Tag Archives: Game Music

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I listen to a significant amount of chiptune music, but it’s been a while since I’ve tried working on any.  However, I’ve recently been playing with a small synth called MiniBit that I picked up during holiday sales.  It’s devoted entirely to that chiptune/lo-fi sound, and has some quite intriguing tones, including a mini-“additive” waveform editor.   I’ve been throwing some algorithmic rhythms at it and the results are far more intriguing than I anticipated.

The following tracks feature a couple of randomly-generated and subsequently edited waveforms, along with some default drum patches, with some processing by BYOME to get the “squishy” sort of extra ambient drum bed.  These are more demo loops than full songs, but the second one seems like it could have served as the background music in a rudimentary platformer back in the day…

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Famicom Jam/Apreggiations

Ahhh… it feels so good to finally have some actual equipment! As to the song, I’ve always liked video game music, especially the “chiptunes” available from old systems, such as the NES and Genesis. They have a pure sound, and pioneered a variety of interesting sounds, including some fascinating arpeggiations. It is a sound that is not replicated much these days except by enthusiasts (perhaps for a good reason), but for their time, the consoles (and especially RPG games on the consoles) were able to reproduce a huge variety of interesting, polyphonic sounds that went far beyond the blips and bleeps of every early computer games. I almost get the sense that this same transition is now being made on cellphones and other handheld devices… At any rate, the Japanese name for the NES was the Famicom, hence the name.

Fast-forward to today, when I finally registered the incredible Vanguard synth instrument. For me, the Vanguard indicates a very large evolution in sound for me, as I can finally recreate some of the trance-inspired sounds that I’ve been trying to locate for quite some time. If you’re really into trance, check it out – it almost sounds better than some software synths that cost twice as much, and you can find a large number of preset banks for it if you’re determined enough. Anyway, one of those preset banks, by ProSounds, has a very interesting arpeggiated preset that, for some reason, reminded me of those interesting, early synth presets that were present on some of the early consoles.

So, I decided to just jam with a variety of different chord structures and sequences – and these tracks are the result. Unlike many of my other tracks, which are preprogrammed before being recorded, both of these pieces were performed live (the second piece was slightly quantized to fix a small glitch). The first piece is basically me just jamming away – in the second one, I try to pay a little more attention to specific patterns. Believe me, this is a great preset to just jam to, and let yourself be inspired… I could probably play around with this sound for a good half-hour if I was determined, but that’s a bit much for this website to handle :)

These tracks are of slightly higher quality than some of the previous ones (160kbps). I’m going to try this slightly upgraded sound quality for now, assuming that it doesn’t end up taking too much space on the site… I think the sound quality is just slightly better. As I’m writing this, I’m occasionally moving my hand over and trying some additional arpeggiations between sentences… Programming music in advance is nice for the exactness of the composition that you can create, but it’s definitely fun to just play around with a sound in realtime and see what you can come up with.
Production Notes: Sequenced in Logic Express. Instruments: Vanguard Synth (Prosounds Preset). Method: Recorded live using external keyboard controller. (I plan on adding this info to all of my tracks eventually, so that you have an idea how the track was built)

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/famicomjam.mp3

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/arpeggiations.mp3

AQ Theme Remix

So, way back in the dawn of internet time (i.e. some time circa the early 2000s or so), I played a flash-based game called AdventureQuest. I won’t provide a link to it here because, well, you can go into your neighborhood mega-mart and find point cards for the game on their giant wall of gift cards, which should really tell you everything you need to know about what the game unfortunately turned into. However, back in the beginning, it was a fairly small, fairly fun game with a pretty decent community, and I had a great time with it. However, at that time, the game didn’t have any music for it, aside from a couple of short sample clips hidden away somewhere on the website of one of the game’s artists. So, I suppose that makes this remix unique – perhaps one of the only remixes from a game that does not yet have music :)

This is a remix of one of the AQ title themes, from their “music development” website. The original track was only 4 bars long, so I had just a bit of work to get it to a piece that lasts over 3 minutes. Still, this track has some good effects, and actually manages not to be too repetitive, while improving the sound quality from the original recording. It is also one of the most complex pieces that I’ve put together using only Harmony Assistant.

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/aqthemeremix.mp3

And, a random bonus clip:

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/thehit.mp3

Game Music

Battle Theme

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/BT-Synth-Stereo.mp3

Bell Ambiance

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/bell-ambience.mp3

Cathedral

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/cathedral.mp3

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/cathedral-extended.mp3

Crystal Cave

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/padsynth.mp3

Dark Ambiance

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/darkambience.mp3

Electric Piano Ambiance

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/elecpiano.mp3

Fanfare

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/synth_fanfare.mp3

Forest

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/metalsax.mp3

Harp Tune

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/harppad-noenv-harmonics.mp3

Victory Theme

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/victorytheme.mp3

http://www.idlecircuits.com/digintmedia/vtheme_newsound.mp3