*** Commentary for https://soundcloud.com/user-92045971/sets/dfrag-music-collection ***

Welcome to the show! This is amateur self-commentary, so it's obviously going to be grotesquely self-indulgent, but it was your decision to click on that link, buddy, so my conscience is clean. I'm not including links to the individual tracks, so my suggestion is to open the playlist in a separate window while having this open on Notepad or something AHAHAHAHAHAHA I am a wanker.

=== Tracks from c. 2017 ===

I don't actually remember exactly when I started using BeepBox, but my best guess is around 2017. The earliest songs I can confirm the date of were made in 2018.

* "Theme for a Museum"
This could have been in 2018, but I feel like it was earlier than that. This was definitely one of the earliest ones. Musically, it's pretty simple, but I like the blasts of sound with the drum and use of longer attack on some of the notes.

=== Tracks from 2018 ===

* "Completion"
I remember making this after I'd finished my exams for the year, which I was very happy with. And I remember being very happy with how this turned out! Delayed vibrato on the lead makes it sound a lot like the lead in Europe Endless (listen to it at the following link for comparison: https://youtu.be/Ms6kC-3yq0k?t=102), which I think was an inspiration.

* "Cram Capacity"
This came from an unfinished attempt to make an exam concept album. (Yikes, past me.) The title of the track sort of indicates what I was going for -- a video-game take on stressfully studying. Obvious use of the whole-tone scale for ~tension and uncertainty~ is obvious. I spent a while trying to make the last three beeps sound "natural" (you can hear the fade-out on the last one) but I still don't think it's quite right. Oh well.

* "BASS Jumping"
This stemmed from an attempt to make some background, chill music in the style of Matthew S Burns' stuff (I was playing Shenzhen I/O at the time, which featured his music) but I think I ended up making it too boppy. Depends on your definition of "chill", I guess.

* "Mega Man Legacy"
Right, so at the time a friend of mine wanted to make a Pokemon fan game and I offered to make the music. I composed this one as a boss theme (I think?) a couple of days after listening to the Mega Man 2 soundtrack, which has some chiptune *bangers* on it. I tried to stick to something approaching the limitations of the Nintendo sound chip (four channels -- two pulse waves, one triangle and a noise channel) but it does switch the pulse width at one point which I'm not sure the 2A03 could do. (EDIT: Yes it definitely could. This makes it possible to transcribe this tune to a .nsf, but this would be a massive waste of time so I'm probably [sic] going to do it at some point.) I was also very proud of this one at the time. (The fan game unfortunately never came to fruition, by the way.)

* "Outback"
Another track for the Pokemon game. This actually gives an idea of what we were going for; the game was to be set in Australia, with Australia-themed Pokemon, towns, etc. This would have been a background theme for the outback, as the title would suggest.

* "Quest Onwards"
Now, despite this name, this track was independent of the Pokemon stuff. Just an RPG kinda song I composed at the time. I do like the fake echo/delay line I had going on here, but am not sure the B and C sections hold up.

* "Powerline Rd"
A not altogether unsuccessful attempt (IMHO) at an EDM style song in chiptune. I was never quite happy with the percussion on this, but I'm never happy with the percussion on basically anything. It does sound remarkably like one of those classic EDM wobble synths in the intro.

* "Kilolovania"
This was going to be the regular battle track for the Pokemon game. Did I mention that the whole thing was supposed to be just filled with memes? (Hence the Megalovania references in the melody and title.) I took a 'memeless' version to show at my school's Music Composition Club, because I am a dork.

=== Tracks from 2019 ===

* "Beach Theme"
A beach theme! Guess what ill-fated project this was, again, made for. The main melody works pretty well here, I reckon, but the addition of the screeching arpeggiated bit in the second half pushes it over the line.

* "Village Square"
At some point the Pokemon project morphed into an RPG parody of our school, or maybe I misremember and it was the other way around. None of that is especially relevant to this song, which was a kind of village theme for either game. (And a pretty neat one, too.)

* "Concentration"
I remember this one, actually. I wrote it in 5/4 for no particular reason and realised it could probably work well in a minigame. I then remembered the fan game, which at this point had been properly inactive for a couple months. I posted this to the Discord server with some message to the effect of "yo I wrote another song for it, are we actually doing anything with this project" and everyone basically ended up agreeing that it was dead. And I remembered starting from the very beginning, being like "we need to set concrete realistic goals so that we don't abandon this in like a year's time" -- we ended up abandoning it in a year's time. So it goes.

* "Funky2"
It's funky! (Don't ask about what happened to Funky1.)

[ Context for all following tracks: BeepBox received a pretty juicy update in July of 2019, including a bunch of instrument presets that I eventually got around to playing with. That's why songs past this point tend to be less "pure chiptune" and more MIDI-ish. ]

* "Insulin Not Included"
At this point I was still adhering pretty strictly to chiptune, but enjoyed playing around with the low-pass filter that came with the update, hence the "Pacman/Super Mario Brothers" "sample". I was going for the arcade theme *hard* with this one. It's a bit much, but you can't deny that it's joyful.

* "Jazzy Demo"
I quite like the dynamic range of this one; often intros I make or see just feel like a useless "warm-up" for the instruments that only serves to delay the real meat of the song, but the intro here feels suitably tense to get the listener's attention. The first intro bar (the one with the C, then the D+Eb) was something I came across while messing about on the piano. It basically forms a minor 7th chord with a ninth, but with the fifth and seventh chord taken out. I really like minor 7th chords as a base for improvising "jazz-sounding" pieces, but slimming it down here keeps the tension (well, obviously, the top part becomes a minor 2nd, the same interval the Jaws theme uses) while remaining pretty minimalist. And then the fade-in works quite nicely. I actually vary the volume of the hi-hat hits to add to the jazz vibe. It kind of loses the plot a little in the B section though. When I figure out how to do a B section? It's over. I'll be stratospheric.

* "Subversive Xylophone"
Demo with the new tuned percussion instruments. Not much to say here.

* "Drum Test", "Drum Test Full"
The concept for this one was that I'd start by making a bunch of drum patterns on the new drumkit noise channel option, then add some accompanying generic instruments (bass, then synths). I added a fake metronome instrument for full effect, going for a "educational music lab session with default teacher-assigned instruments" vibe. Hence the two tracks (one with just drum patterns, one with the accompaniment). I like to think I've gotten better at drum programming since then, but that kind of misses the whole point of the exercise, which was to make a MIDI-tastic edutainmentesque demo.

* "Exapunks Tribute"
More playing with the then-newly-introduced filters, with the gimmick of increasing the resonance over multiple different instruments that then get played in order to create a build-up, re-creating the synths in the "Rave" track from the OST of the titular game, Exapunks. It is an excellent programming game, by the way. I highly recommend it; probably the best Zachtronics game I've played. ...Future Me realises now that this is basically the whole idea behind acid house and definitely not unique to Exapunks. Why hadn't anyone extolled the virtues of the TB-303 to me back then?!

* "Speedster", "Speedster Alt"
I actually incorporated the above gimmick into a song, although I think I began working on this before doing the Exapunks stuff, so I must have added it in at some later point. I think. I kind of like Speedster Alt a little more for its consistency.

* "O Carol Bells"
A half-baked attempt at remixing the only good Christmas carol. This is the worst track here.

=== Tracks from 2020 ===

* "Mr Bop"
I'm actually thrilled with the arrangement of instruments on this despite it being such a short loop. A very good candidate for coming back to and extending in the future. 

* "Relativistic Effects"
I may have gone overboard with the vibrato and general spaciness of this track, but ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, whaddya gonna do about it.

* "Konga Conga Kappa (JLH remix)"
Possibly my best composition, given that it's not actually, y'know, mine. The theme that I have remixed is "Konga Conga Kappa" from the very fun rhythm roguelike hit Crypt of the Necrodancer. I was going for almost a C64 sound with this, with the pulse width modulation stuff and all the rest of it. Sure, it's not nearly as good as the virt or Chipzel remixes, but one can only dream, right? [Not sure about copyright status on this given it's a remix of a song I don't own the rights to, actually.]

* "Caffeine"
A fairly generic synth loop. I don't have much to say about it.

* "Maths Advanced"
I think this hits the mark of "chill background music" better than the track from last year, but you can be the judge of that. I ummed and ahhed over making the chord instrument a sawtooth or a sine wave, and settled on the sawtooth. ...Man, that last sentence has to be the low point of this commentary, geez. Sorry, folks.

* "Japanese Instrument Loop"
A demo with the Japanese MIDI instruments. May I just state for the record that I am not a weeb. 

* "Crushin' It"
This was supposed to be an action-y sort of feel-good tune. As you can probably hear by the B section that abruptly ends, I never figured out where to go from there. I don't even know where to go from here. Thank God we're nearly at the end of the tracks.

* "Beamjet"
Similar vibe to the above. After showing it to a friend, he encouraged me to play with the panning a little more, which I did, and I think it really adds another level to parts of it.

* "Press Start"
A pleasant intro for a video game that doesn't exist. (Presumably you're going to press start and actually start the game before the looping part of the song becomes grating, I suppose.)

* "Bit Bashing"
Finally, a proper experiment with stereo audio! (Listen to this one with headphones.) The original uploaded version of this track has the bass too soft and the drums too loud but that should be fixed in this version. :)

=== Tracks from 2021 ===

* "Down the Isle"
A very short loop with steel drums and actually good percussion wow. Bass is too repetitive though. Can I go now?

** *** ***** ******* ***********

Well, that's everything for now. If you listened to every single song on this page, congratulations! And also my sincerest apologies. Thank you for visiting the commentary page, please come again.