Tag Archives: video game music

Time of the Oppressed – performance video

Hello, everyone!

I have a new video this week, which is a performance of one of my own compositions – the one that started my journey as a composer. I actually wrote the initial draft of it back in 2013 and it’s gone through multiple revisions over the years before I settled on this one. If you’ve listened to my recent album, you’ll know it already. Despite having written it so long ago, I think that it’s still one of the strongest melodies that I’ve written.

When I first wrote it, I was experimenting with polyrhythms – I didn’t have much experience with them but knew that I wanted to use them to increase the sense of something not quite being right in the repeat of section A in this piece. Writing them into was pretty easy, but I struggled with playing them at the time.

Since then, I’ve explored how to practise polyrhythms fairly extensively. I’m in the process of writing the script for a video dealing with how to effectively practise them, though it’ll take a while because it’s the first of this kind of video that I’m planning to make. Does anyone have any notable polyrhythms that they struggled with (or are struggling with)?

Also, which other topics would you like to see teaching videos about?

To Arms! – proof of concept video

I’m excited to announce that I have a new video on my YouTube channel! This one contains a rock arrangement of one of my earlier piano tracks, titled ‘To Arms!’. For anyone that prefers rock to solo piano, this is for you! If you’re a fan of epic (in the original sense of the word) guitar solos, please have a listen. The solo in this piece was written by the fantastic Ainsley Stones, (who plays in the band Girl Gone Bad), and is the first of two collaborations we’ve done recently.

There’s a link in the video description to my Soundcloud page, which has a version without the sound effects from the game.

I’m a fan of making multiple arrangements of the same piece of music (I love the classical form Variations on a Theme), as I think there’s so many different directions a melody or harmony could be taken in. I hope that this rock version can provide an interesting demonstration for my pupils when compared to the original piano version (see below) for how different two arrangements can sound, while still keeping the same essence.

Theme of Oppression proof of concept video

Another new video is up on my YouTube channel. This one is my attempt to integrate one of my compositions into a video game level. Actually, this is a remade version of a composition that I wrote back in 2013 that inspired me to take up composing more seriously, though it took until the recent pandemic for me to really start focusing on it.

The game is in the style of 90s JRPGs (Japanese Role-Playing Games), such as the Final Fantasy series. My intention is that the music matches the visuals and dialogue and helps convey the story and emotion.

Let me know if you think I succeeded in this. Does the video feel oppressive, as the track name states?