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Futurism

Nov 23

The New the Old and Some Songs!

Published in Virtual Instruments, union, self-promotion, Remix, new music, myblog, Music, mass effect, marketing, Independent, GANG, Game, Futurism, Famicom, Digital Releases, Demo, Compositions, Challenge, Audio, Apple, Ambient by Trevor Sparham | Comment (2)

Hello to all who read this and thank you if you do.

But if you don't want to read, there is some music at the bottom :)

I suppose I am still fairly new here and not to be so mysterious, I thought I would share a bit.

It has been over 10 years now since I first composed a song using a computer; quite incredibly so using the DOS based program called "Impulse Tracker". Prior to that I used looping software, but "IT" really allowed me to compose something from what seemed like scratch..

It was also ten years ago that I first used Fruity Loops 3 which ultimately gave me the bug!

It took me a couple of years to learn and teach myself all the new things that I wanted learn; starting with simple techno songs; now aiming for something that resembles soundtracks; often inspired by all the video game music made by the many G.A.N.G members here.

I began putting some of these 'songs' I made to use around five years ago or so. That was when my music really began to take shape and a style was formed. By 2006, I made my music public online and even got some stuff into a couple of games.

I worked with a lot of bands in the later part of the last decade recording and such and also began making a couple of video games of my own. I didn't promote much and still have a lot of music that even now has not yet been heard.

This year, I made a challenge for myself. I had to publicize more which ultimately helped me out. Seeing as how I am so soundtrack driven; especially game soundtracks, I knew I had to do something a bit different and learned a lot through adapting what I already knew and combining it with online resources.

I made a realization while playing Mass Effect. I was thinking that the soundtrack was amazing and really liked how it contained both electronic and classical instrumentation - I did a lot of electronic stuff, but wanted to do something orchestral so this union of genres seemed like something I wanted to pursue. This also lead me here to G.A.N.G.

..So this year I stepped out of my comfort zone a bit, bought a Mac, and started using programs that I didn't know but it really didn't take long to learn how to use these programs such as Logic since it shares some similarities with FL Studio.

I made just over 100 mp3s this year to date in my free time. Before going out and buying a bunch of expensive programs and stuff, since many of you know how much one can get into, I put my old stuff to work and gave it one good last run to see what sorts of things I could do.

One of the challenges I made for myself was to give myself a limit whilst attempting to produce some soundtrack-like material. For those who know their computer hardware, the orchestral samples do tend to eat up quite a bit of resource.

Below are some songs that I made this year. The first six were made entirely on a computer running Fruity Loops 3.56, Edirol Orchestral, and only 256 MB of ram on an over ten year old budget Duron chip clocked at 700 Mhz. For the fun of it! That was a challenge of patience ;)

The following six are more electronic on a Celeron computer with FL Studio 6. Both sets of six tracks were made from start to finish in one week per set. I have high standards for myself however these do not showcase anything in terms of high quality and were intended more for demoing purposes. Some of them are a bit shrill sounding.

The last track Overpass was one of my early tracks using the new Mac Mini and Logic Pro Studio 9 with the default instruments.

Feel free to listen to some of these 'sketches' skip through them, download them, whatever you would like. The goal here was to play around with orchestral samples before buying higher quality and more updated stuff as well as combining the genres of orchestral and electronic; inspired by the ambient, spacey, and epic stuff as heard in Mass Effect:

Please enjoy and feel free to drop a comment!

Thanks again,

-Trevs.

1. Arrival http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13959236/ISO%20MP3%20128%20OCT%202010/01%20Arrival%20110%20Master.mp3

2. Impending http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13959236/ISO%20MP3%20128%20OCT%202010/02%20Impending%20118%20Master.mp3

3. Departure http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13959236/ISO%20MP3%20128%20OCT%202010/03%20Departure%2091%20Master.mp3

4. Aim http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13959236/ISO%20MP3%20128%20OCT%202010/04%20Aim%20111%20Master.mp3

5. Landing http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13959236/ISO%20MP3%20128%20OCT%202010/05%20Landing%2091%20Master.mp3

6. Append http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13959236/ISO%20MP3%20128%20OCT%202010/06%20Append%20104%20Master.mp3

7. Beat http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13959236/ISO%20MP3%20128%20OCT%202010/07%20Beat%2070%20Master.mp3

8. Collapsed http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13959236/ISO%20MP3%20128%20OCT%202010/08%20Collapsed%20118%20Master.mp3

9. Drone http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13959236/ISO%20MP3%20128%20OCT%202010/09%20Drone%20108%20Master.mp3