Hey guys! I'm currently working on an electronic battle theme and would really appreciate some solid feedback for it thus far:

Kimiko

This is really cool, I love the jazziness, especially the saxophone. The drums lack personality, to my taste, but I like the song. The transition at 1:25 seems like it could be a lot better to me, though. It's sudden and kind of awkward. Although I really like where it goes, with the piano and stuff.

I've been doing some songs for a game some friends of mine are making. It's a "surreal science fiction romantic stoner period horror spaghetti screwball cybernoir dinopunk select-your-own-journey audiogame" called Dinosaurs in Pakistan.

This is the first project I've done that I can actually call "chiptune" without feeling bad; I'm composing these for the NES soundchip using FamiTracker. It's pretty rad.

https://soundcloud.com/brother-android/battle
https://soundcloud.com/brother-android/your-theme

http://legendsoflocalization.com/earthbound/ covers pretty much everything, plus discusses some changes that were made because the themes or jokes just don't make sense in English.

thanks for this link, this is awesome.

I went on a bit of a spree last night and this is the result.

It's a few pages old at this point but I like this. It'd make for a neat Zelda-type game.

How authentic do you intend for this to sound? I have some advice on that front, but kind of suspect that isn't what you were going for.

Kudo for having a black female casual character in your pic and not being black nor female : P

I think it's actually a very tan, possibly Pakistani male character.

Also, hey bernard. You're a real guy, I've seen you.

I use Sennheiser HD212's (man, model numbers are awkward to pluralize). You might not think it, on account of I'm a musician and stuff, but I'm pretty much a philistine when it comes to fidelity. Between a pair of OK headphones and some truly dreadful speakers I can mix most things.

The reissue of All Hail West Texas, which is the best Mountain Goats album for my money, and one of the just plain best albums, for that matter.

Good news, everyone - 3.5" floppy disks are now available! Each one has a unique hand-drawn label and contains the original .xm file for the song, plus a few little extras, though nothing you'd miss too much if you don't have a floppy drive.

Get one here: http://brotherandroid.bandcamp.com/merch/black-gate-35-floppy-disk

I do music with lyrics! Here's a song from the album I'm working on (not the recording I'm going to use):

https://soundcloud.com/hlemke/getting-the-hell-out-of

"Getting the Hell out of Dodge"

The stress you were under was killing you slowly,
and the city was lousy with dense coils of memory,
and the spectre of home haunted every avenue,
and it was too much for you.

So you said you were getting the hell out of Dodge,
and you drove out of state in your dead grandma's car,
and you mailed me a postcard from Louisiana,
and after that I didn't hear from you.

Now you've gotten the hell out of Dodge,
but Dodge hasn't gotten the hell out of you.
The ghost of Dodge follows you,
and sneaks up & spooks you when you aren't looking -
in the antiseptic glow of the supermarket;
in the feral cats lapping occluded drainwater;
in the brown dust of fenced-in overgrown ballparks;
in the peeling pink siding of your new old neighborhood;
in the misspelt signage in cracked glass at the laundromat;
in the tripwire tree-roots that dishevel the sidewalk;
in the spasms of wind at the dying of the day,
and in the lilacs and the trash and the filth in the midnight of the alleyway.

And do you know why that is, honey?
The ghost of Dodge is you.

I've been busy rediscovering Wayne Shorter, mostly. I think that I've listened to his 'Night Dreamer' album from cover to cover 20 times in the past few weeks. The playing is so ridiculously heavy from all of the musicians involved, though I'm always most affected by what Lee Morgan does. Unreal. You can listen to the whole thing on

.

Just from this description I did not expect it to be a jazz album. But it was a sweet kind of surprise. I'm not very experienced with or knowledgeable about jazz but this is great. Any more jazz recommendations? I like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Dave Brubeck, and Miles Davis, but that's about all I know.

@Tipsheda - that Daft Punk song is pretty great. Their use of vocals almost always turns me off, but occasionally they do things (to my estimation) really really right. Wish that guitar solo lasted longer though.

i have to say i really like this one melodically. there's almost a "bluesy" touch to the sliding notes.

Thanks. Yeah, I guess at this point folk, blues, and rock'n'roll are so deep in my psyche that they're going to come out regardless of what kind of music I'm composing.

I'm making some 3.5" floppy disks with hand-made labels... would anyone here want one of these? They'll just have the .xm file and maybe some extra bits of artwork on them, they're mainly just for looking nice.

Trackers can be hard to get into, but there are some good free ones. Famitracker is cool for doing NES style music.

I'm... pretty sure that's a good thing! Sorry about your inner child, hope it's nothing serious.

This is my new EP (or 11-minute song, if you prefer). The description says:

The Black Gate is where contradictions - high fidelity and low fidelity, dark and light, minimalism, maximalism, repetition, variation, simplicity, complexity, fear, love - converge and resolve themselves.

How silly!

buy/stream: http://brotherandroid.bandcamp.com/album/black-gate-ep
download for free/stream: https://soundcloud.com/brother-android/black-gate

3.5" floppy release forthcoming, so hold off on buying if you're into that.

I can't quite follow it. My immediate reaction was "it sounds like a jazz song," so the sound really isn't the problem so much... I think it's that my brain can't really get a hold of the melody because the bass isn't creating a sense of what the chord progression actually is. I have a lot of trouble when I'm called on to compose in a new style, personally, so I don't know how much help I can be, but I'd definitely start with the chord progression and make sure it's getting across in the bass line or some piano chords or something, rather than starting with the melody, because this is crucial to making the piece cohere and feel good (especially in a jazz song where the melodies are often complex and get improvised on a lot).

This is well-done. You could dirty up some of the samples a little bit (just convert them to a lower sample rate) if you wanted to make it a little more authentic sounding. The drums on "Icebound Underground" are kind of uninteresting and the drum samples feel a little weak... the cowbell also feels out of place. A lot of your tunes are good though, and the composition style is nicely reminiscent of some games of the era. I think "Yoshi's Island-esque..." is the most successful at sounding like an SNES song, but none of them are bad. "Shiver Shore" makes me think of Mario Kart or something.

Also, I love that elevator music piece, but I don't know if it's supposed to be SNES style or not.

Also also, if you'll take an unconnected piece of criticism, you're pretty good at this - too good for an impossible-to-remember artist name like Jimmy52905.

This one is for Jay Tholen's adventure game, which looks pretty awesome, besides having a highly entertaining video:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jaytholen/dropsy-a-surreal-exploration-based-adventure-game

The Earthbound soundtrack is great for so many reasons that have nothing to do with this song, but it still might be the best song in the game.

I think it's a problem that when a genre has been done a lot it develops its own sort of language and the games become more and more derivative, lazily relying on a preexisting shorthand. The fundamental concepts of the "metroidvania" genre are solid, and I don't think there could ever be no room for another one, providing it was done right. It's just that people forget to be creative a lot of the time in genres that are so well-trodden.