Club Silicon

Contention

Welcome back, music fans. The day of reckoning approaches, and "Legend" is now "Contention". I had been convinced that Legend, while I like it, is too common a name. Contention sums up the final name of my band related work because that's what it is, opposing forces working together somehow. Acoustic and electronic, differing opinions, etc..

Just for your amusement, how many names have I gone through with my "bands" since 1995? Here's a list of bands I've either been in or have formed:

Bass Productions
Kosmic Free Music Foundation
Juni Digital Music Group
G-Command
Indicator
OSPF
Era's End
Scene Two
Legend

What's good is that we now have a website, and while it isn't live yet, Bryan Rudge, my compatriot in crime since the old days of tracking is setting up some great back end and hosting for the website, and my wife Jeanette is doing a great job getting it pretty and setting up the actual design.

A tracklist is set up, and there's quite a lot of work still remaining but I think this is going to be an album worthy of respect among many different people around the world, which is far more than I originally was expecting.

VGM Greatest Hits: Taboo

Been awhile since the first post eh?

I’m writing this little update on a plane. I’m 26,000 feet in the air flying toward Houston where I will then board a flight for Baltimore to see my parents. I discovered I can’t do the sound design tasks I originally planned on doing for Obsidian due to the fact that the laptop is the size of a Buick in such a small seat. Typing is barely possible. But as fate would have it, I remembered Club Silicon is in dire need of new material, so typing it is.

Right around 1985, Taboo: The Sixth Sense was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was a unique game in that, at the time, not many card games were in electronic form, and this was the first time a Tarot card game was released in such a media. The developer was Rare, a company later made famous for such collaborations with Nintendo as Killer Instinct and Donkey Kong Country. These later games used 3d rendered models as sprites using halfway decent art direction and well tested and responsive control mechanics.

At the time Taboo was released however, Rare was a fledgling company and had barely released their first success: Wizards and Warriors. However, they already had one of their best in house composers on the job: David Wise. David wrote music for Taboo. Taboo along with Wizards and Warriors used instrumentation on the NES that provided a very round variation on the standard square wave generator, resulting in a sometimes haunting lead tone, especially when doubled for a delay effect. While Capcom and Konami had their own techniques, Rare’s games stood out from the crowd and provided an aural treat to make up for the lack of visual excitement. Congratulations to Mr. Wise on another job well done.

Download taboo3.mp3

Fruit of the Loom Basic Theme

This is hardly a fitting return for the awesome CS logo, but it's a start.

This is a theme Daniel Cook (aka Danc, the artist who made the logo, among many other beautiful works, you can see more as well as read about game design on his site, Lost Garden) made up and sang every once in awhile when we worked together in North Carolina on The Circle, a role playing game based on the Unreal engine. This was around eleven years ago.

I plan on remixing this a bit, this turned out dreadfully simplistic and not that polished compared to some of my original ideas, but like I said it is a start and I'm sure you'll find it amusing. Lyrics follow:

Fruit of the Loom underwear

Fruit of the Loom underwear

The kind you wear around your bare

The kind that will not rip or tear

Fruit of the Loom

Of course an entire song can be constructed from this and that's my intention eventually. Enjoy the snippet in the meantime.

Download FruitOfTheLoom.mp3

Behold! The People Is One.

Before Fruit of the Loom, there must be God.

No, I haven't flipped my lid, this site is a combination of the tech savvy and the humanitarian, remember? And religion is, as my father so rightly puts it, the foundation of western civilization, regardless of the violence, dichotomies and paradoxes that it causes. This post and this piece of music is a dash of sacred in a world of secularity.

And as a tribute to perhaps the ultimate intangible, as confused I am about the physical existence of God, I have my own personal (and now a little more public) faith. I sang in church choir for several years, and in that time got to hear some of the best organ playing anyone has ever heard. I'm not exaggerating. Our choirmaster and organist was one of the best players on the East coast.

Two years ago, during one of my rare visits to church, I decided to stop praying for things for me, and to darn well give back. To offer up a song to God. Being baptized a Christian, every so often that "feeling" hits me and yes, I feel inexplicably responsible for worshipping something I've never seen or heard described in any scripture. Then I go back to my life and usually forget about that warm glow inside kneeling at the pew.

This time I didn't forget, I just came around later than I wanted to. This is my singing to God and my thanks for the life I have been so lucky to lead, the wonderful family I have, and the fact that the world hasn't blown itself up yet due to the money grubbing oil mongers.

The quotation in the title of this post (also the title of the communion piece), as gramatically incorrect as it is, struck me as particularly applicable to this day and age. It is taken from the King James translation of the Bible, chapter 11 verse 6.

This piece is dedicated to my former piano teacher and former choirmaster and organist at St. Anne's Episcopal Church in Annapolis, MD, John Cooper.

Download ThePeopleIsOne.mp3

Tyrian Jukebox

Everyone, Renard posted to Club Silicon that he had a jukebox for playing all the songs from Tyrian, the first game I ever worked on. I must thank dear Renard for this. Before I get apologetic in not posting for awhile here's the link. Enjoy it, all:

http://moi.renard.free.fr/tyrianjukebox/

Next, what's up? Here's what's up:

Legend is still rolling somewhat strong, with two possible vocalists and a guitarist already lined up, but of course our day jobs love dancing with this project and I haven't driven things forward as much as I could have. But we'll probably have a little bit of magic from this project posted here in the next two months. Old Legends never die, they just lose weight, as Big Enis Burdett said in "Smokey and the Bandit."

I owe Danc (our beloved logo artist) a piece of music based on Fruit of the Loom. Only those who are my closest friends will know why that is. It is also in the works.

I'm trying to hook up the Game Audio Network Guild (www.audiogang.org) with Full Sail, a school that is one of the largest schools for audio production and music business in the world. Bill Smith, the head of their recording program and I had a chat on the phone before GDC and the next step will be: where do we go from here to help get programs online? Lectures? Shared resources? Stay tuned yet again.

Four projects at Midway are closing out for me, all announced: Hour of Victory (WWII FPS), Touchmaster (DS version of the tabletop mini-game set), Hot Brain (PSP puzzle title), and oh yeah I actually can't say what the fourth is, but its cool too. Challenges abound like the ones I talked of in my GDC talk this year... budget and schedules from five years ago with qualitative expectations of today, but that's what external dev is all about, not breaking the bank and getting a polished gem from a mountainside. Oh, in part of that, Andrew Sega (aka Necros) is doing music for Hot Brain and if I can get permission I'm going to post some of his tunes on here. They're brilliant, but then again everything he writes is.

More involving things from G.A.N.G. including the announcement of the IESD (Interactive Entertainment Sound Developers) devoted to sound design. I'm pretty excited about this but I'll let Gene Semel, Scott Gershin, Scott Selfon and Dave Murrant tell you more about that. They got it going. I honestly don't think G.A.N.G. needs more legitimizing, but it just got a big shot in the arm of it for skeptics out there.

I just became part of the awards committee for a new TEC Award (http://www.mixfoundation.org/) devoted to game audio. Again, another great Gene Semel achievement. Who the hell is this Gene guy? Gene is me in 1997 with the IA-SIG, only supercharged.

This site is not all about my own selfish preening in front of the public however. There needs to be the odd useful bit of info on here and last but not least I intend to post some more interesting pieces coming up. Continue your faith and thanks so much to all for your contributions. Ask the Fatman (www.fatman.com), I keep my promises.

-Alex

Legend Update

I promised another Legend update and here it is. At the moment I've rekindled my ties with Bryan Rudge, who I've written music with for the past ten years or so. He insists that he drags my kind of talent down, but it was once predicted by one of the greatest composers I know (Andrew Sega aka "Necros") that Sirrus (Bryan's "handle" in the MOD scene old days) would be a great artist one day. That day will soon come.

Bryan and I wrote an album under the band name "Era's End" about five years ago that was close to being published by Warner, but the company that was acting as our representation went bankrupt. This wasn't surprising considering that their offices were in Beverly Hills and they spared no expense at anything while most of their content was trash. Mars Lasar, who has worked with artists such as Seal, also was signed with this company (XSIV Music) and was due to release several albums, but he also got the short end of the stick and I finally met him later, where we shared a laugh about our previous solo efforts.

Enough of the side trip. Back to business. Bryan will be using a Yamaha EX5 keyboard and Nuendo to put some finishing touches on a group of songs we've identified, and I'm going into the Midway studio at night to also work on a group of songs. The next step is to put actual instrumentalists and vocalists to perform the music. We'll be requiring the services of a guitarist, a percussionist, and a male and female singer (Tenor and Soprano, respectively). We'll put up a website with a few demos to whet appetites and I will be using my now fairly extensive record industry contacts to drum up marketing, but we'll be publishing ourselves through CD Baby, possibly Amazon as well, just as Andy Sega does with his Alpha Conspiracy albums.

The plan is to release an eponymous album in mid to late 2007. Tomorrow I'll be heading back into the studio to work a bit more after a month long hiatus due to holidays and family care. Anyone interested in providing the "real" music part of this effort definitely contact me.

Video Games Live Report

Video Games Live as I wrote earlier is the first concert tour to exclusively feature video game soundtracks. It is a great triumph for the composers who work hard and are so inspired to create music for the most evolving entertainment medium in the world. I got the great honor of being invited to the Hollywood Bowl concert on September 21st.

The first time I saw the Hollywood Bowl it was in a record: "Chuck Mangione: Live at the Hollywood Bowl". It was the first music anyone ever bought for me, and my parents got it for my eighth birthday.

I remember being very impressed with the sheer size of the audience and most of all the incredible performance itself. It was and still is the only live performance I have ever heard that might have been recorded in a studio. Now, here I am watching BT and Steve Vai set up their rigs on the very same stage that Chuck played on when I was four years old.

I had the pleasure of meeting my colleagues and friends from the industry: Inon Zur, Rod Abernethy, Cris Velasco, Sascha Dikiciyan, Gary Schyman, Marty O'Donnell, Jason Hayes, Brian DiDomenico, and of course Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall.

But the true surprise was about to begin. The real treat was when the great triumvirate appeared: Frank Serafine (sfx), Richard Taylor (visual effects supervisor), and Steven Lisberger (director) of Tron. These people are legends, and I unashamedly took great pride in meeting them in person. Thanks to Tommy for somehow getting them to the concert.

The music itself was incredible and the concert performance itself was spectacular, playing a medley of great well known hits such as Super Mario Bros., Rastan, Pong and Castlevania. There were also interactive portions of the concert in which players would be accompanied on the big screen playing Space Invaders and Frogger in realtime by the orchestra.

While I wasn't able to make Chuck's concert, VGL was truly an evening of magic.

Podcast Single #2: The Shell

This music is a tribute to Major Kusanagi, Masamune Shirow and all things Ghost in the Shell.

For the uninitiated, Ghost in the Shell is one of the most popular Japanese Animated features that began as a comic book. For most, this sort of thing is very niche, however the appeal of Ghost is something that mixes a few dichotomies...

A beautiful woman with the strength of a few dozen men and the skills of James Bond leading a team of government specialists in covert operations throughout future Japan.

That the woman is beautiful is an obvious reference to the antisocial repressive tendencies of tech obsessed artists like Shirow, that is reflected in whatever percentage of the population that is geek males worldwide. But, in this case the woman is extremely powerful and while often dressed in an "inviting" way, is not the least bit interested in men unless it suits her mission. This aspect I have found appeals to women. Combining it with some of the best hard science fiction writing I've seen in a comic book and you get something thoroughly intriguing.

Such intrigue inspired this piece, which is one of the few I'm proud of. Download and enjoy.

Download TheShell.mp3

Video Games Live

At last video game soundtracks are being performed by an orchestra. This ultimate achievement known as Video Games Live is thanks to Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall, among many others at Mystical Stone Entertainment.

I'll be at the meet and greet, and Greg at Music4Games.net was kind enough to make an announcement about who else will grace the red carpet. Hope to see you there!

Video Game Soundtrack Greatest Hits

At last, what the slowly growing fans of Club Silicon have been waiting for: some content. The cool thing about this twenty year evolution of a newsletter is actual distribution of that which is written about!

Attached is the first of VGS: Greatest Hits. While I am enveloped in high tech studios, Hollywood and orchestras along with my illustrious colleagues, we all came from somewhere humble, and this is it. Or at least this is my start.

Around 1986 Jason Emery called me with fantastic news: game audio had evolved. While this was already happening with arcade games, for the first time five synthesized voices with some manipulatable aspects (filters, vibrato, etc..) were possible, and the music actually could trigger a bit of emotion, where before all the functionality music served was something to minimally enhance the gameplay. The game was "Metroid" which we have already covered a bit in an earlier post.

Attached here is a list of my personal collection of music collected over the years. 450 pieces from the best of the classics. At least, in my limited opinion. Part of the purpose of this is to expand my opinion. I've already been recommended Mega Man 2 and Gauntlet IV for the Sega Genesis, which are also excellent soundtracks, so this list has some growing to do. The first piece we'll start with is the Metroid title theme. Enjoy!

Download VGMHitsUpdated.xls

Download metroidtitle.mp3