Mar 15, 2012
6 notes

This is all kinds of amazing.

Mar 15, 2012
4 notes

Started watching Game of Thrones.

And I have no idea what I should expect.

Mar 14, 2012
12 notes
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

I always felt like this song was in a bit of an unfortunate position, being a bonus song on the Wanderers album, which basically meant that only people who bought the album or those who specifically scoured youtube for it would get to hear it.

So I’m gonna bring it to your attention and hopefully someone will be hearing it for the first time!

Tomahawk Head was pretty much a full-on collaborative effort between me and Radiation. We had already done some stuff together with the full version of MeGaLoVaNia, but this song was a much more even split IMO. Radiation basically wrote most of the composition in midi form, and I had the task of unleashing my samples and live guitar on it. I also did some minor rewrites, like fleshing out the acoustic middle-section as well as adding the guitar solo section.

This song was intended as ARs theme, and uses a lot of (stereotypically) Native American instrumentation. In that sense, it kinda reminds me of a lot of Jade/Bec themes, where there’s an obvious eastern Asian vibe, even though thematically there’s no real canonical connection between Jade and eastern Asian culture.

I actually consider this a really cool use of ethnic instrumentation. It’s not even the fact that it deliberately tries to go against a stereotype to make a point, but rather that it treats the ethnic instruments as any other: it makes use of the characteristics of the sounds to underline a particular situation or character, and ignores any cultural connotations of the instrument.

When you think about it, it’s pretty silly to assume that Jade has to be Asian because some songs associated with her use ethnic instrumentation. In that sense, I might as well claim that Rose has to be Italian, because hey, that’s where violins originally came from!

At the end of the movie Kill Bill, there’s a final showdown between The Bride and O-ren Ishii. They’re both wielding katanas and the setting is a very stereotypical, snow-covered japanese garden. You would THINK that you’d at least get some taiko drums as a backing, but nope. The song that plays is “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” by Santa Esmeralda, which can best be described as a flamenco/disco hybrid. And it fits PERFECTLY.

In that sense, I think that this song too fits AR very well, even though his character has fuck-all to do with Native American culture. 

Mar 13, 2012
0 notes

I’m so hyped.

(that song is amazing too btw, hadn’t heard it before)

Mar 12, 2012
2 notes
Anonymous asked: Is there a portion of the Homestuck fandom that you absolutely avoid at all costs?

Sure, if by ‘portion’, you mean majority.

But nah, I kid. I’m honestly cool with pretty much whatever, people who roleplay fantrolls weird me out a bit but not enough for me to avoid them. I know I lashed out against fandoms in an earlier post, but I’m a bit more mellow towards them now.

Honestly the only stuff I ACTIVELY avoid is HS porn or erotic fanfiction, but I’m not gonna condemn people who do like it. I mean, I enjoy editing drum track velocities and automating filter cutoffs, so who am I to say that you can’t enjoy Gamzee getting it on with Tavros (or whatever pairing all the cool kids are into nowadays)

Mar 12, 2012
3 notes
Anonymous asked: What's your general opinion of HSG?

Tough to say. While I am a 4chan lurker, I mostly follow /v/ and /vg/, and I only really occasionally drop by HSG after an album/flash release to see people flipping their shit.

I am sort of aware of the general hatedom/hipsterism that people like Radiation and me occasionally get, but I really don’t keep up with HSG enough to hold any strong opinion towards posters there.

Honestly the only concrete thing I can remember from any HSG right now is how someone wrote a Homestuck music team tier list and put me down in the “Mid Tier, but chronic masturbators” tier, which cracked me up (because of its accuracy).

Mar 12, 2012
3 notes
Anonymous asked: Dude, the only HSG posters who hate you are basically hipsters. They only hate you because your music is rock instead of chiptunes, and apparently that makes it inferior. I post there and I really like your music, so don't assume everyone in HSG is stupid.

Fair enough. Though, I would like to say that disliking my music does not make a person stupid in my eyes, hehe.

That said, I don’t really feel strongly about the matter one way or another, I really just brought it up as an example for how my music doesn’t necessarily appeal to every single person out there.

Mar 12, 2012
7 notes

This anime makes a very good case for liberal translations.

Mar 10, 2012
3 notes

Yes. yesyesyesyesyesyesyes.

Mar 9, 2012
14 notes
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

This song is special to me. For one, it’s my very first posted OverClocked ReMix, but more importantly, stylistically it’s basically the ancestor of the Strife album!

It’s a very liberal arrangement of arguably the most iconic Chrono Trigger song, Corridors of Time, basically only retaining the main melodies but completely throwing the feeling, style and harmonies out of the window.

Looking back, it’s CRAZY ambitious for the time (we’re talking like 3 years before Strife); Strings and choir going into a full rock band, constant switchups to clean sections or a weird solo cello/shamisen melody/countermelody part, a synth solo in some kind of weirdass mode I don’t even consciously recognize (it’s like mixolydian or something), and the noticeable amount of work that went into the drum sequencing.

I suppose that this arrangement is what made me realize that I definitely have the potential to come up with some crazy stuff and actually make it work as a song. This is also why I constantly try to challenge myself by making unusual instrumentation or style mashups work.

When I was making Strife, I used a lot of the techniques I had learned while making this arrangement, and tried to keep the same general mindset I had back then: i.e. being very open to experimentation and just throwing in whatever came up in my mind (the weird jazzy sections with rhodes piano chords in Atomic Bonsai or Knife’s Edge are good examples)

In that sense, I still consider this song a very important personal milestone. 

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I make music for MSpaint Adventures, but I'm always looking to branch out. I also like to talk about vidya games, languages, and history sometimes. Subscribe via RSS.