Filed under: Music — Tags: Escher — Screenhog @ 6:09 am
This one is an experimental piece. I probably took it way too far and invested way too much time in it, but it was just really fun to compose. I think I actually had more fun playing it than I do now that I listen to it.
I was experimenting with the idea of creating something that would do with music what M.C. Escher did with pictures. He’d create a detailed picture of some optical illusion that would go essentially go in circles, from basic to complex to basic again, so I attempted the same thing.
This is the first piece of music I’ve put on this site that’s completely my own, rather than being a remix of another piece. It’s not the first piece of music I ever wrote, of course. I started learning piano when I was 5, and started composing almost immediately (not that I was a mini-Mozart or anything)…
I’ve always wanted to do a remix of this song. It is still, in my mind, one of the coolest Mega Man stage themes. In doing the remix, I’ve also discovered that doing remixes of 8-bit music is often more fun than doing remixes of newer music. With the new music, you already have a preconcieved notion of what the orchestration sounds like, and putting new instruments in its place can sound quite jarring (imagine the choir of the Halo theme song being replaced by bagpipes or something). The bleeps and bloops of the older music are much easier to imagine as a different instrument, since they could really sound like anything.
That being said, I definitely took some artistic liberties with this arrangement.
Filed under: Music — Tags: take five — Screenhog @ 10:42 am
Take Five, by Dave Brubeck, is one of the first jazz songs that I can ever remember learning. It was certainly the first song I ever learned that was in 5/4 time, which opened up a lot of new possibilities in my mind for composing music – I hadn’t even realized that you could have a piece of music in that time signature. Of course, this was before I listened to the original Mission: Impossible theme song, which is also in 5/4 time.
This is my take on the song… it goes in a slightly different direction than the original song, but overall stays true to the tune. Hope you enjoy!
Super Mario Galaxy has some of the most beautifully orchestrated music of any video game, with quite a wide range of styles. One of my favorites can be heard in most of the levels where you can turn into a Boo. Its official name is the Teresa Waltz, and I decided to make a piano-only rendition of it:
If you’d like to hear the original music, try this YouTube link. If that doesn’t work, I highly recommend playing Super Mario Galaxy, it’s a beautifully crafted game.
