"Japanime," or "The Greatest Video Game Ever Made"

It’s finally time to reveal another track from my forthcoming album! This will premiere Friday, 6-21, at 12:00 PM. If you missed the premiere, the link below should still take you to the video!

I titled this song “Japanime,” because it sounded like it would work well as the soundtrack to an anime. That title stuck throughout the production process, but later I conceived the idea of a music video that paid tribute to classic PC games from the 80’s and 90’s and thought about changing the name to “The Greatest Video Game Ever Made (tribute)” - an homage to Tenacious D, obviously. However, in the end I couldn’t make up my mind, so you get two titles.

I’m always trying to think about ways to make an interesting music video on a budget. Combining other personal interests with my music is deeply satisfying, and the retro 486 project that I undertook earlier in the year seemed to offer a perfect opportunity. This video is a love letter to the video games of my childhood. I hope you enjoy it!

The 486 featured in the video is interesting enough to write an entire blog post on. It’s a Gateway P4D-100 from 1994. It intrigued me because the seller had replaced the Dallas RTC already, the interior shots showed everything in excellent condition, it booted into DOS, and it had a PCI bus - which was uncommon for a Socket 3 system. It came to me with 8mb of RAM, a Dimond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro (PCI, 4mb VRAM, S3 Virge-based video card), some kind of cheap and generic OPL-emulating sound card, a 2x CD-ROM drive by NEC (One of the very first 2x models), a 3Com Ethernet card, and a 333mb WD HDD, 3.5” floppy. Over several months I upgraded it to 16mb of FPM RAM, a proper Sound Blaster 16 (Model CT2290, one of the best revisions), an 8x CD-ROM, a CompactFlash-to-IDE controller that lets me use removable 2GB cards as drives, and an additional 1.6GB WD HDD.

Afterburner - and a new album in the works

Afterburner - A War Thunder Music Video

Greetings! Please enjoy my newest song and music video.

Over the past several years, in between being a Dad to a now 4-year old beautiful girl and my day job as a network engineer, I have been hard at work writing and producing a new suite of songs. My next album (as-yet-untitled) will hopefully be finished and released before the end of the year.

This new album will be nearly half instrumental music, harkening back to my entirely instrumental debut, Photon Life. Nonetheless, the songs with lyrics that I have written are the best I’ve ever done, and I’m excited to share all of this with the world. The lead single, which I’m hoping to release a music video for sometime in the next four months, is ominously titled “End Times,” (which may end up as the title for the album). But the first piece of music I’m sharing that will be on the album is a track called “Afterburner.”

”Afterburner” was conceived early in the writing process, when I was flirting with the idea of making an entirely instrumental album that is thematically centered around video game soundtracks. In my head this was a pseudo-soundtrack for the 1987 arcade game Afterburn (which I played exhaustively on my Amiga 1000). In Afterburn, you fly an F-14 against increasingly difficult waves of enemy fighters. The original arcade game included a motion-simulating cockpit that would tilt and swivel as you pulled on the flight stick. One of my childhood favorites.

Not long after I finished recording the demo version of “Afterburner,” I conceived the idea of an inexpensive music video that simply used replays of War Thunder games I had recorded. The problem was that I didn’t have any afterburning jets in War Thunder. I’ve been playing since 2014, but my highest tier jet fighter was an F-84, which has no afterburner. I knew that to do this video right, I had to have an F-14, because flying an F-14 at supersonic speeds against enemy fighters was the mental vision I had kept throughout the writing process. So, I embarked on what turned out to be a very long mission to unlock the top tier fighters in War Thunder’s USA tree, culminating in not only two variants of the F-14 (A and B), but also the three variants of F-4 Phantom II, plus the F-15 and F-16. Along the way I recorded lots of matches, hoping for some cool moments that I could use in the video.

Late 2023 I started reaching out to drummers I know, to see if anyone was available and interested in helping me finish my songs properly. I knew that this song in particular had to have a real drummer - it’s just too much of a jam to play along to sequenced MIDI beats. Tom Reavis answered the call and knocked it out of the park. After a few months spent getting his home studio ready, we finally recorded the drums for this song on April 21st. Last weekend we filmed ourselves playing the parts, and over the past several days I’ve edited everything together into the final video, which I hope you enjoy.

Stay tuned for more tracks and more videos! If all goes according to my current plan, I will produce at least three, but possibly four more music videos this year, culminating in the release of the new album.

My Adventure in Classical Music Composition

In March this year I decided to undertake a longstanding ambition to try to compose a piece of classical music for solo piano. I first began dabbling with classical music in 2015, beginning with a short ensemble piece titled Rapture of Logic, moving on to scoring a short film, and culminating in the classically-inspired prog rock of my 2020 album Reason and Romance. But all of this music was written for synths and sequencers, with a corresponding dearth of subtlety, and usually as the backdrop for heavy rock instrumentation.

My first piece for solo piano, While You Were Dreaming, is so-titled because I wrote it late at night. My best ideas happen at night, when I am secluded and immersed in my work. For my first attempt, I knew I wanted the piece to be something dynamic and emotive, and playable by a live musician. I decided to keep it simple and let it come out of me naturally, without overthinking it. I did what I knew I could do. I selected a chord progression for the left hand, then wrote a melody for a right hand. I developed it in four distinct parts that followed each other in a logical progression that let the music rise and fall then rise again in a crescendo, and arranged it like a song with a verse and chorus structure, not unlike the rock music I was used to. I massaged the main melody to let it reveal itself in veiled allusions over the course of the piece, rather than all at once. I added some flourishes and surprises. I tickled my brain with just the right notes and harmonies at the right moments. Then, I went back and adjusted the note dynamics and tempo to make the piece breathe as much as it could while being played back as a MIDI file through a synthesizer.

When I was all done I was a little shocked at how quickly I had worked, and how much I liked the result. Sometimes music comes out of you so naturally, with such little friction that it can feel like you are only a conduit for something supernatural, as if the song was floating around the Universe until you, like a lightning rod, channeled it down to Earth. Whenever you get this feeling, you know you're onto something good. But I also felt it was *too* easy, because I had not strayed very far from my comfort zone. Writing this piece of music was not so different from writing a rock or pop song, and I didn't even have to learn the piece to play it.

So I decided I should take this experiment further. I should challenge myself to write something much more difficult. I should force myself to grow new muscles. I should try to write something really incredible, as if it had come from a great master of Romantic-era piano music from the 19th century. Something that evoked Brahms, Rachmaninoff, List, or Chopin. My next piece, Rhapsody No.1, took at least three times as long to write, and it is one of my greatest achievements. I feel I succeeded. This piece modulates key, moves through different modalities, plays around with lots of different time signatures, and includes some almost-playable impossible stuff. Truly, it would take a great master to perform it, as I originally wrote it. But, that was the point. Only great masters can perform Rachmaninoff's most difficult work.

With both pieces finished, I decided my next step was to arrange everything as sheet music, replete with dynamics markings and tempo instructions, and have them performed by a pianist. It is simple to import a MIDI file to a notation program like MuseScore, but MIDI does not translate in any precise way to sheet music. When composing my pieces in MIDI, I had manually adjusted the velocities and durations of every note and dynamically adjusted the tempos, to give a human-like feeling to the final result. If I exported the music *as composed* in my MIDI editor, it produced an unreadable mess that no human being could understand. So I had to "flatten" the music by removing all dynamics, and then go back through each piece measure-by-measure, note-by-note to include dynamics markings and tempo instructions. Since I had never done anything like this before nor even used notation software, it was a laborious learning experience.

After preparing the sheet music, I went to the website fiverr and solicited bids for performances. Antonio Giardina, a Sicilian pianist and Conservatory graduate lowballed everyone else I approached. I think perhaps he did not understand the tremendous amount of work that would be required of him to complete the contract he was agreeing to, but that was soon to be his problem, because the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition demanded that I accept his very generous terms. Still, I tipped him very well.

Ultimately we decided to tackle the hard job first, Rhapsody No.1. I would like to find out some day if there is nobody on Earth that can play what I originally wrote, but suspecting that might be the case, I agreed it would work best to arrange the piece for two pianos, recorded separately, and to slow the tempo down. Antonio did the bulk of the work on this new arrangement, which I then edited and corrected for mistakes. He also re-arranged While You Were Dreaming to make it a little easier to read and play.

I am greatly pleased with the final results of all this effort. I don't know what I will do with these recordings, but in any case they exist now, and they didn't before. These are two great pieces of music that I have birthed into the world and I'm proud and happy to share them as wide and far as I can, though my reach may be limited to mere dozens of individuals. Enjoy!