Music

This was my first ever hip hop track and it was a blast to put together. I had been listening to a lot of K-pop at the time and was really inspired by Suga from BTS after watching his documentary.

There was a lot of processing on the vocals to invoke the feelings I wanted and I talk about this a lot in this post. It was the first time I had worked so much with audio, having previously been very MIDI based. The backing came from a Maschine pattern, but I added a lot and messed with many of the elements.

I decided to break from my usual composition methods with this one and start with a fairly innocuous rhythmic section. The melody just came to me after hearing that rhythm for a few repeats and I knew a violin would be perfect for it.

Though it often sounds a little unconventional I really like the sliding on the violin. It sounds lazy and tired to me, which si the vibe I was going for. I envisaged a long journey on horseback for this one, which is why the rhythm is faster than you'd find in walking pace. The shift to the guitar section signifies a jumping forward in the journey, to a completely different location.

This was a fantastic track to put together. It's the solemn version of the Kintovia/Weyn's Lullaby theme but wit ha twist and is supposed to represent the fall of the city. The returning army and the subsequent attack and fall of their city.

I took a lot of inspiration from Hans Zimmer's - The Rock soundtrack. The lone horn, the build up and the inclusion of the electric guitar though this track has a distinctly metal feel to the guitar. Thank you to Joshua Taipale for the guitar work.

Here's my demo reel for 2022, highlighting my current works against a backdrop of gameplay from Genshin. Most of the tracks on here were composed with the world of Genshin in mind, so it seemed only fitting for it to feature a lot in my reel.

There's something for everyone in here, with battle themes, calm exploration themes and some full orchestral work too.

This was a concept track that started as submission for a GameDevLondon Challenge. It was composed so that it would loop properly so as to be used in a video game setting. It has an intro section, a transition and then a loopable main section, with a finishing section at the end.

I was very fortunate to get the amazing Lucia La Rezza to play violin live for this one which really gives it something extra special.

This piece was originally written as a piano only track for a competition in the 8-bit Music Theory community during the COVID outbreak in 2019. The competition theme was automation/mechanical and I decided to write a piece of music to explore what music generated by an AI may sound like, to have it experiment as the piece progresses.

With this version, I decided to take it that step further an incorporate many different instruments into it to turn it into a boss battle theme for a video game.

This was my first chiptune and I really wanted to create something that sounded authentic to the original NES sound. I used magical 8-bit plugin 2 for the sounds and kept the number of instruments to 4, just like the original NES. I did actually program the entire track in FamiStudio also, but decided that the sound I got from Reaper + M8BP2 was slightly more preferable, and didn't compromise the overall feel.

The simple melody is key to the original sound and really shines through against the backing instruments. The drums were created using only the noise channel and there were no bit-reduced, sampled instruments in this piece.

This entire album, apart from the first orchestral title track, was composed and recorded within a month period during early 2022. I wanted to write an RPG video game soundtrack and so I began with a main theme and expanded it out into multiple other tracks. The main theme's first three notes crop up many times during the sound track but are taken in different directions.

My favourite track from the EP is Weyn's Lullaby which I wrote to invoke some of the same vibes I enjoyed from the Final Fantasy series, Tifa's theme in particular.

I'm also half of Gut Punch Glitter and enjoy writing pop punk tracks with my band mate Ben Smith. We started working on this album about half way through COVID. Ben had written most of Fake Believe and asked me to record some piano for it. After a while, he asked me if I had any other tracks I had not yet produced. As it happened, we had been in a band together 20 years in the past, and I still had a few tracks we had never finished.

I contributed the composition and lyrics for Confessions, Don't Bide Your Time, Colour Me, Happy and Free. The guitar solos on Happy and Colour Me, and some supporting work on I'm Back and Fake Believe.