NOTE: If you want to get straight to the tunes, skip the self-indulgent blathering and look for the orange links below!
Although few know in the SoD realm know this, my biggest dream for many years was to become a composer of video-game music. Starting mid-way through high school, I began writing a piece of music every single day. I kept up with this habit for an astonishing amount of time, often putting off more "exciting" social events or even schoolwork just to get in my daily dose of composition. Sometimes, I'd put on a favorite PS1 game, mute the soundtrack, and play my own (much more juvenile) music instead just to imagine what it'd be like to hear my own work in a game some day. For years, my YouTube favorites list also consisted of virtually nothing but various game soundtracks that I'd seek out - even if I hadn't ever played the games myself - purely so I could broaden my tastes and gauge what made a given soundtrack successful.
High school came to a quick close, as it does for many. I pursued music at the university level (specializing in composition with secondary emphases on violin and piano), but a number of personal difficulties and self-doubts wormed their way so deeply into my mind that my "composition-a-day" attitude fizzled out about three years into college. After that, I scaled back my composing until I eventually stopped altogether for a period of about 2 years. I swapped my English minor to be my new major and ultimately gained a B.A. in that subject with a minor in music despite that I had almost three times the amount of credits needed for a simple music minor. The previously hinted personal difficulties overcame me and I lost my will to nurture my music from that point on.
Most people I interact with these days never even realize I have a background in music because I feel a pang of shame when I mention it. Instead, I'm poised to take up a career as a high school English teacher in the upcoming schoolyear. Everybody along the way has been so supportive and enthusiastic despite that my own personal interest in this path is non-existent. (I'm clever at putting on masks, which probably explains why I gravitated toward the Enchanter class so readily in SoD!) C'est la vie.
I pick my composing back up every once and a while these days, and my "music muscle" doesn't seem to suffer from rust even when I go months between exercising it, but I've yet to regain that unstoppable enthusiasm of my younger years. I doubt, at this rate, that I'll ever have the energy - let alone resources - to pursue my old dream, but I figured I'd like to share two of my more polished pieces with you all just because I still consider my compositions to be a central part of who I am despite that I've allowed my hobby to lie in neglect for years now.
Sorry if the above sounds too much like some dreary Lifetime movie. I'll just cut to the two tracks, which I admit are most of 3 years out of date as of posting this, but I only set up this SoundCloud account shortly before "throwing in the towel" near the end of my college career, which is why the account (which I named ComposerJames - James is my real name) appears inactive and out of date. Nevertheless, I hope those who listen find some small joy in hearing what I have to share:
Track 1 - "Sand Dunes & Snickers" (2151)
Track 2 - "Cry of the Forest" (2156)
The word "snickers" in the title does not refer to the popular candy bar, but instead the act of sneaky laughter. In other words, I imagined it being set to a lighthearted desert town in a RPG, the kind of place that has people with good but not necessarily honest intentions. This track uses a number of ethnic instruments (I'm a sucker for ethnic strings and percussion!), and all the sounds you hear were produced by me using Logic Studio and a wide array sound libraries. Like much of my music, it loops and closes with a fade-out so that it can be played continuously as one would find in a typical JRPG. Production is a whole beast unto itself and far removed from the composition process, but I insisted on learning it as best I could until I could get a product like this, which admittedly still probably shows its amateurishness in some ways from a production standpoint. Nonetheless, it's probably the one "finished" track I'm most proud of.
Track 2 - "Cry of the Forest" (2156)
The title of this is probably self-explanatory as to the imagery I thought up while composing this piece. Oddly enough, I remember hitting on the electronic-sounding "cry" effect heard in the background by mistake when I picked the wrong preset in one of my instruments (a preset that was originally intended to simulate whalesong, which you can probably spot if you give it a close listen). Nonetheless, the sound appealed to me and complimented the lead oboe melodies surprisingly well, so I kept it and decided that it sounded "foresty" to me despite the original preset conveying a sound you'd only hear underwater.
P.S.: In case you noticed the numbers in parentheses following the track names, these correspond to the numerical order in which they were composed; the former was my 2151st composition, the latter my 2156th. They were composed ~5 days apart in 2011, in other words. Believe me, the further back it gets, the less worth hearing the music becomes! Furthermore, most of my compositions don't receive the full production treatment given to these tracks, as I've always given more weight to the actual composition process than production.
