. It was a novelty, it redefined pop music from the early Moog's to the DX7. However before long simply "using" a synth wasn't enough. After Van Halen's Jump with its Oberheim OB-Xa, and the Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams with their ingeniously simple use of the OB-1, the (apparent) requirement for increased complexity skyrocketed.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the synthesizer as a stand alone instrument had considerably weakened and people turned to more specific uses of it. Rather than make a statement in its nascent raw analog state it was tweaked into hundreds of genres, from techno to gabber to new age to ambient, while pop music began a "plain synth" rebellion resulting in alternative, grunge, variations on folk, and R&B, which are now the dominant genres. At this point the synthesizer is usually very much in the background of popular music, despite it being a staple in most songs, its respect at the forefront is practically nil. In the wake of this, Chip Davis has managed to do what most would consider impossible: he continued writing music he personally enjoyed, using the synthesizer in similar ways, and continued to sell albums by the millions. Rather than pitch demos all day long Chip sold his albums to audio showrooms, using careful mixes that would not only demo his music but high tech recording techniques such as HDCD. This new avenue proved quite successful.

It is this achievement that serves as an inspiration for my future work. For example, in the upcoming "Earthscape", I plan on using factory presets from my Yamaha Clavinova and will darn well create something interesting with them, rather than spend hours in Reaktor, and I will feel no shame in doing so. Head over and listen to Chip's music, and chances are for the fans of this blog it might be a little too passe or cheesy, but somehow I still love it. Hats off to Chip for such a remarkable achievement and going against the record industry grain.

Unreal Anthology Soundtrack review

Thanks to the great Jayson Napolitano for this very complimentary review.

New Website, New Music

Here it is! My first music website. Ever since I started writing music on the Ad Lib, I have wanted to release an album. Thanks to my wife and interest from the community, I've done it.

They say start small. Well, it started with an email from fan Scott Larson recommending I make my music more publically available. Next came "hey, you should totally do that!" from my wife Jeanette. Then she darn well made a site that did it. What a woman.

Era's End, the first release, is aptly named. With some co writing and the entirety of "Free Fall" written by Bryan Rudge, some guitar by William Wallace (now working at Bioware in Austin), and some beautiful vocals from Jeanette, it represents old school computer music making and modern studio finesse.

Parts of the music were written in a tracker, of all things. Parts were written in Nuendo, the high end of PC based studio digital audio workstations. It uses ancient 90s samples and more modern Waldorf and Absynth. It is a conglomeration of the old and the new, but the whole thing says "I defy standard albums because I have many different song styles". I truly hope you enjoy it.