birdie

Intro cutscene for my new RPG Maker project currently in production - "Another Place: A World Without You"!

"Another Place: A World Without You" is an otome dating sim JRPG hybrid with multiple love interests and branching routes/multiple endings depending on who you choose to romance!

big news! I am now selling my music on Bandcamp for $1 a track. you're welcome to pay more if you wish, but the price stays at $1!

I will be slowly uploading my entire discography over the coming months, as well as uploading my tracks to YouTube. I may or may not also make a Tiktok to promote my music!

in spite of this, Soundcloud will continue to be my most frequently updated platform - but I will try harder to accommodate those who don't use it going forward!

https://on.soundcloud.com/1fqOuItVzkogihloMY

You can also buy some of my piano sheet music on Ko-fi or tip me!

Vital - A powerful wavetable synth, my personal favorite VST synth, very easy to figure out creating new synth sounds, with the help of the plenty of tutorials that are out there for the plug-in. (There are paid versions but they are completely unnecessary to get 99% of the features of the plug-in.)

Synth1 - A classic piece of synthesizer software.

Pendulate - An interesting, chaotic synth that you can make weird little sounds with.

Native Instruments' free plug-ins - Various cool VSTs, including the Komplete Start pack.

The Free Orchestra - A set of orchestral instruments for Kontakt Player (see previous link).

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover - More orchestral stuff! This one has its own player so you don't have to download a separate VST to use it if you don't want to.

Magical 8bit Plug - A chiptune plug-in, intended for producing sounds like that of 8-bit systems like the NES and Master System.

Genny - A synth VST made to emulate the soundchip of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.

MT Power Drum Kit - A nice rock n' roll style drum kit plug-in.

This guy's weird VST collection - 6.4 gigabytes of weird VSTs, including some you might know, like Delay Lama and MeowSynth!

sforzando - A free player for soundfont files.

Musical Artifacts - A resource I mainly use to find soundfonts, on which you can find other various things as well.

Kilohearts Essentials - 30 effect VSTs including reverb, delay, compression, pitch shifting, transient shaping, ring modulation, phase distortion, and more.

Xfer's freeware VSTs - Exactly what it says on the tin, including the one and only OTT compressor.

Illformed - The good ol' dblue Glitch 1.3, Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop.

Hysteresis and Fracture - Two interesting glitch effects, one being a delay and the other being a buffer.

Codec - A cool digital audio degradation effect.

Le Phonk - A slick distortion plug-in.

MAIM - An effect that mimics the sound of MP3 compression.

Soundly Shape it and Place it - One is simply an equalizer VST, the other is an effect that emulates a speaker (ex: a radio) and a space (ex: a cave).

Fresh Air - An effect that adds high end information to your sounds, to provide brightness.

ValhallaSupermassive - A combo reverb and delay plug-in that sounds quite big.

UnplugRed - A collection of various interesting VSTs, most of which have free versions.

Chowdhury DSP - I can't personally speak for all of these but their tape model effect is great for some lo-fi style effects.

TAL-Chorus-LX - A thick sounding chorus, good for "retro" sounds too.

Polyverse Wider - A great effect for widening sounds up, really simple too with only two controls.

Freesound - A good audio file resource, mainly for foley recordings.

Cymbatics Dubstep Starter Pack - A little sample pack with some good drum and synth samples.

fishmonger drum kit - A pack of samples from the album 'fishmonger' by Underscores!

WangleLine's sample packs - Free samples put out by my awesome mutual WangleLine!

aaand I might as well include this set of drums I made a while back :P

The resources listed here are probably better than Bandlab in a lot of ways, but I really value portability/ease of use and the ability to compose from anywhere (assuming I have internet). I can't tell you the amount of times inspiration has struck me while grocery shopping with my family or while eating at a restaurant. One of my favorite songs I've ever written was when I was eating KBBQ with my parents lol.

(here's the "original," written for piano, transcribed from an old Finale Notepad file)

I was thinking about it recently... in the era of music we're in, where streaming has become this all-important thing and for a song to become popular it needs to Go Viral. I've noticed that song shave become a lot shorter because of that... because you have to base everything around the 10-second clip that's gonna go viral, because you have to put your effort into making 10 songs of 2 minutes each so that you can hike up those streaming numbers, so you can become Famous and get Money.

And then you have like, artists who are gonna put their whole soul into a 15, 16 minute long song. Artists who have an idea going throughout that entire runtime and develop it so beautifully that making it shorter is just doing it a disservice. Artists who make songs with multiple sections (even though it would probably be way more profitable to split each section into its own song). Like for them it's not about the money. it's about what they're trying to say with this song. And their insistence that it has to be told in this specific way. They're doing it because they love it and you can tell how much they love it in each second.

When I first started writing music during the pandemic my songs were 2-3 minutes, but now that I have a better idea of what I'm doing I find that I have a lot more to "say" in each song. Ultimately I value preserving the artistry/authenticity of the work over going viral/making a profit.

Still, being disabled and having no source of income is a drag, so I have to find other ways to compensate. On top of all that I also suck at managing a social media presence :/ so I've had a lot of trouble getting my work out there and networking with other musicians.

Also, side note, I remember seeing a song teaser go semi-viral and I loved it, but all the posts always showed the same 15 seconds - and when it released, the whole song ended up being totally different from what I expected. That 15 second clip was the most polished part of the song.

I think another aspect to this whole thing is that social media and the algorithm has ruined our attention spans and our ability to enjoy long form content in general.