Errant Knight Music

I composed this song as the main theme for the wargaming website http://www.spwaw.com. The Steel Panthers Depot is a fansite devoted to the freeware game Steel Panthers: World at War and features custom scenarios, campaigns, and even an Academy to educate new players.

In composing the song, I blended traditional strings with a comtemporary form. The webmaster requested something that would easily loop back into itself as a repeating theme. The song can therefore be looped from the end to the beginning and sound continuous. Here’s the finished product:

On to Battle

Having worked extensively with Sony Acid Pro software and Propellerhead Reason, I welcomed the chance to try out Apple’s new music program GarageBand.

Garageband ships standard with all new Macs and has generated a lot of buzz for being an easy to use program with a lot of power hidden under the hood. I was anxious to see if GarageBand lived up to the hype. I sat down with my PowerBook, some Sennheiser studio headphones, and a few hours later I had this tune:

Tranquil

Was GarageBand worth all the fuss? You be the judge.

Another tune I composed with GarageBand. Never did come up with a good title.

Garage

I first started creating computer music when a friend introduced me to Acid Pro 4.0. I made my first track in a few hours, and it still seems to be a lot of people’s favorite even though I’ve moved on to more complex projects. I guess that’s art for you. Click below to hear Spanish guitar married with some good ol’ drums and bass.

Spanish Bass

I wanted to experiment more with textures and pads, so I decided to work on a more ambient kind of piece. I used healthy doses of delay to create rhythmic echoes and applied a heavy dose of reverb to everything.

Ambient

I had been experimenting with loop-based music composition for some time when I came up with the idea for this song. As my wife and I were listening to a CD of beatnik poetry, she made the comment that the poets had an almost musical quality. So in the spirit of experimental beatnik poetry, I decided to compose an experimental piece combining spoken word, loops, and improvisational guitar. After all, the beatniks loved poetry and music. Why not try combining them with a more modern context? And as any good guitarist will tell you, any reason to use your wah pedal is a good reason. Here’s the result:

Beatnik

One of my favorite instruments is electric piano. Originally, electric pianos were designed to replace conventional pianos, but the early electro-mechanical instruments ended up creating a sound of their own. Newer software-based keyboard solutions often times merely emulate the sound of the Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos. I thought it’d be fun to write a song around electric piano, so I combined some electric piano phrases with drums, bass, flute, and some modern synth sounds. I ended up with something jazzy and a little groovy. See what you think:

Groovin’