Music

Overview of works

Matecha

• 2001 – Synthesized Soul (LP)
• 2005 – Demo Aug 2005 (LP)

FMTA

• 2006 – In The End, You Don’t Exist (EP)

Video/computer games

• “Tap It Up” – Tap Tap Revenge
• “Splash” – Marathon: Eternal (unused)
• “Shocked” – System Shock 2 unofficial remix

Demoscene

• “Eco” – Trailer Park Demos

Background

Discovering music & going digital

At a very young age I was enthralled by the sound of a piano, so much that I nearly demanded to be taken to piano lessons so I could learn to play one. I took private lessons under a teacher with the Royal Conservatory of Music for about 6 years.

Eventually I actually became impatient with a lot of the music I was playing, and decided not to continue taking lessons.

Some years later, in early 2000 sometime, I had been playing a computer game called “Ares” (developed by Nathan Lamont), and found the music to be super catchy. Enough so that I decided to try and extract the music files so I could listen to them when not playing the game. This led me to the tracker software PlayerPRO (developed by Antoine Rosset). See, the music files in the game data were in a format called “MADH” – a variant of the common MOD format, but unique to PlayerPRO (not that I had much clue about this at the time).

After I had figured out how to play Ares’ songs in PlayerPRO, I almost immediately realized I could do far more than simply play back the songs – I could edit them! The MADH files themselves contained not only the sound samples used in the song, but also the patterns containing the arrangement of notes in the song.

Needless to say, I started messing around with these files, copying the sounds and creating my own via PlayerPRO’s built in effects, and built my own [primitive] songs.

Getting serious

I made these songs for quite a while, although I felt limited by the software and my lack of knowledge of it. Regardless, I regularly played new songs for friends at school [who were generally shocked at first that I made these songs], and eventually a close friend of mine, Steve, also began making music on the computer (although using a very different technique using the software Acid Pro). It wasn’t long before he and I began working on new crazy songs together, and eventually founded our band, FMTA.

FMTA was the first band for both of us, and we started out with pretty experimental tracks (as I’m sure many many bands do). Our early songs were very harsh and not too professional, but friends still thought surprisingly highly of our crazy productions. This really boosted our motivation to continue working, alongside the internal motivation to create music that expressed our selves.

Later on, after we had recruited a guitarist named Tyler, we recorded a 4-song EP with Jeremy Inkel and Chris Peterson of the Canadian industrial band Front Line Assembly. This EP, entitled “In The End, You Don’t Exist”, was released in December 2006 and marked a huge milestone in our lives as being our first professionally recorded, produced and released product. Needless to say, it’s on iTunes.

Branching out

Gaming

From then I’ve also sought to get involved in making music for video/computer games and similar areas. I’ve produced a variety of songs with this intent, the most notable being “Tap It Up”, which won a song competition for the iPhone game Tap Tap Revenge. Currently, this game is arguably the most popular iPhone game to date, with 5 million unique installs. Needless to say, I was stoked to reach 2nd place in this contest!

Demoscene

I’ve also pursued creating music for modern demoscene productions. I’ve produced the music for one prod (“product” or “production”) so far, named “Eco”, and released by the demo group Trailer Park Demos. This was a “4k intro” which basically means the entire executable file for the demo must be 4 kilobytes in size, or less.

I worked very closely with s_tec to develop the music for this demo, as the process involved a lot of dialogue between us regarding what he could code for the audio engine, and what I wanted to work with to create the sounds I envisioned. Being that it was coded in x86 assembly, the process of creating the music was very tedious. Good thing s_tec was able to show me a few tricks to simplify the process a bit.

All in all, the effort was worth it. Our demo came out quite nicely and has gotten almost universally positive ratings on pouet.net, the leading demoscene community. Even more notably, our demo won 6th place at NVScene, the event for which we had created it. A fairly respectable placement amongst 18 other entries in the 4k intro category.