Music

When I was much younger, I thought it would be sweet to be a rock star, but I always had terrible stage fright. My love of all things computer eventually led me to the magical underground of demos and tracked music. So, I decided to become a 1337 h4×0r like the guys from Future Crew, and that means I started my musical experimentation with Scream Tracker. I slowly progressed into stuff with notes and staffs and stuff, but that’s so much less awesome than a good multicolored screen of ascii characters and hex dumps.

Anyways, this page is a more or less complete history of my musical production experience, in rough chronological order.

  • 3rd Journey Into The Realm – (1996) My first big composition, tracked in Scream Tracker. For those unfamiliar with Scream Tracker, it was 1337 back when 1337 was spelled with letters.
  • Concussion – (1996) Also using Scream Tracker, this time avoiding notes and chords and stuff and sticking with layered percussion. I always really liked this one, despite its rough spots.
  • Day09 – (1999) I wrote in NoteWorthy Composer during my first year on the West Coast. I wanted to see if could make something coherent w/out a tracker, and this is the result. Also I was apparently feeling very mellow.
  • chorus – (2000) This was me just putzing around ModPlug, and coming up with something strange that I liked, although the samples I used are fairly lo-fi.
  • Cube 4 – (2000) I never liked the melody in this, but as a kind of joke, I was proded by some friends to keep working on it. And I bowed to the peer pressure a little too easily. Anyways, another tracked tune in ModPlug, still using lo-fi (aka free) samples.
  • The Sun Rose That Day – (2000) This was an experiment where I was playing around with taking pieces written in CakeWalk, and dropping them piece by piece as samples into ModPlug, where I was more familiar with moving stuff around and adding drum tracks. I must have been plaing Chrono Cross that day.
  • NullSpace Title Theme – (2001) – Using some nicely organized samples from the CakeWalk Groove Maker CD’s, I pieced together some music for my junior project, NullSpace. Definitely the most badass of everything on here.
  • Target – (2001) – More Groove Maker goodness, this time with a lot more additional work by me using a sequencer and the sounds on my Alesis QS6.1, including the heavy drums and fast piano lines about 2/3 of the way in.
  • Let’s not all get killed (at once) – (2001) A short march I threw together for someone else’s game project. They didn’t end up using it. I think I wrote this in Cakewalk, and rendered it with some free sound fonts.
  • Crazy Cross Battle Theme – Old School Mix – (2001) The first rendition of the Crazy Cross Battle Theme. My pal Fraz described it as sounding too “midi”. I asked, “what?” and he explained to me that it sounded like the old PC games that used midi music. Which I then realized he meant “used midi music on a crappy FM synthesis sound card”. I tried to explain how it has nothing to do with being midi, and everything to with the sound card. Fraz said that, whatever, it still sounds too midi.
  • Crazy Cross Battle Theme – Game Mix – (2002) I found some midi sound banks at school that I trolled to render this mix of the Crazy Cross Battle Theme. Once I got Fraz’s thumbs up, this became the version that shipped with Crazy Cross.

I also learned to play drums and percussion, both at school and in private lessons with the best goddamn drummer in Maine, Phil Verrill. The tracks below are all pretty much me jamming with friends. It’s all kind of funky, jazzy, and occassionally jam-bandy kinda stuff.

The Sucker Punch Office Party is the type of stuff I like to do the most, where people just play off each other for a while. I did a bit of that while at DigiPen, and I’ll have to dig up some mp3s I know I have lying around somewhere. Not that anyone besides me really wants to hear it, but whatever. This whole site is just a shrine to me, so stop your goddamn whining.

  • Lunch Break – (1997-ish) w/ Tim Butterworth on piano, and Dan Philbrick on the triangle
  • Concise Blues – (1998-ish) Tim Butterworth, Chris Falk, and myself. Either Tim or Chris put this up on mp3.com at some point in the distant past. He invented the track and band names used out of thin air. I had never heard them before I found this track online. It’s good enough, so I used that band name on all these tracks.
  • Untitled 1 – (1998-ish) More Shoeless Funk stuff. FYI, all the Shoeless Funk stuff has me on my electric Yamaha kit, which was fueled by a Yamaha DTX2 module.
  • Untitled 2 – (1998-ish) More Shoeless Funk stuff. I think Tim probably came up with all the music, although he and Chris both were in jazz bands and stuff, and so very easily could have been winging it themselves. I was definitely winging it. This is where I learned how to fake me way out of a pre-emptive finale.
  • Untitled 3 – (1998-ish) More Shoeless Funk stuff. Check out the sweet Super Mario Bros. riffs. Overall not the hotest track ever, but not bad.
  • Surge – (1998-ish) Tim Butterworth was a Surge addict in high school. Like, in a manner that was entirely frightening. Again, Chris Falk and myself complete the band.
  • Sucker Punch Office Party – (2004) My breakout performance at the office warming party held at Sucker Punch after we moved up to the 26th floor. I’m on drums, Andrew Woods is on “the plank”, and Bill Wolford is on guitar.