So what’s going on here?

I’ve been meaning to set up a sort of blog/mailing lists for a while now. Originally I was going to title this “isle of mann dispatches” based off of some research into concert bootlegs of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band I’d started downloading during the pandemic. Right around the time I was doing this, cohost.org started accepting new members for joining the site, and I registered and while I didn’t actually post about any of the fun bootleg-related things I might have liked to, I did do posts that were related to the focus of the topic — the Hedgehog Masque Replica series, which I may yet repost on this archive.

It was probably the better decision, as the longform posting in question was more to my tastes, as I got to write more about a personal creative project rather than just old archived content. Along the way, I started linking to various music projects I’ve done, and self-hosting some of the stuff I’d made. This was partly to demystify any parts of my own creative process, explaining why I made specific creative and aesthetic decisions when I did, and being able to have content shared in a more direct, personal manner, in the style of They Might Be Giants’ old dial-a-song answering machine. Hence the name of this blog/mailing list.

And here’s today’s mail-a-song song!

Today’s song comes from very deep in the vaults. Let’s go back to maybe the year 2003 when I was starting high school. Through the internet I’d learned about such wondrous things as emulators and roms and therefore the ability to modify those roms to make new games out of old ones. I thought that the world needed Sonic 2 for Genesis to be heavily modified to a new game based on Sonic Chaos (the Game Gear game!) and I got into sprite modding, some basic level editing, and messing around with music.

Having basically no starting experience with making Genesis music at this point, I just made MIDI files, because tools for making MIDI files could easily be downloaded on my family’s painful dial-up internet connection, and MIDI files get to be both representation of the music and, in a way, its performance. You can hear more-or-less what I wanted it to sound like, though I came into this without a whole lot of knowledge of things like “channel limitations” for old synth chips. That said, looking over it, it holds to principles that, these many years later, I absolutely could adapt this to a proper Genesis soundtrack; every channel is a monophonic instrument, and the channels are set to instruments that they could easily represent; the only thing that would need to be different is the panning.

While I’d dreamed of the game being more of a total-conversion mod, this song is titled the way it is because it’s intended to replace Sky Chase Zone’s music in this mod — a version of Sky Chase intended to be in a much gloomier, darker sky, with faster and more intense enemies, and is mostly timed to match up with the progression of the stage; the song gets much moodier once the wing fortress craft zooms into view, and the song is at its most intense at the final horizontal scrolling section once it’s passed.

It’s probably not hard to see why this never went any further — an inability to really think beyond the existing level structure in terms of what I wanted to do, and thus the mod concept not feeling novel or expressive enough rather than just a retread of the existing sky chase concept.

Plus, I’m going to be honest, the melody with the guitar at the first part is kinda crummy. This was a very early project, after all.

That said, I do think it’s worth sharing as a good example of trying to develop a song to try to develop the story of an autoscrolling level. Who knows, maybe in a future post I’ll make a fuller version of it.

Download the MIDI file here:
https://mushroomhill.hopto.org/owncloud/index.php/s/45SUoRhWpeve9bE
As an experiment, I’m going to continue to self-host these files (as most of my posts on music had links to MIDI or VGM source files — they’re small enough to be easy to download). It’s a very small server on a personal network connection so please be nice or else I’ll probably have to take down public links. Thanks!

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-muteKi