NOTES: What if you had a warning telling you when you were about to die? What if you knew how much time you had before you die? What if it was 8.5 seconds? I know what I would do. Hopefully, I would be in a very crowded public place, like a bus or in a school. Then, from out of nowhere, I’d have this sound start blaring at ear-deafening levels. I would shriek at the top of my lungs and thrash around, right before I burst into a blaze of flaming glory and set at least 15 people on fire.

NOTES: This is an original tune I originally wrote for the Composition Combat competition at remixsite.org, until I found out how stupid the voting system was going to be. Well…at least I got a new song out of it. E.S. Posthumous style using my Orchestra libraries. It’s still in somewhat of a draft format, but I wont be completing it for a while.

NOTES: Kwakfest is a periodic competition where musicians (at variable degrees of intoxication) gather in an IRC room, and given a theme, need to create a MIDI song in 1 hour. It’s quite intense. This is my second Kwakfest. Most of my Kwakfests feature mucho copy&pasting, 1000 genres and break neck transitions.

The tempo change in the beginning didn’t exactly work out like I wanted it to…hmm…

Actual title is “Santa Claus Plays with his Weiner“.

NOTES: Kwakfest is a periodic competition where musicians (at variable degrees of intoxication) gather in an IRC room, and given a theme, need to create a MIDI song in 1 hour. It’s quite intense. This is my first Kwakfest. Most of my Kwakfests feature mucho copy&pasting, 1000 genres and break neck transitions.

UPDATED April 3rd, 2010

NOTES: This song was primarily written by Travis Moberg. The structure and most of the riffs were written by him. I did a lot of note and fingering corrections and wrote and embellished the orchestral, lead guitar and other keyboard parts. Epic.

UPDATED April 3rd, 2010

NOTES: The idea of this song came from an idea I had for Shadow Cast to make a large concept album about Dante’s Divine Comedy. We all decided that this would be very far in the future, but I was so in love with the idea, I went ahead and wrote a song that would be an intro to the Purgatorio album. After it was written, we wanted to play it anyway, and many changes took place. The ambient sounds in the beginning were originally going to be ocean and wind sounds, to signify landing on the beach in the beginning of the Purgatorio. And, because we wanted to keep playing this song, we still took the idea of insanity that would have been associated with Purgatory and made it it’s own. Now the concept of the song is more associated with an insane asylum than Purgatory.

Solo breakdown:

3:53 – Tony
4:06 – Dale

4:50 – Tony
5:03 – Dale
5:17 – Dale
5:31 – Tony

NOTES: This is also one of the first songs I ever wrote. It’s been reworked numerous times. The electronic sounds you hear at the beginning are related to the original lyrical themes that Travis Ambrose wrote for this song, about a living machine.

NOTES: Nothing really special about the backstory of the writing behind song, but there is a bit about what the song’s lyrics and theme were going to be about. Travis Moberg, Shadow Cast’s then drummer, was really into the 11:11 concept (if you want to research it, Google it, there’s a lot to it), and it turned out the song’s MIDI length was 11:11. Naturally, lyrical themes were set at that point. This song is really two seemless songs. The first part is instrumental, and the second part will have lyrics. The transition is the one-measure Bass and Drums fill after the Guitar harmony. Dale Blakeman recorded the guitar solos throughout the song.

NOTES: I originally wrote this song when I was really into RPG Maker for PC back in 8th grade. It started out as a video game boss theme, but the instrumentation was very much applicable to Shadow Cast, and eventually I adapted it to a more appropriate instrumentation for our situation. The first Shadow Cast adaption had a slower tempo and there were fewer parts. As we kept playing this song, I eventually started bringing back more and more of the elements from the original version. This whole tune is recorded by myself except for the piano outro, which is by John Wilkins.

NOTES: The reason why this song is listed as both an original and a Shadow Cast song is because it was inspired by and written for Shadow Cast, but clearly the musical style did not fit, so it just became an original tune. I recently sat down to finally finish this song after putting it off for god knows how long, when I started cracking down on the work, my Berklee audition was coming up, and I really wanted to show it to the Berklee team. I borrowed an acoustic guitar from a friend to record the acoustic guitar parts, but I didn’t have it long enough to record lead parts. Lead guitar parts are played on some pretty dead strings, but time constraints didn’t allow me otherwise.