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 Last updated: 2/14/03 In high school and early college, I got into sequencing music using Scream Tracker 3 and, later, Impulse Tracker. I've kinda fallen out of it in recent times, owing to other distractions, but I recently rescued my whole archive off of an old PC in my parents' garage, and so I thought I'd at least throw up a bunch of old things from time to time. You won't find anything great here, most likely, but then if you weren't deathly bored you wouldn't be at this site in the first place, no? I've decided to keep all the little program notes and junk I kept in the files, even if some of them are geeky and dated to the point of embarrassment. You will notice I once went as, uh, "Chaos InterBot", hence my email address to this day. I first got into this tracking software when I was recruited to write music for Plaid World Software, a local Mac gaming company, and so some of these wound up in commercially released computer games, including the platformer Death From Above and the space shooter Project: Magellan. The recommended player is Impulse Tracker 2.14. However, it may not function on all modern systems (mine, apparently, for one), and its interface may not be especially intuitive, so I should mention that Winamp will also work fairly well. However, Winamp's module playback has its own occasional imperfections, and you also may not be able to hear sequences hidden in the order list and other esoteric junk, so if you can get IT or another module-specific player working, that's probably ideal. When playing most of these S3Ms in Winamp, be sure to force monaural output in Winamp's Module Decoder input plugin, since most of them weren't written in stereo. The ITs should be fine. Dumb Winamp. |
Herein lie works I consider complete. Somehow. • FF3j Town -- Battle Mix - The town music from Final Fantasy III (J), arranged sort of like FF battle music from the 16-bit era. Those using Impulse Tracker can also look in the order list for a few neat extra goodies. Purple of Never - A little theme and its various expansions. I like how the latter half of the theme reappears in the coda. Dilemma - I threw this together in a night while I was practicing recording my own voice samples (never was any good at it). Stupid yet amusing. Astro Boy has a Nuke - Wrote this using only four channels and tiny samples. Some (most) of the transitions are pretty clunky, but overall it's not too bad. new - Evil - A high school English project, believe it or not. We had to do interviews with various people on their respective "encounters with evil" and "loss of innocence" (we were reading The Catcher in the Rye at the time) and then present our findings in some creative manner. Mine came out kind of, erm, postmodern (read: mocks the entire concept of the project with its banality), which must be good, because I think my grade was decent. new - The Orb Awakens - One of the many tracks for Plaid World. All right if you're doing something else, I guess, like shooting aliens. Oh yeah, and there's this whole other piece in the order list, too, but you can't get at it in Winamp, which is too bad, 'cause that one's sorta cool. new - Baroquen Heart - h0 h0 h0. Probably more rococo than baroque, anyway. Fun fun. new - Graceful Zombie - Along much the same lines as the previous. The Zombie sings, but no one listens. The Zombie dances, but no one sees. new - Melting Water - There used to be this annual demoscene contest for music in this format, so I entered a couple times (I'll put up my MC5 entry when I feel less embarrassed by it). I was gonna do this big extrapolation of the Magician Tune (see below) for MC6, but I never got around to it, and finally I just wrote this instead the entire night before the deadline, which explains why it's so short. It doesn't quite cohere, but it's still a fairly pleasant theme and two variations. Oh, and I didn't get close to winning, but one judge wrote that they wouldn't mind seeing it in the second round, which I guess could be worse. • Super Mario Remix Before I knew even a lick of Japanese, one of the first romhacking projects I tried to help out with was Super Mario Remix, which is still one of the most stunning hacks I've ever seen. At one point there was even thought to change the music, and so I offered to write a new soundtrack. I wrote a few test tracks, but apparently there were technical difficulties, and interest eventually died out all around. I don't know if the music even ever fit within the NES's capabilities, but either way it was kinda fun to write. new - Underworld - Spare and creepy underground music. What lurks in the darkness? new - Swimmies! - Underwater undulations. new - Dammit - A callous motif to mock your demise. Percussion courtesy of NESticle, by the way. new - Hooray - A short fanfare. I'm still proud of the consistent imitation in each voice. new - Oh! I am strong - The requisite blaring, repetitive invincibility fanfare. |
Herein lie but fragments. Or perhaps shards, or chunks, or maybe even a whole pane here and there. Basically anything I never considered complete or releasable but that I thought you might possibly find interesting now. It's a fine distinction sometimes, but bear with me. These might just be little wisps of tunes, or they might start out well enough and go horribly awry. Perhaps they're annoying in a certain oddly godawful way. Perhaps I look at them even now and wish that I'd done something more with them. But above all, each one is here now. • winstart.s3m - I used this as my Windows startup sound at one point. winstrt2.s3m - And a few months later came this. winshut1.s3m - And, to accompany that last one, I wrote this shutdown sound, which even now doesn't sound too bad. Objectte - I was writing a (really short) brass quartet for a class and I used this to help hear how the pitches would go together. I don't know what I was doing in that last big section, but it sounds pretty cool. new - song27.s3m - A fairly fleshed-out untitled march. There's also a variant with a few more ideas tacked onto the end. new - Magician Tune - I liked this little tune quite a lot, but I never really did anything else with it. Well, besides add that godawful intro. Gahhh. Pretend that's not there. new - song39.s3m - When I was first introduced to Plaid World, I was asked to write "techno", but due to my complete and continuing ignorance of the genre none of it ever really came out that way. This one is probably the closest I got. new - song24.s3m - This one might also be sorta techno, I guess, though I think I always did write too melodically for that. Still, more agreeable than a lot of my unfinished stuff. new - song37.s3m - A friend of mine -- our lovely host, in fact -- once wrote a Tetris Attack clone, which inspired me to try my hand at background music for it. There never was a music engine written, but it was fun to try puzzle game music anyway, and he seemed to like it. It takes a bit of a bad turn near the end (a common theme in this section, actually), but it's kinda neat up till then. new - song25.s3m - Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about this one. Just a sketch, but it's kinda neat, actually. This one was also the inspiration for this later Impulse Tracker experiment, which is also kinda neat and also fails to go anywhere. Lots of random experimental junk in the order list, too. new - march.it - Another unfinished march. I do seem to have a lot of these. Pretty nice until that part where it sucks. Winamp users might hear a few other ideas floating in the order list at the end. new - field1.it - A short emphemeral kinda thing. Doesn't suck. new - webpage.s3m - Okay, see, so this friend of mine -- our host again -- mentioned to me that he'd been designated webmaster for his neighborhood community whatsit group, and I said Hey, you should have background music on the site! and he said Um. So I wrote this tiny piece basically as a joke. Imagine as you listen that you are in fact viewing the official home page of the Meadowrose Community Resource Center or whatever. new - Sad Little Tune - I CRY SO SAD new - Fifths - So like, all the intervals are perfect fifths. Seems to work, I guess. |
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