Craze Music Productions - Christian Andersson: Music 2008

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© 2010 Christian Andersson - Craze Music Productions. Copyright and All Rights Reserved.
My work is registered at Swedish Musicians' Union and STIM - the Swedish Performing Rights Society.

About 2008

This is the music I made during year 2008, and most of it is not commercial quality.
At the start of the year, I bought Nexus, an excellent instrument bank from ReFX, containing everything
I needed to try out and begin to understand the full potential of digital instruments, the VST standard.
First try was "A song for the Queen", which I did after some re-instrumentations of old Daggerfall in-game tunes.
Most of the tunes here are no technical or artistic wonders, but it gives a taste of quite a dramatic quality
improvement compared to all the MIDI and free VST instruments that I had used before in my Old Crap.

When I composed the song Haeksman's Forest, using Nexus Dance Orchestra, in the summer of 2008,
I understood that I can actually do interesting music. The song in itself is nothing special when it comes to the "crafting",
but the idea of the song was good, which means I had came up with a pretty interesting non-trivial idea,
transferred some fairly complex figures from my brain and made it into real music (which is the hardest part for me).
Personally, that's my favorite from year 2008, but I do realize that the majority of listeners will find it odd and weird.
But there are definitely some other nice tunes on this page, so feel free to listen around & see what you find. :-)

Fairy Tale - Early Morning (Style: Orchestral / Classical) / 2008-12-23

I found a truly inspirational fairy tale sound in the Nexus instrument banks, and I just had to do something with it! So I put together this little light feeling tune.

I imagine a beatiful fantasy landscape with fairies and elves,
moving slowly through meadows and forests.
Meanwhile the morning mist flows silently over the green fields while
the early morning sun light takes its first little peek behind the nearest hill.

Can you see it too?

Mark Cooksey's Ghost'n Goblins (Style: Computer Game) / 2008-10-19

While playing around with some beautiful pipe organ sounds, I ended up playing a great Mark Cooksey theme
from the old C64 game Ghost'n Goblins. So, I thought I might as well try out a new C64 tune conversion.
After struggling with it for a few weeks, I had to surrender. I couldn't get the different parts of
the tune together in a convincing way. The middle parts are not very good. I never got the strings the way I wanted,
and I didn't get the really spooky feeling to the song.
So, as a summary, I think it's only the pipe organs at the start and end of the song that are OK.
And the conclusion is that, as usual, the original is the best!

Akka Faddam Taff (Style: Electro) / 2008-10-06

This song is named after the mythical Aztec temple "Akka Faddam Taff" that can be the found in the deepest
depths of the Amazonas jungle in South America, but only if you search really well.
It is said that the holy Sun god Akka Faddam was worshipped there,
but because many years have passed since then, it is hard to distinguish legends from facts.
Anyway, this is my worship hymn (hymn = 'Taff' in the ancient Aztec language) to the Sun god Akka Faddam.
(And for the super geeks who may recognize it: yes, it's kind of a cover of an old C64 tune).

Dark September and a Cup of Tea (Style: Classical/Acoustic) / 2008-09-22

Sometimes, I get tired of using the MIDI keyboard. So I bring forth my old acoustic guitar.
The time has come for a lil' September tune.
The autumn is here! ... The grey mist spreads silently over the fields in the mornings.
Fresh cold air sweeps across the country, blowing away the rotten warmth of August.
At noon, a clear sky and sparkling sun breaks the heavy mood at work.
In the evenings, the darkness sneaks up on us, leaving us with a surprised question:
How could the bright summer evenings disappear so fast?
However, despair not! Grab a hot cup of tea and tuck your little cold feet under the blanket in the sofa.
Hug your dearest darling, and enjoy the cozy autumn evenings!

In The Dojo (Style: Ninja/Electro/StoryTale) / 2008-09-18

A good start of a new song, turned into something else... as usual.
So, after a few weeks of banging my head against the wall, not being able to continue this song properly,
I began "Operation Save The Song". I tried something odd, and it kind of worked out.
The song is now "listenable", and maybe it will even break up a tiny smile on someones face, who knows.

A song for the Princess (Style: Classical/Chamber) / 2008-08-21

The plan was to make another chamber music tune to see how easy it is, but the inspiration just wasn't there.
I was working on 3 tunes at the same time when I started with this one. Too much at the same time to yield a good result. However, I decided to finish it anyway. Hopefully I will come up with something more original next time. This one reminds a little bit too much about "A song for the Queen" further down. This one is also very simple. Only three chords are used.
The best with this song is the picture that accompanies it. It has been colored by Katie who is 5 years old. It's really nice, isn't it?!

C64-Bob Strikes Back! (Style: chiptune) / 2008-08-10

Sometimes, I look in the back mirror on the old times... the good times.
I listen to some good old chip tunes from the Commodore 64 period and I wonder how on earth the composers at that time could get so much great music out of that old SID chip. So, I decided to try to make a chip-tune-style kind of song, by using the C64 characteristic sounds in that style that it was used, back then, in the 80s. For example, the SID chip had only 3 sound channels. Many tunes are using the following setup:
- 1 sound channel for chords
- 1 sound channel for drum & bass
- 1 sound channel for lead sound
How is it possible to play a chord in 1 sound channel? To play a chord, the composers typically played an arpeggio very very fast on that sound channel. The arpeggio shifted between the basic chord notes. On the second channel, the drum and base could not play in exactly the same time, so it was typically base & snare drum that alternated on the same sound channel. This technique gives a very special kind of sound that you can hear in many great SID chip tunes.
My "chip tune" is not a genuine chip tune, but I have tried to use the same technique and tried to find sounds that very much reminds about the SID chip. Then I have put a limit to play a maximum of 3 different sounds. (Well, almost... I am cheating a bit, but you won't notice.)

Swedish Waltzes (Style: Waltz / Folk Dance) / 2008-07-21

Just an experiment to see if it was possible to create some Swedish walz music and make it sound like accoustic instruments. Now, I know: it wasn't possible... It is a small medley that consists of three Swedish walzes: "Dansen den går..." (G. Wahlberg), "Sjösala vals" (E. Taube), "Drömmen om Elin" (E. Taube). I was going to make 5-6 walzes, but I stumbled upon the truth too early: I couldn't achieve the really good sound picture that I aimed for, so I gave up early. They are not fully correct in chords and notes, etc, since I just recorded them from my memories of the songs. Later I have realized that "Dansen den går..." is missing a few bars, and some other stuff. Anyway... Swedish master composers wrote these fantastic songs. I destroyed them. Such blasphemy to destroy these national music-cultural treasures like this... Well, well. It was fun to make a try.

Haeksman's Dark Forest (Style: Classical/StoryTale) / 2008-07-12

The legend says that there is a dark, dark forest, in one of the far corners of the world, and somewhere in its deepest shadows lurks an old madman. Once upon a time, the man was very wise and very powerful. So powerful that he tried to tame the forces of Hell, and rumour says that he was successful. However, as always with this kind of experiments, something went terribly wrong. Thus, I cannot recommend you to enter this dark forest. Nay, I must forbid you! But... should you anyway set yourself upon such a foolish adventure, I must warn you! I fear that ol' Haeksman, tamer of the Forces of Hell, may have quite an unpleasant surprise for you... *wah-hah-hah* (Incredibly evil laughter.)

My most ambitious piece of work to this date. Have spent roughly 30 hours on it so far. Yet it is far from perfect. From the beginning, this was going to be a serious try on an in-game tune for Diablo 3. But instead, the song turned into an uncontrollable monster. So... I decided to play along with it. Better to let the creative flow bring forth its magic than to fight against it. Sometimes, it will give the creator a nice surprise... or an unpleasant one. I'd like to say this one was both.[Edit, 2007-07-16: Replaced the original drums in the mid-section with a more "cruel" beat. Adjusted the volume here and there. Used a 5-band parametric equalizer to boost some frequencies a bit which makes the sound picture better. Downpitched the voice at the end 2 semi tones.]

Little Girl Picking Flowers on a Meadow (Style: Classical/Chamber) / 2008-06-23

I am still quite happy with this once, although that tends to change over time.I had my mind set on a “Fairy Tale”-like song, intended to match up nicely with my sister’s children, Amina and Dante. I was fooling around with some nice light sounds and came up with a cheery little start. I then just extended the main theme another 2x8 bars to see what I could do if I added some more instruments. The strings were a nice addition and I am particularly happy with the accentuation and articulation in bar 9-16. It really gives the song more depth (the depth I was missing in “A song for the Queen”). And then, finally, I added a flute in the last part. So simple - yet so light and happy. Although it didn’t become the Fairy Tale song I intended from the beginning, instead it paints up a wonderful summer picture of a small girl jumping around on a meadow while picking flowers. At least, it does so for me.

HouseMoFo (Style: Melodic Funk) / 2008-06-22

This is not one of my best songs, but it was fun to make it. I have always wanted to play around with a house piano sound - and I got my chance when I bought the House sound bank to Nexus! It contains a lot of great house sounds, and the one I have used as base is called “Dirty House Piano”. I just played around a bit until I found some pretty basic chords. Then I had the base for this song. I then added a little of this and that, and ended up with the result below. During the work sessions with this song, I really loved to try out some cool chord sounds on top of the already present house piano chords, but the final result became a bit disappointing. Well… enough talking! Listen and judge for yourself!

Sylvia Leucomelaena (Style: Oriental) / 2008-06-17

One evening when I was surfing the web to learn more about jazz chords, I ended up on a page that contained a lot of different scales. I started playing around with some of them, and suddenly I felt I had a cool oriental sound. However, I couldn’t find this exact scale among any of the proposed scales on this web page. But I thought it was an interesting beginning of a new song. So I started looking for a good oriental solo instrument. In all my instrument banks, I couldn’t find what I was looking for, so I settled with a standard MIDI sound: Sitar. The result became this song. The name is the latin name for a bird called “Arabisk Sångare” (Arabian Singer). I thought the result was very promising for a start. Then, after listening to it for a few days, I became disappointed. It wasn’t as good as I thought from the beginning, but still, it keeps a presentable quality.

Fru Hilda Anderssons Spettkakor (Style: Pop/StoryTale) / 2008-01-19

One day, when I was trying out my sounds on the Nexus soft synth, I found a funny sound called “Gramma Radio” – and it really sounded like Grandmother’s old radio!
So I thought, why not make a song based on this theme? I had an idea that I wanted to do a new song with some sampled material - a political song with absurdities to give a shocking effect. So I started to look on the Sveriges Radio (Swedish Radio) website to maybe find some material for it. I then stumbled over this master piece: an interview from 1939 where an old woman, Mrs Hilda Andersson, is baking “spettkakor” on a farm outside Malmö in southern Sweden. It was so fascinating that I had to put the plans about political content aside and do something interesting with this charming material instead. Although I never got the sound quality on the sampled interview perfect, it still became an interesting story to listen to (note: only selected parts of the interview are present). Thanks, Sveriges Radio for your great material!

A song for the Queen (Style: Classical/Chamber) / 2008-01-26

After listening to the music to the game Daggerfall, I made some remakes of those old MIDI tracks, using Nexus Dance Orchestra soundbank. The result was amazing. Then, I got the idea that I wanted to try out a similar song myself, using the same instrument set ups. Some Middle Age feeling set up of instruments. Here's the result. I liked the song the first 3-4 days. But now, when I have some “distance” to it, and when I can compare it with other similar music, I feel that it lacks “depth”. The sound picture feels a bit “flat” as I have not utilized volume and articulation in the way I could have done. Thus, song still has quite a bit of improvement potential. Anyway, it is still one of my better pieces, methinks.

Should you be interested in the really old crap and more of Electronica music,
take a look at my Old Crap, but for your own sanity's sake, don't stay there for too long. :-)

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