I’ve attempted to write and arrange music before, and some of those attempts turned out decently well. To give me a boost toward learning Cubase, I’m going to review some of those projects in this post. I don’t mind putting them out there for public listening and criticism. I wrote them over ten years ago in my early twenties or late teens. They all sound like they belong in video games because that is my favorite genre.
A Shift in Time
This was my first music project for a community college class. It was the final project for the semester. For being my first major project completed in a Digital Audio Workstation, it turned out pretty well.
Listening to it now I can hear some obvious flaws in the levels of instruments and of the song as a whole. But it got me an A at the time.
Eirigh Amach
“Rise up” in Irish. I wrote this in my senior year of high school using Finale software. I composed the piece, but I couldn’t play it myself then and I couldn’t do so now. It’s heavily inspired by the Halo games.
I submitted this to a competition for making music using technology, and somehow I won at the state level. I took the song to the national event after graduation, but I didn’t win. It was still a good experience, and it felt validating that something I wrote had won a contest.
All I was using were the built-in functions of Finale at the time, including simple dynamics and the limited midi library it had. Some of the base notes are far too loud in places, and the right hand is not nearly loud enough. Overall the balance could be much better. Alas, I have lost the midi file. But I recently found a copy of Finale Notepad software to open the .mus file. Perhaps revisiting this song could be one of my future projects on this blog.
In Epic Trouble
I arranged this as part of a fan-made album of Zelda songs. It was created using the same method as the song above. The audio didn’t end up being quite the quality I hoped it would be, and that has always been a regret.
It was incredibly fun to arrange, though. I took the existing midi file and opened in Finale, then used that as reference to write this. Again, the left hand is pretty heavy. This may end up being another song I revisit on this blog to try to improve the quality. Unfortunately, I again only have the .mus file for this song. Since Finale is discontinued, I’m figuring out how to export the as .xml so they can be opened in other apps.
So, there you go. There’s a taste of my abilities, or what my abilities have been in the past. I plan to surpass those abilities as I spend more time composing and arranging and then posting to this blog.
-Zed