Hames' [MUSICDUMP] More awkward over-familiarity than your browser has room for (5/8)
Have you ever been browsing the art forums and thought "Jesus christ dude. Who would even want to see your art dump? Taking requests? How about you stop making this terrible shit."
Well now you have. Also: "Wow, thats hurtful!" "What a mean spirited thing to say." "Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?" and other pretending-to-be-quirky-and-hoping-meta-is-still-funny-to-some-of-you phrases.
I am a musician. (poor hygiene) I have 15 years experience composing music (largely unemployed for the majority of my adult life.) and I currently "work" as a composer for a few webcartoons I know you haven't seen. (I didn't even watch them.) I take clients on freelance. (my wife makes all the money) I've been doing a lot of fan music (last year: ~100 hits mostly myself. MSPA fanmusic: 1000 hits last week.) and I thought I'd collect it all in one place. (and talk about it like a self important jackass.)
FAQ
What is a music
GTFO
This is stupid!
thats not a question, chucklefuck! P.S. fuck your shit.
If you are a working musician why do you have time to make stupid threads like this
How do you write your music
on a computer dunpass
You are amazing
Word? also not a question
Can I use this music for my AU FANFICTION FORUM ADVENTURE WHEREIN JOHN DAVE NEPETA AND MY COOL FANTROLL IS MARRIED TO VRISKA
Sure, just clear it with me and tell me/everyone how you use it here in this thread! I sort of come off like a jackass but I actually really love contributing to things, don't tell anybody
uHH, wHY DO YOU USE SO MANY SWEARS
because my mom didn't let me say "funk" when I was a kid because It sounded too much like "fuck."
Are you FOR HIRE
Contact me off site. Don't shit where you sleep, you know? I take comissions exclusively through email now.
IT BEGINS:
Konkey Dong no wait that sounds stupid - I wrote this song for a client who asked for something vaguely "Donkey Kong-ish" and I actually got paid beforehand. I promptly spent this money. I had been putting it off until about an hour before I was supposed to meet with him. I quickly listened to the donkey kong music to discover its only about four notes. I had enough time to throw in a hammer theme FREE OF CHARGE. Actually, I reread the email and I was explicitly asked to include one. If it were some symphonic suite I would have probably been boned. SOOO PROFESSIONALLL
Chipfyoog translator's note: Not actually in a proper fugue form. "Dude you are like not even sort of done introducing voices by the time your weak ass exposition starts. YO DAWG ARE YOU STARTING ON THE DEVELOPMENT ALREADY. Man this is wack I am OUT." But hey, chip soundfonts amirite. (no)
Four Years four our fourth anniversary I gave my wife a CD of music I had written her. Included on it was this short improvised piano solo. ("I've been a Jazz musician for 17 years now. I don't write my shit anymore I just kick it from my head.") I was especially proud of this, as it was one of my first improvised recordings. I asked her about and she was like "Oh baby (she calls me baby on account that I cry and wear diapers) you know I don't like jazz."
Reach for the Moon, Immortal Smoke a friend of mine is really into Touhou. He asked me to do a remix for him. I showed him this and he said "Why didn't you do Nuclear Fusion?" I'll tell you why. Because Utsuho is nonsense and her spellcards are terrible and shut up I'm bad at video games.
ORIGINAL FANMUSICS:
What could have been the idea here is that Rose is lamenting of Johns body, and John is telling her things will be ok. John is imagining a future growing up with Rose if they had indeed gotten married and lived on that ranch like Rose imagined during her Maplehoof riding easteregg that is totally cannon. Roses theme fades as she slowly succumbs to the GRIMDARKNESS INSIDE of her. John fades away, now alone, still dreaming about WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN. Man I should write a fanfic that was pretty hot. "And then Hames Strongbody comes and totally like turns Rose good again and revives John and goes to hang out with Dave. Jade can't come because she is too shy around INCREDIBLY MUSCULAR MEN" Does anybody have a towel
Nuclear (Classic) this was intended to be a strife theme for Dave, because of well, "pretty much everything Dave does.." It ended up being so much more than that. I actually really like how this came out. Turns out if you don't force me to make music I don't half ass it. I don't half ass all of it. Well, I don't half ass most of it. I guess you could say some of it isn't half assed. It isn't entirely half assed. There is definitely an entire ass in there. This is pretty much four asses.
Resurrection I tried really hard not to name this piece res-erection and I passed with flying colors. Obviously John can't stay dead he's pretty much Jesus, right? The question remains as to how and when! Obviously with loops.
REMIXES
Not really much to say about these! Atomik Meltdown I thought that record scratches would be appropriate. Also, my friends heard this one and were immediately like "Oh, yeah, this has you written all over it." Apparently I really like corny trumpet sounds. DANG. The hardest part about this is I built that siren sound from SCRATCH.
Neg this is the first remix I did, and it continues to be sort of terrible. I'm not really sure what I was going for. Why is this so loud?
Grimdark Rising I think there are ten people in the world who have listened to this. All of their ears fell off. There are ten people in the world with no more ears. This is sad.
NEETdown probably the best title wasted on this song. Hats off to you if you catch the half second "Black" quote. What? There are two? I forgot about that one. Wait how many times did I put that line in there? Whoops.
Explorar it means explore in spanish. Clever right? I studied Latin Jazz for seven terrible years under a guy who did a thing with a famous guy one time so he was pretty much the biggest asshole in the world about it. Oh, you know thats not what PANCHO SANCHEZ would do. Motherfucker Pancho Sanchez would probably just get really high and tell you something like "The Congas are like . . . a metaphor for life maaaaan can you spare me a twentyyyyy" the jazz industry sucks.
Umbral Ultimatum "WiP" wait work in progress means its bad and you're never going to finish it, right?
Showdown Oh man I geek out about Karkat's imagined strife page music and there were like two remixes of it so here it is. I'm especially fond of the drum fills. YEAH. Really like this one. Oh hey cheesy trumpets. I hate when my friends are right.
"DA VAULT"
Remember when you were a little kid and you were going through your parent's shit when they weren't home, looking for christmas presents even thought its like March? Ok so you know how there was always like one box that you open up and its like "Oh wow the 70s." No? Ok how about when you're moving and you discover theres a box you haven't unpacked from last time and you've been meaning to get rid of it anyway, so you go through it to make sure this isn't where you left your DS and there are all theses memories and stuff and you know what its already in a box anyway why don't we just bring the entire thing with us and then five moves later you still have the same box and you don't really know why? This is that section for me. Most of the music here was written when I was in highschool, (Class of 2003 brehhhhhhhhhhh) but hey! Lets laugh at it TOGETHER.
A lot of these are going to be really terrible.
Ukulele 2001 This is so old. Oh god. I went on this camping trip with some friends and one brought a Ukulele so I wrote this song to make them angry, (You know how some people have best friends? Worst friend, thats me.) thats why the piano voicing/comp pattern is so weird. The chords do not make any sense at all. Listen to how terrible I was at writing "Jazz." That is the worst ending of all time. It makes me feel really uncomfortable.
Theme Song2002/2006 aka holy shit what does reverb do, aka this is why you really need to write music on flat-mixed headphones. Oh god I was in this terrible SKA band when I was in 9th grade. We were called the Isotopes. YEP. This eventually got used as the theme song for a webcartoon that won't die. in 2006. No I didn't fix it at all.
VGBM2006 Same cartoon. Still bad. What? No not the cartoon, the cartoon was awesome. The music is bad.
Soundtrack22009 After the "Four Years" fiasco I wanted to write something my wife actually liked. Enter: the next few songs. Success. I really wish I had spent more time mixing these. I don't know how much that would have helped, I'm not very good at that. DO YOU LIKE MIXING go for it so hard. SO. HARD. RES ERECTION IS SUCH A GOOD TITLE I MEAN COME ON
Soundtrack see above I'm not sure why I thought it would be a good idea to link the second one before the first one. Listen to those trumpets. Intrepid listeners may notice how much of a boner I have for Bach. This is nothing like that song in the matrix during the red dress scene I don't know what you are even talking about. That song was clearly based off Elgar's Enigma Variations. My glasses fell off during that sentence and I had to push them back up while typing it so don't worry, the look was completed.
soundtrack3see above She really has pretty derpy tastes in music. Whatever. These chords don't really make sense (they sound like they should, but its sort of a false cadence) and you may notice the end of this sounds strikingly similar to the beginning of "Resurrection"
No ska is pretty much dead2003 You'll discover that almost everything I do is to make my friends angry. This song is no exception. These chord changes are what I would play whenever anybody would hand me a guitar. Or whenever I picked up a guitar. Or whenever I saw somebody with a guitar. I actually learned to play it on piano because people stopped letting me play their guitar. That interlude towards the end is something that happened one day at practice "Oh hey thats nice it sounds familiar. Oh you motherfucker." The original title of this song was 'Ska is dead and James Killed it.'
Different Worlds oh balls I think this is the first song I ever wrote for my wife when we were dating. I'm so glad she decided to ignore it and marry me anyway. The best part of this song is the organ drowns out everything so you can't hear SHIT. Is it based on canon in D? This is so stupid. What the hell is that guitar sound? I got on somebody's ass the other day about how their writing was a "Miasma of sound" but I mentioned "I have the same problem." This is what I meant, bro. When is that trumpet player even supposed to catch his breath?
You should Know this this
this is it
isnt it
this is the first terrible piece of music I wrote for that shitty band
this is the one that started it all. Its not that bad, considering I was like 14 when I wrote it.
Nocturne I learned to play a different song on guitar. I'm wondering if I should do another section for live recordings. I would like to do more of these. This is old.
NEW STUFF
TOOLS AND FLASH: HARD BOILED Lexxy streamed a drawing of a homework assignment she was doing which essentially required her to draw a piece involving Tools, Chickens, and suspense. I don't know. Anyway, a few of us watching the stream came up with the Idea that the chickens were part of some terrible cop show. Various chicken and egg puns were thrown around. It was good times. I kind of want to see this made into a thing.
AGGRAVATE (strife mix) the cool thing about calling things a certain sort of mix is the implication that you wrote a different mix of it. People think you work twice as hard! Anyway, this is a short loop (it just loops endlessly into itself) specifically made for people to use in whatever nonsense they want. Free music! What do you mean this entire thread is full of free music- oh FUCK
digsite I sort of hate this, but it was made to very specific client request, who never paid me. I'm passing the savings on TO YOU
Piano Concerto mvt 1 This is the first, and definitely the strongest movement of that piano concerto I wrote for my wife. I did some digging and found the entire thing, but two and three are downright embarassing. This isn't super great either, Reason 4 can't really handle tempo changes like sibelius can so the its all at one speed. Yeah. 3:27 sounds pretty retarded. Don't make me listen to it anymore. (SO EXPRESSIVE)
slowrpg sometimes I write derivative piano music that I take wayyy to seriously! There are about 90 files on my computer that sound exactly like this, because there was a period of about 20 years of my life where I liked to pretend I was real serious. (first six years of life mainly devoted to a highly controversial "Which Dinosaur is best" study.)
4.27
"Argh" probably the most frustrating thing, trying to add an accelerando in a program mostly used for making loops, and PHAT BEATS. I just cut it into two parts and mashed them together haphazardly in audacity. 4:30 is probably my favorite part. Work Stuff.
Smooth Am I the only person that legitimately enjoys playing Smooth Jazz? Maybe. MAYBE. More work stuff.
5.1 [S] Lexxer: STRIFE I hang out a lot in Lexxy's art stream while I'm working on stuff, because its encouraging to watch a person who is so enthusiastic about art. I have this tendency to get TOO FAMILIAR with people I only sort of know, so when she was feeling down I sort of overstepped my bounds a bit and offered to write her some music if she kept working on the commission she didn't want to be doing. Super creepy of me, yeah. Whoops. Anyway, she liked it, and hopefully doesn't think I'm stalking her or something.
Bassloops You guys might not know this about me, but I'm actually a Bassist by trade, not a piano player. I found some old basslines I had apparently recorded a while back, and I redid them.
Nuclear (STRIFE mix) calling the original Nuclear (Classic) finally makes sense. I just tried to make it sound a little harder, a little more intense. Its my STRIFE theme now. YEP.
notzanarkand actual email: "can you make something that sounds like that one piano song in ff10 we can work out the details later"
5.7 Cheer the fuck up! Sometimes when life gets you down you just need to be reminded of what to do. I found that life was getting me down a lot lately. So I cheered the fuck up and asked some friends to let me borrow some instruments, then painstakingly recorded each loop and took about a hundred takes for each track. So what you're hearing is me playing every instrument simultaneously, like one of those bad youtube videos. (This is also why the drums fills are so shitty) I definitely looped each and arranged them in a "meaningful way" I probably spent more time doing this, then I've spent having meaningful conversations with people this year.
POOPINTHEMEaka why you should use a compressor sparingly. Preformed on my son's shitty keyboard! Did you know I can play piano if I practice? I mean I forget to hit the sustain pedal a few times, but hey what can you do. Somebody asked my ideal job, and I said it would be "Following around a rich guy writing theme music for his life." Now you know what shit sounds like. It would be completely legitimate to say this sounds like shit.
VGBM (Strife mix) So, I really like corny dance music. An earlier version of this is somewhere up there, but I did this strife mix when skepticArcher (who I only kind of, sort of, not really, just barely know) vaguely mentioned their fantroll. I felt too creepy afterwards so I never gave it to them. Pretty much my entire social life can be summed up with this pathetic display of awkward over-familiarity. I'm pretty sure they're not carousing the art forum so I'm not really worried about them ever finding out how terribly sad this is. ("Hi my username was jamesatron we sort of talked like one time" "Wow you are fucking weird." "haha, yeah I get that a lot oh you left")
Doctora I started working on a remix of "Doctor" to relax, but then, you know, it turns out this song is almost completely rhythmically incompatible with the style I was trying to write it in so I gave up because I figured nobody was watching, so nobody would notice my failure. Then I typed about it, at length, over the internet. Now a handful of people will know about it. Welp.
Yolanda I've been having some life-troubles lately. And I got asked by a family member to write and preform something, uh, when the time comes. HA HA I HOPE THIS ISN'T REAL AWKWARD OR ANYTHING
Last edited by Hames; 05-07-2011 at 09:17 PM.
Reason: WHY AM I SO AWKWARD
Re: [MUSICDUMP] Why would anyone want to hear this nonsense: An autobiography
"Four Years" is really smooth, man. I hope I'm that good in a few years. "Explorar" is fantastic. Your jazz skills are great and shine through as authentic.
"What Could Have Been" and "Game Over" are really pretty. Your slow pieces are very beautiful and easily your best tracks along with the jazz ones.
Thanks for all the remixes, btw. [/blushes] I was actually thinking of making a Showdown remix almost EXACTLY like the one you've got there. Now I kind of want to do it even more. The trumpets have a couple off-notes (and the production in general is a little weak) I think but besides that the feeling/idea of it is great. Do you mind if I do a remix of a remix sometime down the road? I guess we can work that out when it happens.
Re: [MUSICDUMP] Why would anyone want to hear this nonsense: An autobiography (update
Originally Posted by Path
Way to murder ska dude.
I have it on good authority (A dirty t-shirt that doesn't fit anymore but I still hold on to it because I can dream) that ska isn't dead, its just underground.
Re: [MUSICDUMP] Why would anyone want to hear this nonsense: An autobiography (update
Originally Posted by Hames
Originally Posted by Path
Way to murder ska dude.
I have it on good authority (A dirty t-shirt that doesn't fit anymore but I still hold on to it because I can dream) that ska isn't dead, its just underground.
Re: [MUSICDUMP] Why would anyone want to hear this nonsense: An autobiography (update
Update: Lexxy streamed a drawing of a homework assignment she was doing which essentially required her to draw a piece involving Tools, Chickens, and suspense. I don't know.
Re: Hames' [MUSICDUMP] aka: "Free exposure" won't keep me warm at night (3 new on 4/2
Updated with three new pieces, updated the FAQ to be even less helpful and put most of it under spoilers so your eyes don't melt trying to look for something.
Re: Hames' [MUSICDUMP] aka: "Free exposure" won't keep me warm at night (3 new on 4/2
whichever. Its nice to have a place to collect your projects in a mildly organized way.
slowrpg was originally supposed to be the final boss battle. You know, in the rain, mano-a-mano FOR THE LAST TIME. I was thinking of adding sound effects to it so it wouldn't come off so pretentious and douchey.
Re: Hames' [MUSICDUMP] aka: "Free exposure" won't keep me warm at night (3 new on 4/2
It all, strangely, feels like soundtrack music, rather than independent pieces. I get the same feeling with movie music. I usually don't like to listen to it, because it feels like half the content is missing — what's on screen, specifically.
Re: Hames' [MUSICDUMP] more like musicchump. taking requests (2 new on 4/27)
Dude, Hames, I've got, like, almost enough musical knowledge to write a post-it note, and my taste in music could be legitimately described as godawful, but seeing as we're bros and all, I totally had to roll in here and tell you how your music stuff rocks house, and all other forms of music stuff on the intertubes are totally lame by comparison. If anyone tells you different, they are straight-up jellin'. The jellin' so bad it's just embarrassing. Man, would you look at that guy jellin over there? That is just sad. That is just so sad. Gog, man, what a totally abhonkulous display of stone cold jealousy that guy busting out, and now it's leaking all over. Jebus, it's in everything. Would somebody just put that dude out of his misery? This is just uncomfortable.
Anyway, I especially thought that nuka-classic track was awesome. Like, somewhere between 'hella' and 'effing' awesome. We're bros, so you might think I was just telling you that, but there's also this other, totally unrelated dude sitting in my living room and he is like totally rocking out to it right now. You don't know this guy, but he's pretty cool and a programmer. Being a programmer doesn't have a lot of baring to the conversation, but I thought you should know anyway. So yeah, this programmer guy thinks you rock, and he's not even like your bro or anything, so you know that shit's totally real. It's unbiased, like a federal gogdamned mediator.