itch.io

I kind of wish my bridge was twice as long but that's someone talking who commits the sin of making track after track with nothing -but- bridge sections without round-back in much of my catalogue.

When we can -get- me to relax, some of the latest ambient stuff is getting better at being calm.

Glad you gave my submission a try.  Cheers.

It did get one extra pass through to throw something approximating a motif in there.

Although I think with not 100% faithfulness.

Something more along the lines of Life of Rixlor (my itch.io debut back in July) would have done it better justice where we had 3 or 4 motifs.

I threw...three-quarters of one repeat into version 2.  And it did benefit.

So I find your criticism to be wholly accurate.

Glad you gave it a listen!  Cheers

FA-08 is usually regarded as inexhaustibly good so it's probably a -me- mistake than the gear :)

But glad for the feedback, and you could still be right

if you have a fancy schmancy workstation, do the backbone first, then move it to the laptop on the export

then key little single-note-width overlays with the Akai MIDI keyboard while in your DAW, for the last 8% of the work

try not to over-busy it, crypt of the necrodancer got hosed wheni went one too many. its penultimate v3 is better than the v4 and i plan to eventually post that

this one's a little rugged i grant :)

when i get more time i can be...more organized.  Life of Rixlor proved that when i debuted in July.

if I get time in edgewise away from my 9-5 things....benefit.

Glad you had a good time.

P.S. postscript for postscript.

Ok so what have is....

a) tunnel forward for at least 30-40 measures.  sometimes only 20-25.

b) give yourself a rest every 5 seconds

c) in these 5 second jumps manually perform a wild chord move that you can barely accomplish

if you need to, move the tempo dial -down- from 120 to like 89

then back up again

copy paste your sections and transpose the sections in a circle-of-keys

perfect pitch is better than relative pitch for this task if you know your major 4th-below then count...

just think of what key the last chord of where you stopped..."leads into" for the offset of the pasted section-to-follow

if you're getting too close to the top of the keyboard do the mirror-image of your offset out-of-12 tones

like you were going +7, now it's -5/-17/-29....

punch 16-measure insertions between the sections once you just can't stand it anymore

c2) best if you can make these asymmetrical from each other

d) top it off by copying your Outro as your Intro

e) if youre unhappy with the intro smash it up a little 

f) maybe -again- diddle your ending to have things from your modded intro

there you go

Was a busy week for music jams on itch where we had six(?) in parallel for a moment.  Probably this submission suffered accordingly.

Glad you at least gave it a go :)

Roland FA-08 88-key with weighted keys.  The tone library is enhanced with my own choices out of Roland Axial's Integra packs so that there are well over 3500 tones, and you can edit the tones in so many ways you couldn't run out in ten years.  So many menus you can get lost in....

Yeah I would have done better to just to replace the existing drum track and hand-tap the rhythm again the whole way through

The pasted sections start out each time being perfectly on-beat but then degrade within about four, five measures

Glad you took a listen.

(2nd reply) as an eclectic late bloomer who has play by ear ability and can just noodle and ego aside, probably can build at least a B-list sounding tune in just an hour, i have to tread carefully and not poke a stick at the music theorists who have to build upward the hard way, folks with a music degree etc.  I'm just winging in between working a 9-5 job as an old fart :)

Against students who spent all day building their thing note by note, I tend to score in the bottom quartile in the jams so far, yet individually score high on the creativity metric by itself.  And that's fine as long as over on Re-Ex/soundcloud the woolly band over there gives me 8.5+ out of 10 

When I get enough time I can pass through and make sure motifs are emplaced.

We saw that with Life of Rixlor in July as my itch Debut :)

Our ragged band of competitors had a lot of deadlines in parallel this week and the last, at one point we had six(?) jams at once.

So I am sure this fell victim to that :)

In the round the itch community's OST folk are more the ones to be using the little Akai 25-key setups and similar dummy MIDI keyboards in tandem with -software- synths.  I'm a bit of an outlier to be strutting around with an 88-key Roland with the sequencer built-in.

And so we have a gradual dance going on here as I (now that I have an Akai) learn to join the caravan and conform a little re: quantization of rhythm, etc.  When i am squeezed for time, this will exhibit less, but as i can get a space in edgewise I aim to try to get more with the program :)

I nearly pulled it off with the Axl Low theme for Guilty Gear.  my percussives were off but if you listen to that piece on my page there are good long sections where I achieve lock-step quantization.

In the coming months, i should be more on the rails :)

Anyway most gratified that you were able to put in your 2 cents.

Glad you had a good time listening!

farther back in my Soundcloud history prior to itch you can see more of my general behavior like that:

https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/tracks

Gratified you liked.  Peeps in my age range got a lot of SNES JRPG into our system during the 1997-2005 early emulation days.

my soundcloud where I had been putting stuff out prior to Itch these days is:

https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/tracks

Cheers,

--D

Excellent, Charlie! gave a follow, 

Here's my soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff

Take a poke around and follow back if you genuinely like.

I've tied all my platforms together to a godaddy site:

https://exedexes1.godaddysites.com/

Have a lovely day out there

--Douglas

triggered to say "my lodging, it is on the cold ground..." attributed in The First Churcills(BBC, 1969) to Moll Davis by John Neville as John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough (and Moira Redmond as Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, in the same scene, who sings the lines) with nearly these notes, in G minor rather than C minor but the relative pitches of the notes are almost the same except 1 note missing

The benefit of having the workstation have a sequencer built in is I can just stuff a blank space in the center then work backwards until the two halves connect.  I decided to give us some weird tones out of the master list so it would stand out :)

I was after just a notation-symmetry rather than getting such complex voice tones to have the same -timbral- going backwards which sounds super difficult.

Glad you had fun.

yeah its more that it's manually played in reverse with the same notes on the keyboard with fingers, like carving out a blank space in the middle and doing the ends toward each other till they linked

not that it would play on a vinyl in reverse the same :)

Glad you had fun!

Cheers

Yeah my one regret is toward the end that because i didn't really find a leaves-rustling SFX that it does use a seashore wsssh that is a little too-on-the-nose.  Gratified that you enjoyed it!

followed you both here and on soundcloud.

my soundcloud is at

https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff

and i've tied all my other music sites into a godaddy site:

https://exedexes1.godaddysites.com/

have a lovely day out there Lydia

Cheers

I would in fairness add you bring down the seriousness to a lower level right away and the best compositions that win awards feel like they're coming around the corner from somewhere else, like introducing a character in an action movie in a city street well they were on another street before that living their lives, weren't they? lol

I can't really throw stones because I tend to write serious and momentous all the time even when more lighthearted is called for like in a shop.  But I totally recognize high production quality and creativity.  Strong everywhere except credibility took a slight hit (for doing the same thing I do!)

Felt very professionally done, I very much enjoyed!

The immersive version, only thing detracting is a little murky could be sharper but super strong on rhythm complexity and the effects really draw a person into feeling the bustle of a shop with other people randomly jabbering and walking around.  High marks for credibility and composition.  Excellent!

I feel it's strongest in its structure and the adherence to the theme of a shop theme that correctly loops without any gaps.  I'm a stickler for tonality so i would have wanted the whole melody to be on harmonic point but relatively few people do that anyway.  Nicely done.  Liked the slightly whimsical tone selections which are exactly what's called for when it's down-time and the characters are at a shop getting supplies or upgrades.

Many of these things are more for the cross-impact to other musicians rather than I will really ever polish unless someone with clout that makes revenue on Itch says "ok this one, we'll use it in an actual game or an asset pack if you cinch up the timing flaws"

and so too with my Soundcloud, Spotify. And so the wisest thing may yet still be to just lay down the ideas before i forget them :)

I -do- at times make an unflawed thing about 5 percent of the time.  But I don't worry too much.

Glad everyone is having fun!

Yeah i fully freely admit I only listend to the Youtube samples a few minutes :)

Just a vague sense it would be a bouncy early 90's SNES like Neko's tune in the shop for Secret Of Mana 1 in 1992/93

Glad you had fun, everyone in our beastly outfit submitting for Aurelien knows I write kind of rough cut things.

gave you a Bandcamp follow

if you look around and see something you like maybe give me a follow-back there(I mean only do so if something genuinely impresses...):

https://dougstoothoff.bandcamp.com/

my soundcloud is:

https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff

have a lovely upcoming weekend.

Cheers

gave you a follow on Bandcamp, have a look around and follow-back if genuinely intrigued :)

Cheers

https://dougstoothoff.bandcamp.com/

https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff

i would followback on SC but its clogged because faithfully doing the re-ex cycle every day keeps me at 2K followed

if theres a new opening because someone fell off and i remember, ill do that

Been releasing to soundcloud since 1/24/2023, 337 releases so far myself.

in the electronica space also

dunno about collabs necessarily but just good to see another not-hiphop out there fighting the good fight

Cheers have a lovely day out there

https://exedexes1.godaddysites.com/

https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff/tracks

https://exedexes1.itch.io/

https://dougstoothoff.bandcamp.com/

followed! here's mine if (after snooping around and genuinely testing out a track or two): you -wish- to follow back:

https://dougstoothoff.bandcamp.com/

i range to electronica with a heavy jazz influence and a touch always of some classical in there

my soundcloud is:

https://soundcloud.com/doug-stoothoff

I am of course overthinking it! But briefly overthinking it at the beginning is just common courtesy :)

c418's things on youtube don't seem to be split in a way i can go "ok where's the mountains/forest stuff" :)

the OST's tracks aren't broken by biome there

somewhere around in these comments i muttered that the 3rd rather than 4th version had exactly that, one-less layer :)

I write these checks with the bass line that my lead-line can't cash quite a lot. usually to do with pulling out of the first pattern and shifting key signatures.

When i hit it, it's a home run, when i don't: gets ugly fast :)

Re-Ex crowd very candidly and probably correctly gave me only 6.8 out of ten for this one.

We do better next time!

this had 4 versions and yeah sadly the 3rd one was less busy and was better than the 4th one that got submitted

i got excited working the new Akai keyboard and wanted to use it (probably basically the right idea) for doing single note flourishes but the final product has one layer too many

This is kind of a situation where I was excited to get the Akai instrument as a way to add 'grace notes or flourishes' after the Roland export over to the laptop, but unfortunately while version 3.0 of the finished product had a nice balance the 4.0 that got submitted had just a layer-too-much of busy extra sub-tracks to it.

Transitions maybe too abrupt.  It's definitely creative enough though.  We almost all of us took a credibility hit because we used real instruments instead of base chip tunes, got to think of stone age 1985 technology for electronic music.  I liked it but maybe a little more coordination (granting that jazz is about chaos but very first original SMB is a cutie-pie game and not really darker).

If you do rate my submission back the actual correct wav file and soundcloud link are out on this page:

https://exedexes1.itch.io/smb1-underground

i ran afoul of the issue where if you don't move any of the defaults it submits the prior project by accident

credibility takes the smallest hit because it's faar too -good- to be correct for SMB1.  Creativity and everything else about it is off the charts.  Authentic chiptune but I think it would be in a Japanese game that they thought was too complicated for American audiences.  This 100% would be in some obscure game we were unaware of until decades later due to emulation finally shipping it to us.  Lovely fine work on the melodies, rhythm, etc.  It's just frankly busier than base SMB was.

Everything else got perfect ratings.

If you do rate mine back the actual correct wav file is out on this page:

https://exedexes1.itch.io/smb1-underground

I messed up and accidentally submitted the last project, as I understand sometimes happens if we don't move any of the settings.

credibility takes a tiny hit but everything else got a perfect hit.  I got PTSD triggered of a memory of 1998 or 1999 downloading random zip files from sites in Asia to find out some Japanese Famicom title that was such a new dump nobody knew what game it was or something.  This would be 100% one of the dungeon levels of (some unknown game).

Outstanding job.  Maybe a little too serious for the first SMB1 because that initial game still had cute-factor to it and not seriousness.  

If you do rate my submission back, remember the real links are out on here:

https://exedexes1.itch.io/smb1-underground

i got caught by the mistake where you submit the last jam's project on accident if you dont move some default settings.

Credibility took one star of hit but everything else got 5 stars because this is a knockout.  Of the ones i reviewed so far its tone one that -gripped- me immediately the most with atmospherics.  The melody-slides at the beginning were perfeect.  Echoing gives the cavern feel.  Again almost all of us get credibility a little less because 1985 SMB is soo low-tech that accurately we would make some bare bones chip tune.  But this submission here is perfect for like Super Metroid era (1994) or newer remake of the game.

Out side of itch if you posted this on Soundcloud all the repost exchange general-use musicians would rate it easily 9.2 or higher out of ten on the first campaign you burned credits for.

Felt really sharp.  Good job.

If you do rate my project back the correct links are out here:

https://exedexes1.itch.io/smb1-underground

because I messed up and got caught submitting accidentally the last project by not moving the default settings.

creativity is really strong here.  Credibility takes a hit as far as the 1985 technology era but so is almost all our submissions because we're having to dial it back a lot compared to all our setups capability.  Percussions a bit heavy and maybe its too dark, remember the very very first SMB is a cutesy-pie game before stuff got maybe darker starting with super mario world six years later.

But production skill level and stuff is all on point.  Really enjoyed this.

If you do rate my submission back the correct wav file and links are out on this page:

https://exedexes1.itch.io/smb1-underground

i got caught by the issue where you submit the last jam's project on accident by default if you dont move the drop down somewhere